Detained, Gloria Arroyo has changed? Watch out

“Gloria Arroyo: Patient patient, ideal detainee, into landscaping”—INQUIRER.net

APPARENTLY, ex-president Gloria Arroyo’s detention on charges of electoral sabotage has transformed her. She’s no longer her old imperious self, says an INQUIRER.net report. No more glacial stares or tantrums. No more whatever Gloria wants, Gloria gets. The smirk is gone. She smiles and waves to guards on her way to get some sun.

Detention officials like her very much. The patient, mellow, and uncomplaining formerly severe taskmaster has even quietly taken an interest in landscaping. She’s reportedly the very model of a modern major prisoner.

Now, folks, it’s not nice to kick someone when she’s down. And I don’t know about you, but me, I believe it’s my civic duty to alert the authorities that sudden and drastic changes in behavior are classic signs of an inmate who’s planning a jailbreak.

Believe me. At the risk of sounding immodest, I am an expert on this matter. Though my dear parents—bless their souls—bewailed the fact that I showed up in movie houses more than in my college classes, I’ve managed to acquire a considerable body of knowledge on correctional systems and inmate psychology.

First off, Mrs. Arroyo can be discouraged from thinking about escape through the activation of standard measures used in modern detention facilities. She should be regularly patted down for hidden makeshift weapons like darts, shivs, brass knuckles, strangling wire, and cabo negro. Check also for fake guns made of soap, or sleeping dummy heads made of the same, like in Escape from Alcatraz.

Count the blankets to make sure they’re not being turned into ropes. Round-the-clock surveillance is crucial to see if Mrs. Arroyo is using gang-style signals to communicate with secret accomplices. And absolutely no revealing cleavage must be allowed. It’s often used to distract the guards, like in the Big Doll House or Ilsa the Wicked Warden.

It would help to “inform” her that detention authorities pay rapacious bandits outside the hospital grounds to track down and ravage escapees. Like in Women in Cages, which is set in a Philippine jungle, starring the bounteously sultry Pam Grier and directed by our very own National Artist Gerardo de Leon. It will really scare any prisoner, despite being titillating.

So, Mrs. Arroyo is now very friendly. Well, they should really monitor that very closely. In Reform School Girls, starring the busty Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics, it turns out it’s the unusually friendly inmate played by Linda Carol who leads a full-blown prison riot in the end. I’m just saying.

As for the chummy rapport between her and her jailers, that’s extremely suspicious. The integrity of the officers in charge must be rigorously scrutinized. In Chained Heat, for example, the women’s prison is under a very corrupt warden, who has a hot tub in his office. As a result, all sorts of shenanigans take place, with the nearly naked inmates having the run of the place. It’s more fun, but we don’t want that at Veterans Memorial, do we.

As for Mrs. Arroyo’s brand new interest in landscaping—landscaping? While in confinement? Remember The Great Escape with Steve McQueen? The Allied POWs convince the Gestapo they’re into vegetable gardening. But really it’s just so they can hide the soil from their tunnel diggings. Remember?

Remember also Tim Robbins’ “hobby” in The Shawshank Redemption? As a well behaved  “model prisoner” he takes up rock collecting. But in reality he just uses the teeny tiny rock hammer to patiently carve out an escape hole–which he hides under a pinup poster of Rita Hayworth–to a ventilation duct in the cell wall. Remember?

Besides, Tim Robbins has a huge stash of cash hidden in the countryside, for later when he flees to Mexico. Or is it the Dominican Republic? I forget. But definitely not Spain, Germany, or Singapore. All in all, the authorities should be on guard if Mrs. Arroyo asks for a trowel to do some garden work around the hospital grounds and a really hot poster of Piolo Pascual. I’m just saying.

It also wouldn’t be a waste time to double-check if the Veterans Memorial hospital isn’t actually owned by Chief Justice Corona or one of his daughters—just so we know Mrs. Arroyo doesn’t have access to blueprints showing the vents and sewer lines leading to the outside.

As a final precaution, whenever Mrs. Arroyo is let out for sunshine she should be shackled to another prisoner, ideally one that she can’t stand, like that turncoat-stool pigeon Zaldy Ampatuan. That way, when the two of them escape while chained together, like in The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, they must overcome their mutual disgust in order to survive—and in the process regain their humanity.