In the midst of all this change the little things are forgotten about. I know this is not just particular to Bang Kwang; anyone who has worked at the same job will relate to this. The old guy who has worked hard for years is almost invisible now. These older guys, and I include myself here, were more hands on and got the job done quietly, without fuss. The old guy started his day with a coffee and a smoke at 6am. Then he would have a walk about before unlocking the building. He would ferret out any mishaps from the previous night—who beat up who, who was raped by whom. He always made it his business to know what exactly was going on with the inmates.
He also cared about the little things, like making sure that the inmates got served equal amounts of food. He would watch the inmate who was in charge of dishing out the soup, telling him not to stir it because the meat would be scattered and settle at the bottom of the pot, enabling the convict to dig deep for his mates and skim the meatless surface for everyone else. The server would be instructed to put the fish into the small bowls first and pour the soup over it so that everyone got a bit of meat. The new guys don’t concern themselves with any of these voluntary niceties, they don’t see the point of them since they haven’t been asked by their superiors to carry them out, therefore they won’t get any points for it and they won’t be paid any extra.
I really don’t understand why the DOC hires so many graduates; surely there can’t be that many jobs to suit their desired profession. Say we need one good solicitor and we end up taking on ten. That means that nine of them just do errands until they get bored and leave for a better job. The prison is just used as experience to put on a Curriculum Vitae and if someone knows that they are not going to be around for a long time then they are reluctant to care about the job. The wages badly need to be improved. A prison officer with a college degree only makes a paltry 7,000 baht a month, which is nothing compared to his counterpart in the business world. The wages are no incentive either to stay or stay away from making dirty money. There would be more pride in the profession if the money was better. The DOC must be careful that all these changes are not purely superficial. The college graduates love proposing new projects. We have boxing tournaments, music competitions and activities galore. But what about the welfare of the prisoners—are they hungry? Are they sick? Is anyone being bullied?
Also I have come to believe that you have to respect the criminals and be a little bit curious about how they arrived in Bang Kwang. It makes the job more bearable and adds to my job satisfaction. If you respect the criminal as an equal human being it pushes you to do your best for him and motivates you to make improvements. Some of the young rookies see the inmates either as guinea pigs for their projects or as errant children. As I have mentioned before, I started to check out their files when they came to the prison and I made it my business to attend a seminar on criminality by the National Council of Thailand. Admittedly, it took me a while to become interested in the criminal as an individual but I’m glad I did. It provided me with a bigger picture and the knowledge that everything is not black and white. When you become a parent you learn it is best to keep an open mind. I think that is why my father was so well-liked—he was always open to new ideas and he was a great believer in the grey areas in life. This is what I have tried to bring to my role in Bang Kwang.
But I also have to repeat what I said earlier. I do believe that some people are innately bad and letting them work in a prison workshop or milk the prison cows is not going to change a serial offender into a good person.
Maintaining self control is a very important social matter in Thailand but it is not always possible. Tourists might find out the hard way that it does not help to lose your temper in public. Thais view a loss of temper to be akin to losing face if you have to resort to shouting and abuse. You are only letting yourself down and making yourself appear inferior. If someone angers you on the street or you feel hard done by you should keep your voice low and smile. This is much more effective behaviour. I could have easily ended up in Bang Kwang myself. When I was younger I was badly beaten up once and I can tell you now that if I had been carrying a gun on me that day I would have been charged for murder or, at the very least, grievous body harm. I was enraged that a gang of men should beat me up for no reason and I was filled with anger and a murderous desire for vengeance. So if it can happen to me it can happen to anyone.
This new breed of prison staff remains oblivious to all that. They sit in their offices hiding behind paperwork and dream up new projects that will enhance their reputations. They send in their projects and continue to sit in their offices waiting to see if they will get a raise for their academic efforts. Meanwhile I have befriended the inmate who cleans my office in the mornings. He fills me in on all the goings-on in the wings. If someone has been beaten up, I ask to see the head of the cell where the beating took place. I ask him what happened and after further investigation on my part I transfer the victim to another cell if I don’t think he is going to be left in peace. This is how I have always operated.
Now, I don’t really have anything against these projects. They help the prison, which can only be a positive thing. My problem is that when one guy starts doing a project and receives praise for it, then the others follow suit and there is no actual prison officer work being done. The new guys decide that a sport exhibition should be put in place. They hand out surveys and questionnaires and work out their statistics and percentages. The older warden worries about whether one prisoner will use the dumbbells to knock out a guy he doesn’t like, or the guy who has flirted with his ‘ladyboy’, or even a guard he has had a run-in with. He wonders where the prisoners are going to have their work out in relation to what the other prisoners are doing. Where is the equipment going to be left? Who is going to mind the key? The older guys have a lot more questions while the newer guys just present answers to questions that haven’t been asked.
