For 86 years, New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa City has stood as the grim centerpiece of the Philippine correctional system — a sprawling reservation where the country warehouses everyone from petty thieves to former senators, from notorious drug lords to communist rebels.
Now, for the first time in its history, the government is preparing to shut it down for good.
The word “Bilibid” derives from an old Tagalog term meaning “confined” or “imprisoned”.
A Colonial Inheritance
Bilibid’s story begins not in Muntinlupa, but in the heart of old Manila. In 1865, the Spanish colonial government established the Carcel y Presidio Correccional on the Mayhaligue Estate — a jail meant to hold 600 inmates, plus a “presidio”, or military garrison, for another 527. During the American colonial period, 1898-1946, the old facility became hopelessly overcrowded. In 1936, the Commonwealth government allocated a million pesos to build a modern replacement on 551 hectares of then-remote land in Muntinlupa.
Inmates, equipment, and records were transferred there in 1940, and the New Bilibid Prison was born. Part of the old site survives today as the Manila City Jail.
The new penitentiary’s history quickly became tangled with the nation’s. During World War II, it served as a Japanese POW camp, and after the war it briefly held Japanese soldiers and collaborators — including President Jose P. Laurel, who was extradited from Sugamo Prison in Tokyo in 1946. He had been sent to Sugamo after the Second World War by U.S. occupation forces for collaborating with the Japanese.
Under President Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s martial law, Bilibid absorbed waves of political prisoners rounded up under the Anti-Subversion Law, mixing dissidents and labor organizers with the general convict population. Political detainees were held also in numerous other facilities, including Fort Bonifacio, Camp Crame and Camp Aguinaldo.
Bursting at the Seams
The numbers tell the story of Bilibid’s crisis. Built for roughly 6,345 inmates, the facility housed 28,616 as of December 2025 — nearly five times its intended capacity. By mid-2023, the Department of Justice had already stopped admitting new prisoners altogether, citing chronic overcrowding and deadly gang wars inside the walls.
That crisis has now forced the government’s hand. Bureau of Corrections Director General Gregorio Pio Catapang Jr. has confirmed plans to shutter the prison entirely by 2028 and redevelop the land for commercial use.
Since 2022, the Bureau of Corrections has moved 15,730 inmates out of Bilibid to regional prisons and penal farms nationwide, with another roughly 7,500 minimum- and medium-security inmates slated for transfer this year alone — many to facilities closer to their home provinces, including the Iwahig and Sablayan penal farms.
High-risk offenders are being sent instead toward a new supermax prison under construction in Sablayan, Occidental Mindoro.
The redevelopment math is striking: the Bureau of Corrections says about 160 hectares of the property have been earmarked for commercial leasing — projected to generate between ₱1.25 billion and ₱1.92 billion a year — while another 106 hectares may go to public-private partnerships. Officials insist the land itself will stay in government hands, with no outright sale of assets.
Behind the Walls
Bilibid is divided into three main compounds by security classification: maximum security for those serving more than 20 years, medium security for shorter sentences, and minimum security for inmates nearing release or aged 70 and above.
In its more freewheeling decades, the compound developed an almost self-contained economy — a talipapa market where inmates could buy goods, workshops, a chapel, even elementary and high school classes, and a bachelor’s degree program in commerce, run with the help of groups like the Jesuit Prison Service and Caritas Manila.
Journalist Ron Gluckman, writing for Asiaweek in 1999, described the sprawling compound as feeling “more like a barangay than a prison.” Building 14, in the maximum security compound, once housed the execution chamber used for inmates sentenced to die by electrocution.
Notable Inmates Through the Decades
Bilibid’s cell blocks have held an unusual cross-section of Philippine history. Huk guerrilla leader Luis Taruc served a sentence there in the 1950s after surrendering to the government, later pardoned by President Marcos Sr. in 1968.
Labor leader and National Artist for Literature Amado V. Hernandez was imprisoned on rebellion charges in the early 1950s and used his time behind bars to write and edit the prison newspaper, the Muntinglupa Courier, now defunct. Future senator Jovito Salonga was briefly held there by Japanese occupation forces in 1942.
In more recent decades, Bilibid became infamous as a base of operations for major drug traffickers, several of whom were revealed in 2016 to be running trafficking networks from inside their cells — a scandal that helped fuel then-President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. The prison also held convicted killers, disgraced officials, and death-row inmates in the years before the country abolished capital punishment in 2006 under the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
What Comes Next?
For a facility that has outlived seven decades of Philippine governments, the planned 2028 closure marks an extraordinary turning point — not a reform of Bilibid, but its demise. Whether the redevelopment delivers the promised billions in lease revenue, and whether decongestion genuinely improves conditions for the tens of thousands of persons deprived of liberty being redistributed nationwide, will be among the corrections system’s defining stories over the coming years.
Bryce McIntyre, PhD, resides in San Andres. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA.
Claude AI was employed in research for this article.