Thai Prison Blogs by Frank Lombard

At the Camp Addison Calvary Base in Saraburi they call the new arrivals students, but they are all amphetamine (ya ba) addicts. They are now under army tutelage and the army’s job is to clean them up in four months. Ya ba is the most popular drug in the country and a poison that...

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A drug user is classified as an addict, and before 2002 a drug addict was a criminal. To relieve prison overcrowding, parliament passed the Drug Addict Rehabilitation Act of 2002, which decriminalised addiction. Indeed, the prison population dropped from an all-time high of 246,000 in 2002 to 210,000 in 2003 and 166,000 in 2004....

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Chatchai Suthiklom, formerly of the Office of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB), was appointed director-general of the Department of Corrections on Sept 30 last year, replacing long-time veteran Natthee Jitsawang, who was moved to an inactive position in the Justice Ministry. Since then, Mr Chatchai has done little in the way of public relations....

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The truth about life behind bars from a recently released former drug-addict Gor is a young Thai man recently released from a provincial prison after serving a three-year term. He was an amphetamine (ya ba) addict but was found with enough pills to classify him as a distributer. Gor might have had a lighter...

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With thousands of lost souls, the Thai prison system provides an attractive converting ground for Christian missionaries from a wide variety of denominations ‘Teach ye all nations and baptize them,” Matthew 28, 18. Those are the Biblical words that have, for centuries, sent Christian missionaries out to all corners of the world to bring...

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The Central Women’s Correctional Institution is on the road to Bangkok’s Don Mueang Airport and sits beside a larger facility housing men. The vast complex is nicknamed Klong Prem. The women’s prison is rectangular in shape, some 300 metres by one kilometre and presently houses about 4,400. In the past the figure was quite...

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Go directly to jail, do not pass lawyers and do not collect advice It is called Hong Chi, or the Pointing Room in English. Readers may have never heard of it. It is not in law textbooks, nor does it appear in the judges’ qualifying exam. But it does exist at every criminal court...

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Prison health is public health, so goes the truism, since the released will soon be out spreading their germs among the general populace. Prisons are breeding grounds for disease, as are all locations where people congregate – aeroplanes, submarines, hotels and particularly hospitals. Thai prisons are particularly infectious, however.You have 100 or so people...

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