Locked away and forgotten: inside Thailand's high security jail

Khao Bin Central Prison’s ‘special zone’

At Khao Bin Central Prison in Ratchaburi, we expected to find incorrigible drug lords - but met instead the poor, the disaffected and the foreign.

At 2 security checkpoints visitors are frisked and scanned with metal detectors. No sharp objects, no liquids, no metals, no mobile phones or gadgets.

Khao Bin Central Prison's special zone, where selected drug traffickers were moved in order to halt smuggling and cut inmates off from outside drug contacts.

As in Dante's Inferno, there are several levels of discomfort here, namely 9 zones of increasing security. We proceed inwards, but the deepest rung is still under construction - a reported 600 million baht behemoth of a building where the most notorious drug lords will be held.

Khao Bin Central Prison in Ratchaburi's Chom Bung district covers 213 rai of land in a remote part of the province surrounded by hills. Phone signal around the area is unreliable, suppressed by advanced signal dampers within the prison - the 1st official signal jamming system of its kind in the country. Even on the roads outside, reception is sporadic until the prison is a kilometre or more away.

The prison houses around 3,000 inmates. In Zone 5, around 1,000 serve sentences ranging from 30 years to death. There are murderers, rapists and, above all, drug traffickers, from "lords" and mules, to the guilty by association. Zone 4, a 2-storey building divided into 6 cells equipped with surveillance cameras, accommodates most of the more than 200 high-profile inmates from around the country who were moved to Khao Bin in February, as part of a move by authorities to stifle smuggling and drug dealing by inmates. The overflow from Zone 4 gets moved to Zone 9.

On the day of out visit, prisoners sit on the bare concrete floor of the school, nearly 300 of them, mostly Burmese, Cambodian and Lao - ones outside the highest security that we are allowed to meet. One Tanzanian with a thick Tom Clancy book under his arm. Almost all of them are here on drug trafficking charges. They are not drug overlords by any stretch of the imagination, simply those from impoverished backgrounds who saw a chance to make a quick profit peddling ya ba (methamphetamine) tablets or ya ice (crystal meth), or who were convicted by association -- the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time, and too poor to mount a proper legal defence. The conviction rate is often tied to how rich a suspect is, as well as what country he comes from. Those whose embassies provide legal, financial or moral assistance fare much better, as do those whose countries have extradition arrangements with Thailand. After a few years, most Europeans, for example, can apply to be transferred to a prison in their country, where the conditions are better and where they will be released years earlier.

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Source: Bangkok Post, November 4, 2012

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