Everything changes and I shouldn’t really be complaining. The world is changing. During one riot the inmates flew a kite to ask for Royal Amnesty. Today they use mobile phones.
***
People ask me if I believe in the prison system, do I believe that Bang Kwang can receive a hardened criminal and make him a better person to send back to live in normal society? I would have to be honest and say that I’m not sure that Bang Kwang has ever, or could ever, achieve that. There is a man from the Middle East who comes here looking to counsel the prisoners in the hope that he will make a few converts. In fact the prison receives quite a few religious teachers. They probably have the best of intentions and take the time to ask the prisoners what it is they are really looking for; how do they think faith could be introduced into their lives to help them. I maintain that all an inmate ever wants is his freedom; he’s not too hung up about improving his health or mind, he just wants to go home.
In my opinion there are three kinds of prisoners. The first kind is the ‘born-to-be’ criminal. He is like a lotus that lives under water and shies away from the light. I remember having a conversation with a serial rapist. He talked about not having the patience to befriend a woman and make the effort to get to know her over a few months before she lets him into her bed. He preferred the short cut. This is not easy talk to listen to, especially as a father and husband. I tried to explain that waiting and working towards something would lead to a more enduring satisfaction, one that lasted longer than three minutes, and would leave him feeling like he had really accomplished something. But I couldn’t be sure that he really understood what I was saying.
The second kind is the easily influenced criminal who finds himself in trouble thanks to his brother or his gang; he just went with the flow without aim or ambition.
The third kind is the mentally challenged criminal. He ends up in jail through a lack of intelligence or abnormal social skills. The first and the third criminal have, more than likely, had a crap childhood riddled with neglect or abuse—sexual or violent. They all end u
p here, after damaging someone else, needing to be rehabilitated and healed. We are not very optimistic regarding their leaving Bang Kwang as completely different people.
It is too heavy a responsibility to place that huge burden on the Department of Corrections alone; society at large also has to change its attitude. What is the point of bringing a prisoner into the workshop here and providing him with a skill? Maybe we can train an inmate to be a great carpenter or a cook but then he gets released into the outside world with his new found skill and when he turns up for a job interview with a prison record nobody wants to take a chance and hire him. So he ends up broke and completely vulnerable to resuming whatever it was he was doing that got him thrown into Bang Kwang in the first place. The politicians don’t seem too interested in the problems of the DOC, which is a pity because we should all be working together. The DOC is like the child of a mistress; no one wants to support us or give us a bigger budget.
We do our best here in the prison. The prisoners have access to sport, a choir, religion as well as the vocational training. We also have a prison house band, made up of inmates, and even our very own DJ, who used to work for a Thai country music radio station before being charged with drug offences. He runs a radio station from the auditorium which the band sometimes plays in. We used to hold quite a few concerts in the auditorium; I even played there a couple of times over the years. Unfortunately we have mostly stopped inviting musicians to the prison after the 1985 riot. The best concert I ever saw in Bang Kwang was actually a comedy show that was put on by the famous Thai comedienne Noi Po-ngam. She and her friends just cracked me up. Nowadays a show might be put on for a special occasion but that’s about it.
We have to function according to the standards and requirements set by the humanitarian organisations that Bang Kwang has joined. Overall the life of a prisoner has improved a lot since I started working as a prison guard. If a prisoner feels that he is being treated badly by a guard he is free to lodge a complaint against that guard. This was completely unheard of in the olden days. Things are better for the prisoner but this means extra work for the officer. Even the language has changed; we should call them inmates and not prisoners, while we are officers and not prison guards. As if that makes a difference!
***
Whether Bang Kwang has the ability to furnish a man with morals, if his parents and teachers have failed him, is open to debate. At the end of the day I believe that every human has his own value and I think I can honestly say that I have never looked down on any inmate. I don’t believe in kicking a man when he’s down, but on the other hand I’m not ready to believe that we can make them into better people. All we can do is send them back into society after they have completed their sentence and hope that they won’t commit the same crime again. They are lucky to receive a second opportunity. Yes we should think positively, but we don’t want to be accused of naivety either.
For my part in the prison system all I can do is control them and prevent them from escaping, and ensure they are equipped with the essentials for living here. The inmates want officers to understand how bad their position is, and we do understand, more so than anyone else on the planet. If I think a prisoner isn’t a truly bad person I would befriend him but not completely trust him. I have to be realistic. I might find he has a common interest in music. Prisoners are always surprised to see me playing the guitar or hear me talk about Elvis or the music scene in the 1970s. Equally if an inmate is upset because his wife hasn’t visited him in a long time I would fetch him pen and paper so that he could write to her. If I had any stamps in my wallet I would take his letter and post it for him on my way home. I wouldn’t contact the family directly which, as I have said before, is a violation of prison rules. If you want to try and improve someone you must win him over first.
