The Last Executioner (6 page)

If you didn’t have any money to supplement basic rations you were in trouble. A prisoner is fed three meals a day for only 27 baht, so it is impossible to serve up decent meals for that amount. Prisoners could lose a serious amount of weight and succumb to every bug and virus going. Vicious fights would break out over the simplest of things, like changing the TV channel. Many prisoners would try to form a group of sorts so that they would be afforded some protection from the bullies. Others would try to strike up an allegiance with a guard. It was all about perception; you had a better chance of surviving if you made yourself look powerful.

It’s the constant threat of warfare that I could not have coped with. Like anywhere else there are good and bad inmates. The good ones, who had broken the law unintentionally or just the one unlucky time, usually took advantage of the vocational training programmes that the jail offered—they could even study for a university degree. They looked for jobs within Bang Kwang and put aside their small earnings in a no-interest savings account. They could then afford to buy food or toiletries at the prison shop, or else they could keep their money for when they had completed their sentence. The bad guys were the ones who were living criminal lives on the outside and only know how to make money from illegal activities. They tried to continue their careers on the inside by organizing gambling rackets. As I said, fights broke out frequently and could be very bloody. If an inmate stole another’s shower gel there could be a stabbing. If someone started to play cards and ended up owing money he could not pay back there could be a stabbing.

The prison housed a variety of people, among them ‘ladyboys’. These ‘ladyboys’ almost always caused bloody feuds. If an inmate thinks his ‘girlfriend’ (the Thai term of endearment is
nong
) is being flirted with by another all hell can break loose. The prison guards were on red alert when a new ‘ladyboy’ arrived because it usually meant a battle for the right to gain her hand ‘in matrimony’. They tended to treat their ‘girlfriends’ very well, and shared any food or parcels that they received. In fact the prison prefers not to accept them anymore because it is much too risky for the ladyboy. Their being raped is almost inevitable. They would need 24-hour protection which we would not be able to stretch to. They were usually only guilty of relatively small-time offences like possessing a minor amount of soft drugs or pick-pocketing. The majority of them were prostitutes, though they stopped short of sex. The story was always the same. The client was lured to a room and offered a drink containing sleeping pills. When they would wake a few hours later they would probably be missing their wallets, watch and shoes, if they were expensive. Ladyboys weren’t allowed to wear their hair long in Bang Kwang and when they took a bath they usually wore a
grajhom-ok
, a garment which covered their breasts if they had any. In Thailand, women wear a skirt high on their body to cover their breasts when bathing in a river, and the ladyboys did the same in Bang Kwang, out of shyness at bathing in front of men.

They could be good fun and liven up the atmosphere. I remember once when some ‘ladyboys’ put on a show in the auditorium. They got hold of wigs and elaborate dresses and performed the can-can amongst other things. They got a great reception that night and were as excited as chattering four-year-olds who had just received their birthday presents all at once.

But they can also cause trouble in other ways. An angry prisoner’s wife once complained to a prison guard that her husband was having an affair with a ‘katoey’ (offensive term for ‘ladyboys’). She was enraged and told the guard that her husband didn’t love her anymore, and if that wasn’t bad enough she learnt that all the presents she had brought to him in prison were being given, in turn, to her rival. It was as well that the ‘ladyboy’ was behind bars as the wife was well built and fearsome looking.

Prison taught me that loneliness will drive a man to do strange things. I remember when one of the inmates decided to try his luck and wrote to a magazine’s dating column. There was great excitement among his cell mates when he received a reply from a woman. He told her that he had been jailed because he accidentally killed the guy who raped his sister—an honourable crime indeed and complete fiction. Anyway the woman believed him and had great sympathy for his dilemma which led to him being in Bang Kwang. She was very eager and after a few letters, which were read aloud to his friends, went back and forth she suggested coming to visit him in prison. Even the prison guards got caught up wondering what she looked like. The date was set and the guy fixed himself up as much as he could, considering the circumstances. Well she exceeded everyone’s expectations, so much that the prisoner panicked. He obviously had no faith in his own appearance and hastily hired a good-looking prisoner to meet with her in his place. It also transpired that he had hired another prisoner to write all his letters for him so the poor girl had not actually dealt with him in any way. He was teased for ages afterwards and couldn’t answer the obvious question; why on earth had he bothered writing to the magazine in the first place?

