Death Row Thailand - empty!

Male prisoners condemned to death are detained in Bang Kwang prison, in segregated areas of Buildings 5 and 7, which for want of another name is often referred to as Death Row, even if the areas do not have a topological similarity or penitentiary identity with those in the US,home of death rows. Women prisoners condemned to death are held in the Women's Central Prison, Ladphrao, and are not segregated at all from other women prisoners. However, relatives know exactly where they are and when they may be visited. Until Bangkok was flooded. First, it was reported that 600 prisoners had been moved from the flooded area of Bang Kwang in 17 buses, to be distributed in prisons elsewhere in the country. Now, we are told that Bang Kwang, this massive old high security prison, has been emptied of all prisoners, and its prisoners are being held in unknown locations. This is no small matter, Bang Kwang is already an overcrowded prison, with 4,191 prisoners, 676 of them condemned to death and permanently shackled. Where are they? The website of the Corrections Department has provided a phone number and an email address to make inquiries during the flood emergency. Emails remain unanswered and the telephone rings without response. These 676 people are already vulnerable and under severe stress. They desperately need the support of relatives, lawyers, and others who relate to them. The feeling of being out of sight in unknown locations must be especially traumatic. One could quote all kinds of rules of prison practice requiring relatives to be notified of the place of imprisonment, but this crisis is beyond rules. There is a grave injustice in moving prisoners en mass to unknown locations and letting the days pass with no news release of what is happening to them.
In fact, the treatment of prisoners is not very different from the treatment of ordinary citizens throughout the country. God-like decisions are made on which areas will be flooded, which dams will release water, which water gates will open or close, when and where mysteriously planned walls of sandbags will rise and fall, without explanation to those who suffer the consequences. But, at least, the public fight back, ask questions, act against the flood barriers in their utter frustration.
Prisoners are treated as non-persons with no rights, chained, and restrained against every norm of human dignity.
Women prisoners live in even more inhumane conditions.
Where are they? Thai prisons are already among the most crowded in the world; undoubtedly prisoners are being forced into even more intolerable conditions. Are they receiving food and water? One does not dare to ask whether they receive adequate food and water, as these are hardly available to the ordinary citizen in the flooded areas.
What is happening? Let the prisoners telephone their relatives, friends, and supporters. Or at least make a news release on the issue.

Conference on Prison Conditions in Thailand

As the possibility arises that Thailand will replace the death penalty with life imprisonment, we turn our attention to conditions of long term imprisonment. On 31st May UCL organised an afternoon conference on prison conditions in Thailand. What follows is a BBC report on the conference.
Prisoners in Thailand kept 'shackled and cramped'
By Vaudine England BBC News, Bangkok
An independent rights group in Thailand, the Union for Civil Liberties, has opened a campaign to improve conditions in Thailand's jails. It has issued a report on prisons which highlights overcrowding, the use of shackles and the lack of medical care. The group has campaigned against the death penalty and praises the government's promise to commute death sentences to life imprisonment.
That makes improving prison conditions even more important, it says.
Thailand's prisons are built to hold about 100,000 people - but according to the government's own figures, they are holding more than twice that number.
As a result, the conditions, says the Union for Civil Liberties, are horrendous.
People have to sleep in tight rows on hard floors. In these sleeping cells, each prisoner has an average of one square metre - as opposed to the four to six square metres described as the minimum by the Council of Europe.
Danthong Breen, chairman of the union, says the overcrowding is shocking.
"In the women's prison it's particularly bad. You have 200 women in a single cell," he told the BBC. "If one of them has to get up at night to go to the toilet, they all shift a bit and when she comes back the space is gone and she has to stand up all night.
"The level of crowding is inhuman and inhumane."
The other horror, he says, is the widespread use of shackles.
These are welded on to the ankles of long-term prisoners and are not removed, even during illness, until the sentence is served.
The United Nations has criticised the practice. The Thai foreign ministry has promised to end it. The constitutional court ruled the practice was wrong.
But the reality of the over-crowding and a ratio of warders to prisoners of about one to 45, makes the practice hard to stamp out.
Prisoners with money are able to improve every aspect of their life behind bars, Mr Breen says. But a lack of government money is holding back investment in new facilities and extra staff.
The civil liberties group suggests Thailand could look more at using non-custodial sentences. It estimates at least half of those jailed are being held for drugs offences.
And it hopes that whatever government emerges from elections next month, the promise to no longer impose the death penalty is kept.