At the helm of the Kamlangji team escorting us is earnest, ever-smiling Dr. Napaporn, a professor recruited by HRH herself to run the initiative. Immediately I can see why. Napaporn is a wealth of information about all things related to Thai women and incarceration, but also a fountain of passion and compassion—an antidote to the cool government bureaucracy I witnessed yesterday. In her hands, statistics take life and become human lives again.
During the ride she briefs us on the global convention that the princess initiated, which resulted in 2010’s UN Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders, better known as the Bangkok Rules. One of its achievements was to identify women as a group that has distinct needs and is uniquely vulnerable. It’s estimated that in Europe, 80 percent of women in prison have an identifiable mental illness, one in ten have attempted suicide before being imprisoned, and 75 percent struggle with drugs and alcohol; in America, the percentage of incarcerated women who are mentally ill is about 73 percent. As a result, safeguards ought to govern women’s prisons across the world. There should be screenings for mental health issues, drug dependency, and sexual abuse. Nutritional advice ought to be given to detainees who are pregnant, breast-feeding, or menstruating, and staff should be trained in “gender sensitivity.” The Bangkok Rules also advocate a ban on the shackling of women during childbirth—incidentally, only eighteen US states have any laws restricting this practice—and propose that a “gender-sensitive risk assessment” should take into account a woman’s history of domestic violence, mental illness, and substance abuse problems during sentence allocation.
We drive into the prison complex, down back roads and through a slumlike area where, Napaporn explains, corrections officers live. A welcome line of officers sporting khaki uniforms greets us and we’re ushered upstairs, into a plush conference room with red velvet chairs and sunshine-yellow drapes. Mango juice and warm banana muffins are served—made by prisoners, we’re told. The lights are dimmed and a computer-generated voice narrates a video tour of the prison library and vocational training classes in food catering, sports, beauty arts. The list goes on, cheerily. Sewing! Meditating! Massaging! Yoga, salons, bakeries!
Is it a marketing campaign? For some retreat?
This perplexed feeling mounts as we’re led through gates and a metal detector, paparazzi trailing us. An officer in salute stance announces the roll count of 4,500 prisoners today, 53 at court. And right inside the metal gates is the main prison area: a tidily arranged complex with a lush lawn, a small Buddhist shrine, several decrepit-looking buildings, and a line of women seated on a bench.
They wear baggy tops and long skirts, baby and royal blue for the sentenced prisoners, rusty brown for those on remand. Spying us, they steeple their hands and bow. They’re awaiting visitors; those in on drug charges can receive them once a week and all others, every day. Visits are just fifteen minutes long, though, and mostly conducted through glass. Contact visits are granted just once a year, usually to children and mothers. It’s generally known that throughout the world, women visit their husbands in prison with far more consistency than husbands visit their partners.
As I’m shepherded through sliding doors and into an air-conditioned room, a bundle is placed in my arms. It’s a baby. One of two dozen adorable beings in a pristine white nursery. A photo of the princess in a gilded frame hangs on the wall and toys are stacked neatly in a corner, where three mothers breast-feed. It smells, deliciously, of baby—powder and lotion. Swaddled in blankets, the babies rest on an island of colorful pillows in the middle of the room, tended to by barefoot prisoners who are trained caretakers. My heart melts by the second.
“I have never seen babies so silent,” I marvel.
“They are happy!” exclaims Napaporn. “If they were outside, they are poor. In here is better than outside. Meal, diaper. All free.”
Lorraine, cooing, takes the baby I’m holding and Joseph lands in my arms.
“From Africa. Mother from Sudan,” a corrections officer explains. Joseph gives me a toothless grin and a droplet of drool lands on my collar.
“I wish my daughter would have one already!” Lorraine exclaims, between coos.
This prison is home to about one hundred mothers, Napaporn goes on, who live together in a dorm. “Babies stay until age one,” she says, as Joseph is extracted from my embrace. “Until age three, house provided by the department and weekly visit to mother. After that, family must provide. Or orphanage.” Goodbyes, after that first year of maternal bonding, are heart-wrenching, she adds.
