Nobody suggests that the Bangkok immigration detention center is a joy ride for convicted Brits like Ellis Matthews. A 2024 report by the International Federation for Human Rights pinpointed overcrowding, abuse, substandard food, squalid cells and poor hygiene supplies especially for women. Legal provisions prohibiting the detention of the children of the guilty are largely absent. There are few or no recreational activities as this is a prison where you are just waiting, sometimes indefinitely, for somebody to pay your airfare back to the country of your passport.
Figures collected by Data Blog and Statista show that you are more likely to be arrested in Thailand than any other country in the region. But that’s because Thailand has the lion’s share of the international tourist market. There are around 200 Brits annually jailed in Thailand, compared with the next south east Asian destination in line, the Philippines, with 26 at the last count. Cambodia has just a handful of around half a dozen. The British foreign office in its former annual report British Behaviour Abroad, now discontinued, said alarmingly that three quarters of arrested Brits believed that the local embassy could get them freed.
The reality is that prisons throughout south east Asia (and much of the world) are hell holes. In the notorious Manila city penitentiary in the Philippines, most inmates have neither a mattress nor a bed and your pillow will be your neighbor’s shoulder. Constant insomnia in temperatures over 100 degrees was the main memory of David Walters who spent two years there during the covid pandemic. Jails for women are separate but still substandard. On the other hand, the supreme court of the Philippines has urged judges to imprison women only for the most serious offences.
As regards Cambodia, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has criticized Prey Sar prison in Phnom Penh for insufficient sleeping spaces, awful food and poor access to clean water, sanitation and fresh air. Laos is unique in the region for having a foreigner-only jail in the capital Vientiane. In 2008 Briton Samantha Orobator was arrested with 680 grams of heroin, became pregnant whilst in Phnonthong prison and was given a life sentence for drugs smuggling. After unusual British governmental pressure about awful conditions in a unique case, she was released back to the UK a year later. The UK high court later ruled that she had not suffered a “flagrant denial of justice”.
Books about prison life in Thailand abound and include “Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison” by Warren Fellows and “Welcome to Hell: One Man’s Flight for Life Inside The Bangkok Hilton” by Irishman Colin Martin. Hopefully, Ms Matthews and her four year old son will soon be at Bangkok airport. She has apparently already been approached by ghost writers to tell all. It would be the first detailed account on infernal matters written or inspired by a British woman incarcerated abroad.
