At its most basic form, justice is exacted through retribution: no crime must go unpunished, and the punishment must fit the crime. But as violence and impunity abound Rodrigo Duterte’s administration, the punishment for every transgression was demanded, even the slightest ones.

Across Duterte’s six-year rule, he managed to turn every Filipino against one another. There was no shortage of online threats hurled at each other, from promising death to intimidating legal action, as in the case of a Grab driver losing their job over their homophobic remark.

With a former president who cannot solve every problem he faced without violence, it has become routine for some to resort to the nuclear option when offended. But exacting punishment at every offense could only do more damage than right a wrong.

Crime and Punishment

For Duterte, there is no problem that cannot be solved without shooting at it, no crisis cannot be addressed without waging a war against it. These violent campaigns certainly amounted to nothing but carnage. But after years of being subject to Duterte’s brutal rhetoric and tactics, some Filipinos have seemed to have internalized his lawless impulses.

With his fiery speeches almost always containing shoot-to-kill orders, Duterte encouraged hate speech and made a spectacle of violence, which ordinary Filipinos now seem to easily reenact on one another on social media. 

Several civilians carelessly commented to have scores of urban poor be arrested and shot down when the San Roque residents justifiably took to the streets to call for food and aid in 2020. Many Filipinos, activists or otherwise, were also on the receiving end of death threats during Duterte’s tenure. Even officials were not exempted from such intimidations. Former Vice President Leni Robredo was also vulnerable to this form of terror from her detractors as she and her family fell victim to countless fake news and death threats.

Uttered online, these words may not hold much weight, except when they do in the real world. Numerous activists, who had received texts about getting killed or arrested, were shot and jailed. Slum-dwellers lost their homes to demolitions. Or in instances of slight trespassing, some, as in the case of the Grab driver, suffered a loss of income. 

Apparent here is how these groups of people were met with punishment despite the lack or triviality of their lapses. But the most appalling facet of this was how the public was led to believe that they deserved it. That the poor should suffer more for the state of penury they did not choose, that anyone who offended anyone, intended or otherwise, should be damned.

Duterte certainly awakened the vengeful side of some of us for he himself always sought misguided retribution against his critics. But he also left the top government position with punitive culture as his legacy with impunity for six years. Nothing empowers crime more than having the criminal go unscathed.

Discipline and Punish

Ordering punishment over the smallest misdemeanor, however, already existed even before Duterte ascended to power. Behaviors and manners such as idleness, homelessness, and aggressiveness, for example, are often morally condemned. Before discourses about gender equality had emerged, homosexuality was also considered deviant behavior, and worse, a crime.

It was Michel Foucault who had a groundbreaking rethinking of what crime and punishment meant. In his historicization of prisons, he wrote about how societies’ detection and punishment of crimes rest on the ruling class’s desire to control people of lower status. As the economy grew and social inequality widened, the latter often fell victim to depredation as they were the ones relegated to producing and handling the former’s wealth. 

Compounding this was the deep-seated prejudice that poverty is the failure of the individual and not of the existing system. A poor person is one because of their irrational decision and poor lifestyle; hence the derogatory term pasaway was used against the marginalized several times during the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

True to the punitive culture Duterte had fostered, many urban poor families were outcasts as pasaway, which turned them into subjects of disciplining and policing, such as caging and publicly shaming curfew offenders.

But amid all the violence, what the Duterte regime also made glaring was how consequential punishments are. Most of the time, they are but poor and unwarranted exercise of power. But at the same time, with how criminality is framed as rampant and serious, punishment appears to be necessary to restore order.

Order Out of Chaos

More than being a consequence of one’s wrongdoing, punishment reinforces societal order. There is a justified need for punishment, despite its failure to rehabilitate a person, because there is a certain status quo to be sustained.

As Duterte calamitously polarized the nation, the desire to punish any lapses grew as the aspiration for order also deepened. Penalizing someone, however, does not mean disciplining them to turn over a new leaf. In Henrique Carvalho’s words, as a lawyer working on criminalization and justice, punishment displaces the fault in the system to the individual. That the conditions that forced the offender to commit the transgressions were absent and it all comes down to the person’s predisposition to commit the wrongdoing.

So long as there is an inequitable order needed to be maintained, punishment will be justified, and, by extension, a punisher’s rise to power is inevitable. In talks about abolishing prisons, several alternatives to punishments surfaced. This ranges from taking rehabilitative measures to strengthening communal ties to sweeping overhaul of the criminal systems.

But some of these courses of action still acknowledge the existence of crimes and punishment are forms of control. As long as unjust conditions can drive someone to infringe laws, one is susceptible to commit misdeeds, which makes another one inclined to punish them. 

Refashioning a country that no longer benefits from punishment are as tall as an order dismantling the current system and giving birth to an equitable one. But perhaps we can inch closer to realizing this when we begin to act more often out of compassion and solidarity. Building a better society out of mutual aid and support may just be the poetic justice we deserve. ●