Thursday, January 10, 2008 Editorials: Inmates’ dance as ‘slapstick’
TRUST Mayor Tomas Osmeña to come up with criticisms like this one against the dancing inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC): “If there’s a special classification of slapstick, maybe they’ll win.”
Osmeña was defending his decision not to allow the inmates to join the Sinulog grand parade when he said that, so it must have been his way of driving home his point.
One wonders, though, whether his saying that the inmates’ feat, which became a Youtube hit worldwide, was because he saw the dance or because he didn’t like Capitol.
Not main reason
To be fair, while Osmeña is yet to be in one of CPDRC’s public presentations, he is knowledgeable of computers enough to be able to view the dance on Youtube.
And he might not be alone in his assessment of the inmates’ dancing prowess, although that does not mean they could not improve come Sinulog parade time.
But concentrating on the choreography or the way the inmates swayed is to miss the forest for the trees; that was not the main reason they became Internet sensation.
It’s not even because of the uniqueness, although that can be factored in.
Penology
What drew people to Youtube was not the dance but the possibilities the act presented in relation to the incarceration and rehabilitation of convicts, or to penology.
Of course, the CPDRC is not the best run penal institution in the world, and we have heard murmurs about the treatment of prisoners there, especially from militants.
But its introduction of the algorithm dance in managing prisoners was an eye opener to other penal institutions not only in the country but in the world as well.
In a way even the Cebu City Jail, in which City Hall has a stake even if it is run primarily by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology, can learn something from it.
That, though, requires the purging of envy or politics from the learner.
Inmates’ feat
Barring the inmates from joining the Sinulog grand parade for security reasons is the right of the mayor and the Sinulog Foundation (which could not say no to him).
But it should not lead to the denigration of the CPDRC inmates’ feat.
