Criminal Prisoners
By Win Naing Oo

Criminal prisoners can be divided into two different groups: those who have authority and those who are oppressed.

Among those who have authority, there are two types. The first type is made up of those prisoners who can pay money to prison authorities; the other (referred to as Bo in Burmese) are those who never hesitate kill and are regularly violent to other prisoners. In criminal society the ideology has arisen such that "you must have money or a strong resistance to persecution". (For example, if a prisoner wants to escape from severe harassment, he has to pay money to prison authorities. If he cannot pay, he has to bend his back and prepare for a beating by the warders.)

In the case of an ordinary prisoner beating or killing another prisoner, he will be cruelly beaten by prison authorities and put in solitary confinement. When he is discharged from solitary confinement, he is recognized as a senior prisoner and he becomes a Bo; then nobody dares to insult him. He is also likely to be appointed a senior prisoner. Prisoners from the administrative group do not need to obey the strict jail rules exactly, because they are a privileged class. They can extort money, food and clothes from other ordinary prisoners by oppression, brutality and injustice. In this way, the above mentioned ideology emerges in the prison.

One event happened in a military dog cell involving Tbar Thar, Khin Than and three other prisoners. One night, Mar Thar and Khin Than killed two other prisoners while asleep with bricks which had been cut around the toilet. There was no hatred involved, and no reason for the killing. The two suspects confessed to killing the two others, but alleged that they had nothing against them and that they killed them because they wanted to avoid hard labour by gaining status within the hierarchy of prisoners. After that, these two prisoners became very popular in Insein prison and were appointed to the prisoner administrative body. This is the usual tradition in Insein. It can therefore be seen that the prison system encourages prisoners to engage in inhuman acts. Thus, those prisoners who want to serve out their sentences peacefully live in constant fear of being killed.

The majority of prisoners are brutally oppressed by prison authorities and the senior Prisoners. They have lost their basic rights. If they try to ask the authorities to respect their basic rights, it is very dangerous for their personal security; they live in fear of their lives while being subjected to the worst possible injustices, minimal food supplies and regular and severe beatings. If they are sent to hard-labour prison camps, prisoners face an even worse situation than in prison. If they want to escape from these problems they have to commit the kind of crimes that Thai Thar and Khln Than did.

Thus, prison life is a cycle of oppression, brutal killing and prisoners conspiring to kill each other. Prison authorities actively encourage this kind of situation.

6.1 Opium and heroin abuse
One prisoner named Nga Shint brutally beat to death another named Mya Khaung, a Tan See (the head prisoner of a cell block), with a mattock. After this, Nga Shint died of a heroin overdose. There are many prisoners like him who have died of heroin overdose.

It is possible to get various kinds of drugs in the prison, for example, raw opium, heroin, concentrated opium oil, marijuana, and diazepam, etc. The main source of drugs in the prison is the prison authorities themselves, but there are also a few prisoners who smuggle a small amount of opium into the prison.

There are two main ways of smuggling drugs into the prison via the prison authorities:

• Direct method
• Indirect method

The direct method is to ask and bribe the prison authorities directly.

The indirect method is for a prisoner to ask a friend outside to send food for the prisoner directly to a prison official at his home. The officer will then pass this food to the prisoner inside the prison; nobody dares to check food brought into the prison by a prison official. Thus when the official gives the food to the prisoner concerned, the drug will be inside the food.

Some high-level prison officials, and even the director of prisons himself are involved, directly or indirectly, in smuggling of drugs into the prison. For example, when a prisoner who is either close to the director of prisons or has given money to him as a bribe receives visitors, he does so in the presence of the prison director. Nobody dares to check the food or other items given to a prisoner in front of the director. In such cases drugs can be easily concealed inside the items that the prisoner receives. The price for drugs inside the prison is always at least four times higher than the equivalent price outside the prison.

6.2 Homosexual abuse
All prisoners are tortured very severely when they first arrive in prison, when they are learning the prison regulations and the standard positions. At that time the popular criminals and senior prisoners arrive on the scene. If they find any young adults among the newcomers, they call these youths to stay with them. These youths are at first happy as they are not forced to learn the prison regulations and standard positions, and they thus avoid the more severe torture. These youths are even thankful to those senior prisoners, and they are well-fed and have a chance to stay in a good location.

The senior prisoners allow the youths to stay beside them. In the night they abuse them homosexually. First, they try to persuade them to comply. If this does not work, they threaten them with pointed iron sticks. The problem is that these youths are very afraid. If they threaten the prison authorities, the youths are intimidated by death very easy for the senior prisoners to kill other prisoners as they implements to do so.

Those youths who have been sexually abused often become very depressed, and lose their personal dignity. The higher prison authorities turn a blind eye to such cases. The victims also keep quiet because they are ashamed and afraid of being killed.

6.3 Lack of personal security
No prisoner has any degree of personal safety. There are many cases of murder between prisoners, as well as by prison authorities. It is very easy to kill someone. The reasons why it is so easy for a prisoner to kill another prisoner can be summarised as follows:

1. There is an abundance of lethal weapons;
2. There is a lack of proper punishment (not more than three years further imprisonment is given even for a murder case);
3. The prison encourages the activities of the senior prisoners and gangsters;
4. These senior prisoners are always protected from punishment by prison authorities;
5. Prisoners do not have any avenue of complaint or appeal;
6. The prison does not take any serious measures to protect the security of the prisoners.

The reasons mentioned above are general ones, but there are many other specific reasons for a lack of security in individual cases which are the result of personal disputes between prison officials.

Take as an example the killing of Be Ou in Thayet prison. This was the result of a dispute between the chief warden and senior jailor.

The senior jailer knew beforehand that Be Ou would be killed soon, but did not take any action, saying that it was just a rumour. If there is a killing case, it will effect the chief warden. This prison officer will have a problem with the higher authorities. The killing of Be Ou happened at the end of 1993. Be Ou was beheaded and his head was dropped into a big pot of vegetable soup. (Also see 9.4)