***

I should probably describe the prison: It’s like a big college campus. As I said, the livestock and vocational training facilities are to the left of the prison’s entrance. They take up a lot of space but then they need to be big as they serve over 8,000 prisoners. On the right is the car park which faces on to the football field. To the extreme right of the football field is the large auditorium, complete with a stage. Behind this is the solitary confinement area which is not really used so much now. If you walk in a straight line from the prison entrance you would pass the visiting rooms on your right and left. You would walk past the 7-storey security tower’s door and then find yourself looking at the wings. There would be a sort of junction where the security tower stands, and just beside that the Custody Section building where I used to have my office. There is another watch tower at the outer wall behind Wing 4.

There are six wings in total; wings 4, 5 and 6 to your right-hand side and then wings 1, 2 and 3 to your left. Also to your right, just in front of wings 4, 5 and 6 are the two small dormitories for the assistants to the prison guards. Each wing holds between 800 and 1000 prisoners. Wing 1 holds the prisoners who have received the death penalty. Behind wings 1, 2 and 3 is the prison clinic where sick prisoners are kept. If you continue on past the wings you reach a large storage facility which is also used to die clothes. Uniforms, soap, crockery and paint thinners are kept here. Then, if you turn left here you find yourself looking at the kitchen, which is staffed by prisoners from Wing 4.

Just past the kitchen is the wooden diamond-shaped gazebo where prisoners are brought before their execution. A table is usually set up with flowers and incense to calm the condemned. The execution room is beyond the gazebo, and looks more like a white wooden shed with a large front porch. There is a good bit of green grass around it and under other circumstances it might be described as pretty. The sign over the porch roughly translates into English as ‘the place to end all sorrow’. The morgue is just a tiny room off to the right that was mostly empty. There is a door on the left hand side of the building which is called ‘ghost’s door’ since it is used to bring bodies out into the temple for cremation. There used to be a statue of Yommaban at the entrance to the execution room, and prisoners would have to pass it on their way in. Thais believed that this spirit punished the wicked in the afterlife. Personally I found the statue and the sign to be in extremely poor taste.

Just beyond then is the Wat Bangpraktai, what you might call a temple—a big building with a red roof which could be clearly seen as you approached the execution room. I suppose it may have proved a comforting sight to a prisoner who was making his last journey. The temple houses the abbot or chaplain and is quite separate from the day-to-day running of the jail. When an execution is to take place a guard would be sent around to invite the abbot to perform the last rites.

The ‘death row’ Wing has received many visits from journalists and camera crews. Here a journalist speaks to the camera live from the wing with a typical description;

‘Right now, I’m standing in the area that houses the prisoners on death row. It’s safe to say that this is the centre of Bang Kwang Prison. There are 280 convicts here, divided among 24 cells. The number of convicts in each cell varies from seven to 15. I am now walking into a room where 14 convicts are kept. The room is about three by seven metres. There is a small toilet here behind a wall that is only waist-high, there is no door. The only other thing in the room is a rubbish bin. The bars of the cell are made of thick metal and they are about four inches apart. The floor is bare cement. Light is provided by fluorescent tubes on the ceiling between the cells, but it is still quite dim.’

***

In Bang Kwang, every morning hundreds of prisoners come out of the cells and they all have to be searched for drugs, money or weapons. We were helped in this task by our ‘assistants’. We needed them because there just weren’t enough guards to do all that was required.

Over the years I found a surprising amount of stuff on the prisoners: cash, opium, marijuana, and harder drugs like heroin. Drugs are a huge problem in the prison. Understandably there are a lot of inmates suffering from terrible depression that neither religion nor playing football can help them fight. They turn to drugs for some sort of escape. Then there are the foreign prisoners who complain to their embassies that they can’t sleep. The embassy supplies them with a large batch of sleeping pills—valium and lithium seem to be the drugs of choice— which may indeed be used by the inmate to help him sleep, but more often than not they are sold on to the other prisoners for a profit.

