Why a second chance is our best investment

It is easy to clap for a jail livelihood program at signing time and forget it a week later, but Iloilo City’s new Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Livelihood Development Activity, or SELDA, looks like the sort of initiative that deserves more than ceremonial praise because it builds on earlier city jail programs that already produced 136 graduates, expands training to 20 courses, and targets batches of 20 to 30 trainees who might otherwise spend detention doing little that prepares them for life outside.

The financial case is actually the least sentimental part of this story, because the 2025 national budget gave the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology PHP 25.39 billion for its Inmates’ Safekeeping and Development Program and set aside PHP 5.66 billion just for prisoners’ food and medicine for an assumed 182,556 prisoners, which works out to roughly PHP 31,025 per prisoner a year for food and medicine alone, before anyone even starts counting guards, utilities, transport, court delays, and infrastructure, so even a modest training program is easier to defend when the alternative is paying over and over for people to leave jail unprepared and come back.

That argument gets sharper when you remember how crowded the system still is, because the Supreme Court said national jail congestion dropped from 296 percent in May 2025 to 286 percent in September 2025, yet Iloilo’s own male dormitory was reported as close to 600 percent above capacity as of May 2024, which tells you this is not some abstract debate about compassion but a practical question of whether the city wants to keep warehousing people in a stressed system or start reducing the odds that they return to it.

Then there is the harder social problem, which is stigma, and this is where SELDA has a real chance to be smarter than many feel-good projects, because a Technical Education and Skills Development Authority National Certificate (NC) is not just a pat on the back but a competency credential tied to workplace standards and a registry of certified workers, while RAND’s often-cited meta-analysis found correctional education participants had 43 percent lower odds of returning to prison and vocational trainees were 28 percent more likely to be employed after release, so the business community has a concrete reason to look at the certificate before it looks at the person’s worst chapter.

Iloilo City also is not starting from zero here, and that matters, because the city’s earlier jail pantry efforts included bread-making and financial literacy training, support from private-sector partners, a PHP 125,000 start-up fund for female persons deprived of liberty  (PDLs) in 2024, an earlier PHP 300,000 seed-capital push for male trainees, and another entrepreneurship and financial literacy training that reached around 100 PDLs in August 2025, which suggests there is already a rough local pipeline from skills to products to small-scale selling if City Hall is serious enough to keep tightening it.

And that pipeline matters in a place like Iloilo City because the wider economy that could absorb these workers is still overwhelmingly made up of small firms, with Philippine data cited by Philippine Institute for Development Studies showing micro, small, and medium enterprises account for 99.5 percent of registered business establishments and 62.4 percent of total employment, so a former PDL does not need a giant corporation to take a chance on him or her to become useful again, only a functioning local market, a verified skill, and a city willing to help bridge the first few steps.

Still, this is where the city has to resist flattering itself, because certificates alone do not defeat prejudice, and the honest way to treat SELDA now is to demand numbers after the ribbon-cutting, including how many finish, how many pass NC assessments, how many start earning inside or after release, how many partner employers come in, and how many eventually stay out of jail.

The Supreme Court put the broader truth plainly when it said, “We cannot incarcerate our way out of congestion,” and Iloilo should take that seriously, because the real promise of SELDA is not that it makes the city look kind, but that it gives the public a tougher, more useful kind of justice where fewer people return to crime, fewer families are broken again, and more former dependents of the state come back as workers, vendors, taxpayers, and neighbors.