Madventures/Blog

6553 known murders a year in country of 90.5 million and relatively big in corruption, the Philippines is still certainly better than its reputation and truly cleaning its crime rate numbers, if the statistics are to be trusted.

By comparison, for example the United States loses to the Philippines in almost every possible crime category per capita.

But we were not in Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center for the statistics, but to witness a phenomenon that originated in this facility.

At this counting, the original upload of inmates re-enacting Michael Jackson’s Thriller has had 33,820,768 views in YouTube.

Meeting the prisoners and the director of the facility, who had set the whole thing in motion was quite eye opening.

According to the director, this prison has no inmates who wallow in self-pity – he was quite proud of the fact that the CPDRC prisoners have high self-esteem. If you make the prison hell, you create demons. His wish is to release angels back to the society.

Apparently, disco dancing is the way to make seraphs out of the most evil of men.

We were allowed freely among these hardened men, many of them rapists and murderers. No one monitored what the prisoners said to us. The conversations were very relaxed and we had no reason to suspect what we were told.

I guess this time we were the cynics, for the prisoners’ reaction to dancing was overwhelmingly positive. We weren’t expecting that. They did not view the re-enactments as punishment.

Some of the energy the men would usually channel into either fighting amongst themselves or solitary apathy was now routed in to strict choreography, high energy dance steps and togetherness.

Many of them truly believed dancing made them better men.

Not necessarily angels, just men who had been given a chance in a system that wasn’t about to spit them out the same as they came in.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, once again, big hand for the Dancing Prisoners of CPDRC!