Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (4 page)

Women prisoners were also on sale. Treated as beasts of burden by Thai society when free, in prison women were brutalized, starved, and tortured
daily. Most of them went without outside support, so they were compelled to eat the vile slop provided as prison ‘food.’ Furthermore, they were not allowed any of the mitigating goods that made prison bearable (for Thai peasants, at least). These items included cigarettes, medicines, decent food, and warm or cool clothes. All of these were unavailable to women unless they paid heavy bribes. The extortion applied to men was a trifle in comparison to the women. Their plight was made desperate, since many women also had to provide for their infants and young children. Women were “allowed” to keep their young ones with them, if no immediate family was able to care for them (up to the age of five). The hardships this created were an awful burden.

Consequently, the women prisoners were eager to sell their bodies and split the money fifty-fifty with the guards. Not many men took advantage of the offer, being far more concerned with survival than with sex. This drove the price down to a ludicrous level. For 100 baht (four dollars at the old exchange rate), the guards allowed the men half an hour in the women’s cell. Even for this pittance there weren’t many takers, and the women’s pathetic charade of enticement was seldom rewarded. For the same price, visitors could enter the men’s cell, though few prisoners’ wives or girlfriends were willing to rut like animals in full view of the public. For the women prisoners, the money they earned on their backs was apparently enough to take the edge off an unspeakably cruel regimen.

As the judges worked their way through the day’s docket calendar, the holding cell became peppered with prisoners dressed in ‘street clothes.’ These were frequently Hill Tribe people, disoriented and strangely curious about their surroundings, so alien to their life experiences in the rain forest. Many of them had never seen concrete, electricity, or even motor vehicles. Most spoke no Thai, and only dimly understood what was happening to them. They are a very gentle and kind people, and the treatment they received from the Thai was bestial.

On occasion, the fates spared you the waking nightmare of a late afternoon trip back to the prison, when an early bus of those finished with court by 11:00 AM left: back at the prison shortly after twelve or so, shackles off before one, and given the chance to shower before being locked up again.

More likely, though, after your five–minute ritual in front of the judge, the rest of the day was spent trying to alleviate boredom. Shifting around, ignoring the discomfort of sitting on the hard wooden benches for hours, and anxiously watching the cell fill up with new arrivals that added an intolerable number to the original crew.

The courts finished their business and shut their doors just before 5:00 PM. Unless an early bus had relieved the overcrowding, the ride back to the prison was unimaginably horrible. Hot, tired, and irritable after a long and pointless day of suffering, tempers would flare easily. The blue boys behaved more abominably than usual, and in the dry season, the violence often came perilously close to breaking out into riots.

Knowing their cruelty could be dangerous when it backfired, the court guards carried assault rifles as the prisoners were loaded onto the bus.

Again, the bus would take more than its share of human distress and begin the start-and-stop journey back to the prison. The weekday traffic at 5:00 PM was like that in any major urban area: jammed and slow.

The temperature in the bus would rise ten or fifteen degrees above that in the streets. The asphalt and concrete gave up their heat built up during the day, shimmering heat mirages omnipresent. You’d choke helplessly on the thick fumes of pollution, unfiltered in a Third World country unconcerned with such niceties as carbon monoxide control.

During the hot season, one or two prisoners per court trip were critically injured by heatstroke or would die of suffocation en route. In cooler weather—but still hot—it was a rare court trip that didn’t see at least one (and often half a dozen) smaller prisoners beaten senseless or suffer broken
bones at the hands of fellow prisoners tormented past endurance, taking out their frustration on a convenient victim.

When the load of stinging, bedraggled wretches poured off the death wagon, the only emotion felt was a numb relief. Straggling through the gate, prisoners were left unmolested to gather underneath the awning over the patio next to the chain room.

Stripped naked, a perfunctory search was done by blue boys out of habit, rather than any effort made looking for drugs or money. As always, you’d nod and give a tired smile when the guard joked about “the farangs large organ;” the Thai’s laughter also somewhat forced.

Dressed again, the line through the chain room was impatient and snappish; one of the rare times that the blue boys kept their nasty behavior muzzled, avoiding confrontation that could easily explode in their faces— with heavy chains nearby.

No shower and no food, as the coffee shop had long been closed, you’d trudge up the last stairway to your cell, dead on your feet. Locked in at last, you’d take an inadequate ‘whore’s bath,’ using a washcloth and the water from the tank next to the toilet. You’d drink a cup of sweet tea or coffee and ignore the atrocious roar of hundreds of men screaming at each other a few feet away, in a confined and echoing space. The only benefit was that sleep always came easily after the exhausting ordeal.

Until you had to do it all over again … twelve days later.

A Day in the Life—Chiang Mai Remand Prison

I
n the misty grey half-light of the dawn morning, the prisoners, both Thai and Hill Tribesmen, are herded downstairs into the cobblestoned square surrounded by prison buildings. They’re lined up, facing the low one-story structure that housed the coffee shop, and an open-air office where guards lounge at desks. This is on the south side of the courtyard, the side that led to the prison administration offices and the prison entrance.

On the north side of the square is the two-story hospital: squat, ugly, and stinking. Those close to death are kept there, as are those who die. The dying men sleep or lie lifeless on the concrete slabs provided as beds, waiting for the two or three times a week in which the coroner would visit. All healthy prisoners are cleared from the yard and locked in their cells during the coroner’s visit. Driving a canary yellow Chevy Luv pick-up truck with a camper shell on the back, the people from the Ministry of Health would negotiate the narrow gaps between the buildings and pull up in the prison courtyard. No fewer than two bodies at a time are hauled out of the hospital and loaded on the truck, encased in sheets.