***
I am now the head of the Foreign Affairs Section in the prison and have been for the last six years. There are around 10,000 foreign criminals in Thailand now, so you can appreciate the necessity of this section. One of my biggest responsibilities is to organise the visits for the foreign relatives who fly in to see their loved one. There are constantly mountains of complaints from these prisoners requiring my attention. There are literally thousands of letters that have to be inspected and filed away and they are in a variety of languages; English, Chinese, French and Hindi, and it can be quite difficult staying on top of it. It used to be a much slower process, in that each letter from a foreign convict had to be first sent to the Department of Corrections where it might lie about for months before it was sent back to us. Thankfully we don’t have to do that anymore. But still the letters do mount up. Some embassies, like Israel, kindly help us by confirming what the letters sent by their convicts are about.
Even if all the different nationalities spoke English badly, most Thai prison guards do not speak English. They tend to just shake their head to whatever they are being asked and wave the prisoner away. Therefore the foreign inmate does not feel that he is being looked after or that he had the same rights as the other prisoners. We have to be able to answer their questions. One guy got very frustrated in his efforts to obtain permission to marry his girlfriend in prison. In fact I have had to help obtain several marriage licenses by now, which is a pleasant matter to be involved in but is a real bitch, paperwork-wise. As always I take my role very seriously and work hard at it. Sometimes the complaints are a little silly like the few times I have been asked why their relatives haven’t written to them. I would love to simply reply with another question, like, ‘How the hell would I know?’ Instead I suggest that the prisoner tells his family to either send their letters through their embassy or register their letters so that the post office can track them—if these letters actually exist in the first place.
We even provide internet access for the prisoners which I am delighted with. If the prisoner prefers he can write a letter and we can scan it for him and email it. When the reply comes through we print it out and give it to him. This service is also available for Thai convicts but they largely prefer contact visits from their families to letters and emails. It is prison policy that each prisoner is entitled to a voice and communicate any complaints he may have.
I also have to deal with complaints about heath matters and insufficient treatments. Mostly the convicts send their complaints first to their embassies or NGO (Non Government Organisation) who then passes on the query or complaint to the Superintendent here, asking him to do something about it. We would then send a letter to the Director of the local hospital asking for a doctor to attend to the prisoner to see how serious the case is. Sometimes the prisoner specifies which hospital he wants to be treated in and the attending doctor must confirm that his illness cannot be treated successfully by the prison clinic. The prisoner must also be made to understand that he will have to pay for all his medical expenses. The prison does provide a limited amount of medicine free of charge but certainly something like a hospital stay has to be covered by the inmate himself.
The most years that a foreign prisoner spends with us is eight, before either being released or being transferred to his own country for further imprisonment. These are the hard core cases, like drug-selling. For lesser crimes it is between two and three years. We have different transfer agreements with 44 countries. There is a committee made up of officials from the Justice Ministry and the individual embassy that look after each transfer case. The embassy sends us a request regarding a prisoner and we send them back the details of the crime committed and the sentence handed down. We also send the photographs and fingerprints and everything is stamped by me to confirm that the prisoner is eligible for transfer. The embassy then has a meeting to discuss said prisoner. If everything is fine they request another pack of the same documents from us. Then the embassy confers with the Department of Corrections.
Obviously the most important part of my job is to make sure that the right prisoner is transferred. Fortunately I ha
ve never sent the wrong guy packing but what did happen was that a guy was almost on the plane before it was realised that he hadn’t actually finished his sentence. The police had filed another charge against him but a warrant hadn’t been issued yet. They had to ask a judge to specially set a hearing and issue a verdict on the same day in order to allow his transfer to continue.
I have to say that the American team probably impresses me the most with their efficiency and organisational skills. Two days before the transfer of an American national, and without any nagging on my part, the Ambassador, embassy officials, prosecutor and police will arrive at Bang Kwang to visit the prisoner to read him his rights so that he knows exactly what is going on. Each transfer is presided over by our Superintendent, and because I head the Foreign Affair Section I am always a witness. I don’t play any part in the escorting of the prisoner to the airport, except for one time when we transferred almost 100 Nigerians and extra officers were required to accompany them. An entire plane had been booked for them. Needless to say there was a lot of paperwork that day. Immigration officers had to come out to Bang Kwang to go through all the documents and passports before the men could leave the prison.
It is very hard work, but I also enjoy it as there is a big social aspect to this position. I have a drawer crammed with all the little gifts that I have received from foreign officials, from an ‘I Love New York’ key-ring to a badge of the Canadian flag. My favourite is probably the head of the Statue of Liberty on a chain, or maybe the FBI badge. The embassies are particularly generous around Christmas and New Year and I receive many cards and bottles of wine. I was never one to say no to a party and get invited to many functions now at all the embassies. The Superintendent and I are the only two ever invited from Bang Kwang and I go to every single one of them. Sometimes he allows me to use prison money to bring flowers or a fruit basket along.
The Last Executioner Page 17