Universally speaking, broken homes are acute collateral consequences of incarceration, shattering a family’s foundation emotionally and economically. On American shores, some 75 percent of women in prison are mothers and more than 2.7 million children have incarcerated parents. A 2014 study found significant health problems and behavioral issues in such children, indicating that in some respects, parental incarceration can be more harmful to a child’s health than divorce or even the death of a parent. Only ten states in America allow incarcerated mothers to spend more than two or three days with their newborns. Here in Thailand the Kamlangji team determined that 43 percent of women in prison were, upon arrest, primary breadwinners. Thailand actually boasts one of the highest labor participation rates for women of any country in the region, in part because Buddhism designates women, who cannot be monks, as “this-worldly” and men as “otherworldly,” thereby placing the onus of everyday economic matters primarily on women.
Rain thunders down and the air is dense with heat. I’m handed a Burberry-plaid umbrella. Prisoners, rushing to and fro, shield their heads with cardboard and garbage bags. Some trail us down a concrete walkway to a library, built in 2006 with HRH’s support. The air conditioning is a welcome relief, as is the glimmer of normalcy that the library provides. Ladies sit serenely at the tables, reading magazines, giggling and whispering, checking out books.
“Very little,” our host officer asserts, when asked by Lorraine about prison violence. “Some fighting over, maybe, people talk too much, too little space. Female prisoners are—how do you say?—more sensitive than males, so when something happen they become moody. Lots of moody.”
The dormitories, as they’re called, are immaculate, with linoleum floors and troughlike sinks flanked by Winnie the Pooh towels. Blue sleeping mats are stacked in a corner of the room, which holds forty-five women and is about the size of a studio apartment. A flat-screen TV hangs on the wall, beside two fans, meager weapons in the battle against the Bangkok June heat. Many hours are passed here. Daily bath and breakfast are at 6:00 a.m., workshop or library time at 8:00, dinner at 3:00 p.m., and lockup until morning at 4:30.
Outside the dormitory, a corkboard posts the number of people inside, their offenses, and their time until release. I ask Napaporn about the longest sentence listed. Twenty-five years and eleven months, she says, scanning the board. For possession. Of what? Yaba. Literally “madness drug”—caffeine-infused meth, in high demand. A Kamlangji study found that 90 percent of women behind bars faced yaba-related charges; in 35 percent of these cases the women possessed less than fourteen tablets. Looking visibly pained, Napaporn explains that fifteen pills can mean a life sentence or death.
Prisoners, I notice from the list, are identified by name, not number.
“No, no. Must know their name and face,” the officer explains. “Sensitive women. Must know name and face.”
Outside, puddles have become lakes. Guided into rubber boots, we slosh through wet heat and gray fog to the work area. Hotpink mosquito nets swathe the room like clouds of cotton candy; those fashioning them hunch over sewing machines. A bright floral housedress is carried to us for inspection. The women smile and bow before rushing back to their stations.
I try to see beyond the smiles, but it’s not easy. I’m learning the dismal facts and figures, but as human beings, the women here remain blank slates to me. I’ve not exchanged a word with them, and barely mad
e eye contact—heads are too often bowed. Lorraine and I have been promised the chance to interview women during tomorrow’s visit to another prison, and next week’s work calls for plenty of interaction, but I wonder about my ability to connect with people here, as I have in the other countries. Given that it’s a royal visit, plus the colossal cultural barriers, how sincere an interface can I expect?
The sewing machines keep humming. I could be in any global factory. Which notion is more distressing, I muse, the idea that prisons are an improvement on the outside world, as in the baby nursery, or the possibility, inspired by this vista of capitalism, that they’re essentially on par with it? Both realities suggest that poverty is itself a kind of prison. Which is why many of my students in New York come home to freedom only to tell me, months later, that the daily grind of life can sometimes make freedom feel not so different from being behind bars.
