BANGKOK, THAILAND
On the morning of my first full day in Bangkok I came out of the shower and saw this pasted on the wall, printed in Times New Roman on a waterlogged piece of letter paper.
Antony Addler is a Canadian-Ghanaian serving a life sentence in Bang Kwang prison. He’s a really sweet guy who got caught up in something way over his head. Antony’s been behind bars for sixteen years and has no family to come visit him, so it would really make his day if you dropped by to say hello or brought him some groceries.
His visiting days are Tuesday and Thursday and you don’t need any prior notice. To get to Bang Kwang, take the river taxi all the way to Nonthaburi, exit the station and…
Oh, what the hell. I got on the Chao Phraya river taxi and took it north as far as it would go, out of Bangkok proper and into the suburbs. The area around the Nonthaburi station looks exactly like the outskirts of any Asian city, squat and full of street food, but as soon as you round a corner it turns into a lifeless stretch of four-lane road lined by guard towers.
But wait, a few words about Bang Kwang.
There are probably worse prisons in the world, but Bang Kwang Central is one of the most notorious. The Thai government locks up a lot of foreigners, and they go home with stories. It’s almost always drug trafficking – most of Southeast Asia is absurdly harsh about drugs being taken across borders (though less so about actual usage, it seems) and while you’re unlikely to be set up or taken in for no reason at all once you’ve been caught with a kilo of heroin the police can make up anything they want. No foreigners have been executed in Thailand in over a hundred years (according to the internet, anyway) but it’s pretty common to receive a death sentence and have it commuted to life.
It sounds totally absurd that anyone would ever even think about smuggling drugs over here, but Thailand is the sort of place that makes the less level-headed feel invincible. There’s another post to be written there.
Since foreign prisoners usually do get released, or at least sent to their own country’s prison system (Americans usually get sent home, which is, um, a big improvement), there’s been a lot written on Bang Kwang. The best I’ve read is Warren Fellows’ The Damage Done, the story of his twelve years for heroin. At one point he’s thrown in solitary with there’s no light and nothing to eat but rice, so only way to survive is to reach down beneath the floorboards and scarf cockroaches for protein.
So, what did I do? I walked down that desolate road and took a few pictures, though I put the camera away pretty quickly because I thought it might not be the best idea to tote around a huge SLR outside a maximum security prison. I asked a guard at the gate and found the visitor’s window, where a surly man in an ill-fitting uniform and your grandpa’s glasses wrote something on a piece of paper.
“ONLY TUESDAY TURSDAY”
“It is Thursday.” I said.
“No. Today Friday. You go.” I checked my phone. It was indeed Friday. Somehow, in the fifteen timezones and six borders I’ve crossed in the past month, I’d lost an entire day. I still don’t know where it went.
Hell if I was sticking around in Bangkok another five days. Sorry, Antony.