The hospital walls are splotchy, livid with slime-green lichen and water stains. It’s as if the building itself can’t conceal its diseased spirit but betrays its nature with a fungal leprosy.

The western side is formed by two, two-story buildings containing factories and housing. One building’s lower floor is a workshop for fashioning ornamental iron; the other is used for furniture manufacturing and carving. Upstairs, each building has two large rooms, approximately 30’ by 60’, which holds 250 to 300 prisoners. On opposite ends are the small ‘punishment cells,’ designed to fit two people tightly, which now house anywhere from five to thirteen prisoners each.

The eastern side of the square is a large, asbestos-tiled roof on stilts that shades a pre-fab trailer and a small shop where the furniture produced in the factories are lacquered and finished. Next to it is another high roof on stilts, covering a large Buddhist shrine that doubled twice a day as the dining hall. It’s filled with rows of rough, wooden benches and tables for prisoners, all facing the altar. This is dominated by a gilded bronze idol, which gazes benevolently down on worshippers, and the ornate sacred boxes, tables, incense, and other offerings they pile before it. A color TV, only used to watch Thai boxing matches on Sunday afternoons, hangs from the rafters above the idol; a jarring anachronism in a room that could have been plucked whole out of medieval times.

The prisoners are shoved and slapped into rows by the blue boys. The men huddle near-naked but for loincloths, shivering in the cold air.

At dawn, the prison loudspeakers come alive with static, followed by the tinny, circus-like recording of a brass band playing the Thai National Anthem. When that finishes, a droning recitation begins. With monotonous chanting, in sing-song rhythm, the Thai pledge to obey the non-violent precepts of the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-Fold Path of Theravada Buddhism—Thailand’s official religion. Ironically, the pledge is led by the blue boys, the worst reprobates among the prisoners. The dawn ritual completed, the prisoners are driven to work.

In our 10’ by 15’ punishment cell, the inmates would wake up to the noise of the workshops and disentangle our limbs from the pile formed while sleeping in such close quarters.

With a terrible snarl, an ancient band-saw would spring to life, its perpetual high-pitched whine produced by cutting teak trees. The saw was weakened by overuse, the wood too hard for the old saw to handle. The raucous noise was a physical presence, and impossible to ignore. It turned every conversation into a shouting match; its pollution as painful psychically as its detrimental effects on prisoner’s hearing.

The wondrous wood-working techniques and ability of the Hill Tribesmen were used to good effect by the prison officials. Scenes of elephants, monkeys, and jungle flora were carved onto sofa frames, chairs, coffee tables, and pictures, all made of illegally harvested teak. They sold very well to foreign visitors; mostly Europeans who never dreamed they were supporting the worst kind of slave labor and the devastation of Asian rainforests with their purchases.

As the sun climbed higher, the sharp chemical reek of lacquer and paint thinner penetrated the cell; the tropical heat intensifying the odors from the factories below.

In the large cell next door, the Hill Tribe people were forced to form a bucket chain, snaking from an indoor cistern outside and down the stairs, ending at the trough that held bathing water. Water would be hauled upstairs manually in large, square metal tins that had once held vegetable oil for cooking, to refill the cistern. Next to the cistern were the toilets—a row of porcelain holes with grids for feet, flushed by gravity and water. The cistern on one side of the toilets fed directly into a narrow concrete trough that ran in front of the toilets and was used to wash after defecating.

These thirty men handled the sharp-edged, five-gallon tins. The heavy, awkward tins caused the Hill Tribesmen’s emaciated muscles to swell and strain with the effort. Forty-five minutes of frantic effort, as if extinguishing
a life-threatening blaze instead of doing a mundane chore, was enough to fill the cistern.

Any spills of water by the prisoners in the bucket brigade were punished with a severe beating. Once they’d filled the cistern, they were moved off, with blows and curses from the blue boys, down to the factories.

At 8:00 or 8:30 AM, a guard would unlock our cell and allow us fifteen minutes to rush downstairs and try to buy something to eat.

The system regulating money that prison officials had set up was a species of cruel genius. Any money received by a prisoner was put into a prison account, held by the prison coffee shop. This was a very limited and basic general store that also cooked a few simple dishes. Rather than giving out money, prisoners were sold coupons, in units of five baht (twenty cents) valid for one day only. Thus, we had to form a queue to sign our money over in exchange for coupons at one window, and then form another queue at the next window down to try and purchase something edible from the coffee shop.

Each day we had to play an ugly guessing game. What food was available at what price? The coffee shop clerk kept everything below the counter and out of sight, except for non-edible items such as shampoo, toothpaste, and other toiletries set out on shelves against the back wall. Chicken or pork fried rice in a small bag cost eleven or twelve baht. Pork with noodles cost fifteen baht. If you were feeling lucky, twenty-five baht purchased a large bag of cookies, or a can of tuna. Did they have the item, or didn’t they? The clerks made sure you had to sign over the money before you bought food and made certain that this information was kept secret.

If they were out of the item, the coupons were money wasted, unless you wanted to buy soap. Often, nothing was available to eat—not even the wretched tins of sardines in tomato sauce the Thai inexplicably enjoyed.

Frequently, the clerks claimed to be out of items purely from spite. Smirking, they’d intone the dreaded phrase “Mai mee, mai mee” (no have, no have), signaling that the hated farang would go hungry, money be damned.

No matter how prescient or careful you were, more often than not, the prison managed to steal a few baht with their worthless coupon, the coffee shop clerks insisting they had no small change, thus forcing you to either make a larger purchase or pay too much for the desired item. They’d laugh while they robbed you.