The tour concludes as strangely as it began, with food and souvenirs. The prison restaurant, just outside the barbed wire, is a big local draw, both for the built-in gimmick of being staffed by prisoners, as part of their culinary training, and for the quality of the food. Today there’s a popular local TV show filming here, interviewing officers stationed by the ladies’ room and hungry patrons devouring noodles. At the table, doily place mats, quilted pink menus, and matching pink chopstick holders mark each seat. Waitresses in pink dresses, sporting those same affectless looks I’d faced all day, take our order and place spicy papaya salad and pad thai before us.
Next door the gift shop sells prisoner-made goods and also doubles as a massage parlor. Rifling through pillows, place mats, and purses embroidered with little Thai girls at the playground, trying to determine if making purchases would constitute supporting the prison system or, instead, the efforts to reform it, I spy one more framed royal photo. There’s the king’s nephew, pants rolled up, enjoying a foot massage from an incarcerated trainee.
———
“I know you tell me not to worry, but I am. I’m worrying,” Lorraine sighs during dinner that night at Vertigo, the rooftop restaurant that makes good on its name. Like many Asian megalopolises, their skylines swarming with postmodern edifices, Bangkok lives in the heavens. Next week is the drama workshop Lorraine and I will run, but we still don’t know the parameters of our access and haven’t quite figured out how the whole thing will work. For weeks before our departure, Lorraine had sent me e-mails. How about this drama exercise? You ought to read this book about Thai gender roles. And maybe this one on women and prostitution in Thailand?
I’d told her to relax; overplanning is counterproductive.
“It’ll be fine,” I assure her, with an extra gulp of wine.
After dinner I go for a walk on Khao San Road, Bangkok’s definitive tourist strip. It’s all knickknack vendors, cheap skewered meat, and thumping bars flooded with Germans in Bob Marley T-shirts. One sign reads Laughing Gas and TOEFL For Sale; another, Very Strong Liquor: No ID Check. I dub it night of the living stereotypes, essence of “backpacker” come to life. Including, of course, one very critical backpacker ingredient: drugs.
The party and the prison are thus hardly far apart. Meth and, beginning in the early nineties, ecstasy, have local markets, especially among hedonistic travelers, and these customers demand suppliers, mostly recruited from the incarcerated women I met today. Thailand is a major transshipment point for heroin from neighboring Myanmar, the world’s second-biggest producer of opium, after Afghanistan. Organized crime groups and border-residing minority groups like the Hill People are at the forefront of this complex trade, and in 1979 the country’s Narcotics Act spelled out draconian punishments for sundry categories of drugs. “Tough-on-drugs” policies and rhetoric were inspired by America’s own drug war around the same time. And as in the States, the whole thing is motivated by politics, serving to boost government popularity while diverting attention from its policy failures.
Bleary-eyed, I hail a tuk-tuk and sputter back to the hotel.
———
Inside another Thai women’s prison later that week, we watch four women with short haircuts craft Hello Kitty bookshelves. Napaporn, speaking kindly to them, introduces us; they restfully steeple their hands.
Pim, wearing pink lipstick and a matching pink clothespin in her hair, is nineteen and serving an eight-year sentence. She carried her boyfriend’s yaba because, well, he asked her to, and he was her boyfriend; given Thai gender roles, Napaporn explains, questioning male authority figures is not an option. One of her studies found that more than half of incarcerated women with drug cases had codefendants, 44 percent of whom were husbands or lovers.
Wanee meticulously applies glue to pastel-colored shelves. She smiles as she tells us that she’s a mother of three serving life, for two yaba pills. Life, because she crossed a national border to visit her family in Laos, and carried pills with her.
I try to muster up more questions but I’m arrested by the quiet anguish of the scene. And the women’s answers are brief and unrevealing; civility and power dynamics hang like cobwebs over our conversation. Smiles and sawade-kas are all that feel appropriate.