It’s not a pleasant thing to have to do everyday— give hundreds of men a body search. The inmates are graded according to their behaviour. There is a choice of six grades; very bad, bad, middling, good, very good and excellent. The average inmate usually has a middling score. Anyone who breaks house rules can be punished in a number of ways. He might lose the right to receive visitors or he could be downgraded. Years ago a high grade made you eligible for amnesty if there was a Royal Pardon and your sentence could be cut in half. These pardons used to happen every second year but then the public began to complain that criminals weren’t being jailed for long enough. Nowadays the pardons happen infrequently and sentences can only be reduced by one sixth—unless you are in jail for drug-related offences, in which case you will never be granted amnesty.

This downgrading usually took place in a court room. I appeared in court as a witness many times. The inmate would be represented by his lawyer and he would grill me as to how the prisoner obtained drugs in his cell. This question was always tricky for me but I would begin by pointing out that the prisoner wasn’t completely isolated from the outside world. He could receive drugs in parcels from friends and relatives. We had already found drugs in strange places like toothpaste and shampoo bottles. Invariably I would find myself admitting that an alternative to parcels from outside was the prison guards themselves. There are corrupt people in all walks of life, it is simply a reality. Some guards could be bribed to collect drugs from suppliers on their days off. It always came down to the same thing—money.

Both inmates and guards were forbidden to carry cash in the prison. Officers had to empty their pockets before they went on duty. As for the prisoners, money would just cause extra headaches. The biggest problem was that a prisoner with ready cash would be tempted to bribe a guard to bring him in his drugs or even to escape. Then there were the other prisoners. If you had money you can be sure that someone else would try to take it from you. Therefore you would be endangering yourself as well as in-house law and order.

The guards could also be tricked into carrying drugs to the inmates. A prisoner would sometimes urge his ‘favourite’ guard to go to a particular bar or restaurant with assurances that he would be well looked after, because the owner was a friend of his. The prisoner might even write up a letter of introduction for the guard as further encouragement. The guard is persuaded and heads off, maybe on a Friday after work, to the venue in question and finds himself being utterly spoiled without having to put a hand in his pocket. Then after the guard has eaten and drank his fill for free he would be presented with a carton of cigarettes to bring back to their poor friend in prison. And maybe just one packet in that carton would be crammed with drugs, but how could the guard insult his generous host by refusing this simple errand?

Then there’s the case of unfortunate Prayuth Sanun who was a prison guard that I liked and is now sentenced to the death penalty. His troubles began after he took a weekend job as a bouncer for extra money. He was hired by a popular restaurant. Bouncing usually entails being paid cash in hand, with instant respect from the men and attraction from the women. The most trying problem is probably persuading drunken teenagers that they have had enough. A bouncer can earn up to 400 baht a night, cash in hand. Prayuth enjoyed his new job and started to make all kinds of friends, including dangerous ones like mobsters, loan sharks and drug dealers. He found that his new associates were handy when things got out of control. You try barring someone from entering the venue, they are drunk or mad and get aggressive, you hit them and they leave, filling the air with threats and promises. True to their word they return with a gang of friends, all wanting to damage you. Now, that is the worst thing that can happen and you need friends near you in those circumstances. Then favours are done and repaid back and forth, and before you know it you are helping your new friends collecting monies owed, for which you need to start carrying a gun because now you have entered a vicious circle.

Prayuth says he was never asked out straight to start selling drugs, and neither does he remember exactly when he started to do it—one thing simply led to another. He soon came to the attention of the police who filmed his every movement. Eventually he was caught with 700,000 amphetamine tables, a M16 gun and lots of cash. Because he was a prison guard he received an even worse sentence. He has been on death row for six or seven years now. I could hardly look at him after he received his sentence. He was absolutely distraught. Prayuth was a good guy. You could rely on him if you had a problem. When he had money he would spend it on his friends.