The Paper Walls that Keep Prisoners In: Documentary Requirements for Release

So many documents. Redundant documents. Paper piled upon paper, like bricks in a wall. You finish one set of clearances only to be told you need another, and another. What should be the key to freedom becomes the very chain that binds you.

Our research with BJMP, BuCor, PPA, and BPP confirms what families of the detained already know: documentary requirements are less about justice, more about bureaucracy. Commitment Orders missing from police. Certificates of Detention incomplete, with no dates of arrest or transfer. Clearances for “no pending case” and “no outstanding warrants” demanded not at intake—where they make sense—but at the very moment of release, when they cause maximum delay. By then, the detainee has already served his sentence, but the door does not open because someone still needs another stamp.

Worse, the system seems designed for obstruction. Jail Booking Sheets and Detainees’ Manifestations add no value—they merely duplicate what the Certificate of Detention already certifies. The Drug Dependency Evaluation is often demanded at the point of transfer to BuCor, years after the fact, when it is meaningless. Probation applicants are forced to chase a dizzying number of clearances—from NBI, police, prosecutors, courts, barangays—when two would suffice. Parole and clemency applications still ask for fiscal’s information, opposition letters, and psychological exams that almost everyone passes. These are hoops for the sake of hoops, hoops that trip up the poor while serving no real safeguard.

And so, discretion is not used to liberate, but to squeeze. Every redundant signature is a new toll gate. Every unnecessary certification, another opportunity to make families cough up money. When staff use documentary requirements not to help but to hinder, justice is no longer justice—it is extortion with a government letterhead.

It does not have to be this way. Clearances should be secured at intake, within the first week of detention, not at the moment of release. Documents should be standardized, not reinvented for each agency. Data should be digitized and shared across institutions so families are not made to resubmit what the state already has. BuCor should review all documents upon intake, so no prisoner stays years longer because a file was lost. PPA should rely on risk assessments to decide when extra documentation is really needed, sparing low-risk applicants from needless burdens.

Above all, the environment inside jails, prisons, and parole offices must shift from suspicion to service. Correctional staff are not gatekeepers of paper; they are stewards of freedom. Their role is not to obstruct release but to assist it, to help families secure documents, and to ensure no person stays a day longer in detention than the law requires.

Paperwork should never be more powerful than the court’s judgment. Yet in our system today, it is. The challenge is to tear down these paper walls, and replace them with a culture of care, competence, and accountability. Only then can the promise of justice match the reality of freedom.