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first three months of every sentence. Condemned prisoners, however, wear the leg-irons permanently, they are actually welded on. The authorities do not provide food, and as prisoners have to purchase their own supplies from the prison canteen, money or supplies brought in by visitors are vital to survival. Each prisoner has an account with the canteen and this is managed with a chit system. If a prisoner has no money, he will perform tasks for a prisoner who has money and will earn enough for food and cigarettes that way. Even though many of the inmates are there for drug offences, drugs are still dealt in prison to make money, often smuggled in inside food parcels. Cooking facilities are provided and the authorities provide the gas with which to cook.
    Living quarters are barbaric, to say the least. Bangkwang is severely overcrowded following a government clampdown on the drug trade, and there are 24 men to a room, all crammed in and having to sleep on the floor. One inmate reports that if you get up in the night to visit the toilet, you are liable to lose your sleeping space and have to spend the night awake. The guards are unlikely to help, as they are hugely outnumbered by the prisoners. The ratio is, in fact, one guard to every 50 prisoners. To even things out a little, well-behaved prisoners are selected to become ‘Blueshirts’. These men are given uniforms and clubs, and can discipline prisoners who step out of line. If even that does not prove to be a deterrent, there is always ‘The Jungle’, the prisoners’ name for solitary confinement. Prisoners can spend months here, with even less facilities than in the rest of the prison − a hole in the ground for waste and no sink.
    Roll-calls are carried out twice a day to ensure that no one has escaped, but there is little opportunity for that, given that lock-down occurs at 3.30pm and prisoners spend 15 hours a day locked up.
    The prison hospital does not even provide any relief. The Bangkok Hilton is riddled with serious disease − HIV, full-blown AIDS and tuberculosis − but there is little help for the victims who lie shackled to their beds. Hospitals in Thailand rely on charity and the Thai people, believing that Bangkwang prisoners deserve everything they get, refuse to make the necessary donations. Consequently, medicines and treatment are totally inadequate.
    The worst thing to be in Bangkwang, of course, is a condemned man. A couple of years ago, there were more than 800. It is bad enough to be waiting to die, but at Bangkwang you never know when, as the authorities do not tell prisoners when their sentences are going to be carried out. The most warning they get is two hours. At least nowadays it is carried out by lethal injection. Until the 1930s, condemned prisoners were beheaded. If the prisoner happened to be of royal lineage, however, the bad news was that he was beaten to death with a lump of wood. The good news was that the wood had to be sweet-smelling.
    In 1932, they switched to machine-gunning the prisoner to death. The condemned man, or woman would be tied to a post, facing away from the machine-gunner, so that he, or she, would not know the identity of his killer and return to haunt him when dead. He would then be shot in the heart from behind. The execution chamber, to this day, bears splatters of dried blood on its walls from those decades of bloody execution. The year 2003, saw a change to lethal injection but only because the machine-gunning was proving too unreliable and the prisoner often had to be finished off with another bullet.
    There are only a few ways to leave Bangkwang Central Prison. You leave when you have served your term of imprisonment, having survived the privations on offer. Or, if you behave, you might be released on parole after serving two-thirds of your sentence. Occasionally the king celebrates an event or anniversary by providing royal pardons to a number of prisoners. Or, you may leave in a wooden box through the gate