Takalan

Overcrowding and the Mechanics of Survival in Quezon City Jail

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In Quezon City, a detention facility built for 800 people now holds close to 3,000. The numbers alone explain the pressure. Inside, space has become the jail’s most contested resource.  Cells designed for a few dozen men contain several times that number. The air is dense and unmoving, thick with heat and breath. Laundry hangs from improvised lines overhead, turning ceilings into fabric canopies that trap humidity. There is no privacy, and little silence. Every movement requires negotiation. Even stillness must be shared.   Much of the congestion begins long before conviction. A significant portion of those detained are awaiting trial, caught in a judicial backlog that moves slower than arrests accumulate. Court delays, limited legal access, and prolonged case processing stretch detention from weeks into months, sometimes years. Infrastructure remains fixed; the population does not.

During the day, the courtyard offers a narrow margin of relief. In one corner stands a makeshift gym assembled from rusted metal and concrete weights molded by hand. There are no trainers, no programs, no supervision beyond watchful guards.

 

Men lift in shifts, building muscle not for competition but for control — one of the few forms of agency available in confinement. Physical strength becomes psychological defense in an environment where vulnerability is constant.

Nearby, a basketball game breaks out. The echo of rubber on cement ricochets off the walls. For a few minutes, bodies move freely within painted lines. Players call out to one another, momentarily defined not by case numbers but by position and play. Recreation does not resolve overcrowding, but it releases pressure, if only briefly.

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At night, the limits of the facility become unavoidable.  The floor cannot hold every detainee at once, so sleep is rationed through an informal system known inside as “Takalan” — the shifting. Groups rotate in cycles. One lies down for a few hours while another stands or sits in corridors, waiting for its turn at horizontal rest. Staircases transform into sleeping tiers. Men drape themselves across concrete steps, heads resting on another’s knees or shins. Comfort is secondary to contact with the floor.   Four hours of sleep becomes a measured allocation. When the rotation ends, the sleepers rise and the waiting group takes their place. The exchange happens quietly, practiced and routine. No official policy outlines the system. It exists because the alternative is impossible.   By dawn, the cycle resets. Those who have rested return to standing space. Those who waited claim the floor. The institution continues to function, but only through constant adaptation by the people confined within it.

 

Overcrowding here is not abstract. It is visible in compressed bodies, in improvised sleeping arrangements, in air that does not cool. It reflects pressures beyond the jail’s walls — an overburdened court system, limited custodial infrastructure, and a reliance on detention that outpaces capacity.

Each day, the population rises and shifts in place. The jail holds far more than it was built to contain. And within that imbalance, thousands of men measure their lives in rotations — waiting for space, waiting for court, waiting for resolution.