In the kitchen fifteen women in prison uniforms, cooking staff, are seated mermaid style on the floor. Massive silver woks rest beside heaps of produce. A menu on the wall informs us that chicken soup, cucumber with Chinese sausage, and curry with pork rind are for dinner. Dollhouse-size samples are presented for our inspection. Kapoon-ka! comes the choruslike call, as we move on to the heaven-scented bakery.
“Is it difficult to bake in this heat?” Lorraine asks one of the prisoners there, crouching to look her in the eye.
“Yes, but I like it. It is like home, baking.” She brandishes her chiffon brownie.
Fifty-eight-year-old Grace, to be released in two months after serving eleven years, tells us she will go north to open a bakery, and this work has been helpful training. A third woman explains that she’s served a year for possession of kratom—a plant in the same narcotics category as marijuana, even though it’s grown for medicinal purposes in rural Thai villages.
I’m reminded of the fact that in America in the 1990s, some 80 percent of drug arrests were for marijuana. And in 2013, 3,278 people in the States—65 percent of them black—were serving life sentences for nonviolent offenses. These include one man sentenced to life for serving as a middleman in the sale of ten dollars’ worth of marijuana, and a trucker who tried to earn the money for his two-year-old son’s bone-marrow transplant by carrying meth in his vehicle, now nearing twenty years behind bars. Because America, like most countries, including Thailand, privileges the weight of narcotics above the role a defendant plays in a drug deal, a kingpin who imports fifteen kilos of cocaine potentially faces the same sentence as the trucker paid a hundred dollars to carry it. A more just gauge of guilt would be the profit taken from the operation—prosecuting an operation’s masterminds, in other words, over and above its hapless street soldiers. But that would mean almost all of the women I’m meeting today would be free. Seventy-nine percent of incarcerated Thai women were arrested during sting operations netting small fish in the big drug pond.
“Before here I was waitress. At hotel,” Grace tells us. “I have not worries about release.” She offers a sample of her fruitcake.
Inside the programs building, prisoners massage each other’s feet during a training course; a dozen others sit in a glassed-off room taking a computer class. On the porch is “art therapy,” as Napaporn calls it. Five prisoners are creating paintings—a diary with a manga-inspired cover, portraits of the princess and the king, a massive one of Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god of success. A dozen women are engaged in a flower-arranging course, and Lorraine is presented with an ornate display of white roses. An officer points toward one of the women, knee-deep in carnations.
“They put on makeup before they sleep,” she laughs. “So when they dream, they pretend they are beautiful.”
Lorraine asks how they treat misbehavior.
Like naughty children, I think. Both of these so-called model prisons—utterly unique, all-female miniworlds adopted by Kamlangji—hinge on a kind of maternal authority structure. They’re a cross between a military camp and a women’s retreat, at which every prisoner is at all times engaged in some program. They call to mind America’s Progressive-Era reformatory movement, which reflected changing conceptions of offenders: not depraved but wayward, led astray and thus ripe for being led back to the right path by way of supposedly scientific methods like probation, parole, and placement in precisely classified prisons, from minimum to maximum. Many of our women’s prisons were born as reformatories, like New York’s Bedford Hills, in 1907, and its House of Refuge for Women, in 1887. Far less severe than male prisons, these reformatories were lorded over by house mothers and an all-female staff. Prisoners there were often paroled to work as domestic servants, and there were gymnastics lessons, reading and writing, health care classes, nature walks, and choirs. At Indiana Reformatory, the women even sported gingham frocks and ate at tables dressed with tablecloths and flowers. This movement lost its steam around 1930, in part because the Depression made them financially unsustainable.
“I try not to look women in eye,” the foreign affairs officer tells me on our way out. “It will be too sad for me. I am glad I don’t go to the prison every day, only sometimes. Because I know. Even though they have programs, they are cared for, they are not happy. They want to be with their children and their mothers.”
In the traditional Thai value system, bunkhun, loosely translated as “duty,” implies that women must care for their children and their mothers, because they have one debt to pay and another to generate. A man can pay this debt in the highest way possible by becoming a monk, but since women cannot be monks, they pay in a more literal sense, as primary caretakers.
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