A US-style drug war brings a terrible cost: Thai prisons packed full of women

But drug policy liberalizers are convinced that in coming years, Thailand’s US-backed drug war will recede and a more merciful approach will take its place.

Female inmates at a prison in Chonburi, Thailand, in 2018. Credit: Lauren DeCicca/PRI

Editor’s note: This story is a part of a series called “Unequal Justice” from PRI’s (Public Radio International) Across Women’s Lives project and GlobalPost Investigations. Click the audio player, below, to hear the accompanying radio story that aired April 9, 2018, on The World.

In Thai prison slang, it’s called “riding the chopper.”

Picture three strangers mashed together — as close as passengers squeezed onto the back of a Harley. Now, imagine you’re the person sandwiched in the middle.

There’s no motorcycle, however, and you’re not even upright. Riding the chopper refers to a miserable, jailhouse sleeping position. It entails a mass of people lying on their sides, on the ground, in a crowded, cement-walled cell.

To maximize space, your legs are bent at the knee. Kind of like riding a chopper.

There are many more than three people in the cell — more like 300 — and you’re all squished together in rows. The floor is lined with bodies from wall to wall. You are expected to somehow doze off in this humid scrum of people.

At your back, you feel the warmth of a stranger’s body pressing against your own. Their hot breath tickles the hairs on your neck. Your own breathing and nighttime wriggling torment the person in front of you, robbing them of sleep.

The guards, keen to monitor the throng, leave the lights on all night. Fluorescent bulbs crackle and hum overhead. But that buzzing is partially drowned out by snorers and grunters, like twin-cam engines — and adding a sonic dimension to the chopper metaphor.

This is a fairly typical night in a women’s prison in Thailand. When a country locks up women at one of the highest rates on Earth, this is the outcome: prison cells packed so tight that inmates are practically spooning. Many of its prisons are at triple or even quadruple capacity.

Interviews with former inmates at multiple women’s prisons in Thailand offer a bleak portrait of this incarceration crisis — and suggest the prison system is nearing a breaking point.

Take it from Ging, a 40-year-old housekeeper who got four years for meth possession: “It’s not like those prison movies where everyone is sharpening toothbrushes and stabbing people. It’s not even violent in there. It’s just really crowded. At sleeping time, everyone is lying so close — as close as the teeth of a fish. Strangers’ sweat actually gets on your skin.”

Or Yok, 47, and unemployed, who recently did about a year in prison, also over drug charges: “The worst part are the smells. When you lie down, someone’s feet are in your face. You’re smelling toenails as you try to fall asleep.”

Or Nut, a 31-year-old shoe vendor, who did a two-year bid for possessing a couple grams of crystal meth: “You have to sleep on your side. It’s too crowded to sleep on your back. There’s no window, and it’s always sweltering. Only inmates with clout get to sleep under the ceiling fan … it’s a nightmare.”

The root cause of this incarceration overload is not mysterious.

As in America, Thailand aggressively rounds up nonviolent drug offenders and warehouses them in cages. More than 80 percent of Thailand’s female inmates are locked up on narcotics charges. Overwhelmingly, they’re caught with methamphetamine, which accounts for 9 in 10 drug arrests in Thailand.

Southeast Asia’s drug of choice is speed, namely little, pink meth pills called ya ba, which is Thai for “crazy pills.” These tablets look like baby aspirin, smell like vanilla cake frosting and — when freebased or swallowed — offer a jittery, eight-hour high.

Listen to Yok describe the sensation of taking ya ba:

Related: Meth’s new frontier: The marshlands of Bangladesh

“It’s not like those prison movies where everyone is sharpening toothbrushes and stabbing people. It’s not even violent in there. It’s just really crowded. At sleeping time, everyone is lying so close — as close as the teeth of a fish. Strangers’ sweat actually gets on your skin.” — Ging, 40, housekeeper who got four years for meth possession

Like crack cocaine in the US, meth pills are cheap — $5 to $10 per hit — and favored by the poor. They’re also demonized to the point of absurdity. In news reports and government-funded public service announcements, meth users have been depicted as hysterical, knife-wielding gremlins.

Related: Meth is now cheaper than a meal at Burger King in much of Asia

This instills into the popular imagination a notion that smoking meth is a moral failure: a strike not only against one’s own body but against society itself — and thus deserving of harsh punishment.

It’s no accident that Thailand’s strategies toward drugs and incarceration are so broken. They are, to a great degree, inspired by the nation that imprisons more of its citizens than any other: the United States of America.

Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the US has tried to build up Thailand as a critical node in the American empire.

Thailand has taken on American-style policies, American factories, American weapons and an appetite for American pop culture. It has also been recruited as a major player in Washington’s global war on drugs — a trillion-dollar endeavor to spread hard-line, lock ’em up tactics from Latin America to Asia.

America has armed, trained and advised Thailand’s anti-narcotics units over the course of nine presidential administrations. But modeling this drug war strategy for Thailand has ushered in terrible consequences — such as cells so crowded that inmates can’t even stretch their legs at night.

Does America’s penal system really offer the best blueprint for Thailand — or any other nation? Consider this passage from a 2012 article in The New Yorker titled “The Caging of America”: “Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America — more than six million — than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”

As America’s junior partner in Asia, Thailand has emulated its patron. It locks up more citizens than any other country in Southeast Asia. That’s 300,000-plus inmates. They comprise the sixth-highest volume of prisoners on Earth. This is astonishing for a midsize country with a population on par with France.

But the superlative that most deeply vexes the consciences of Thai officials is the chart-topping rate at which police lock up women.

It’s not that Thai cops have some special agenda to target women. They cast a wide net for drug offenders: pulling random passengers from cars, searching motorbikes without probable cause, forcing passersby to pee in cups and — if they test positive for meth — tossing them in jail. It just so happens that more than 1 in 10 of those snared by this never-ending dragnet are female.

Yet, it is this image of women — mothers, sisters, daughters, all sleeping on top of one another — that now gnaws at those in power. Compared to men, the plight of incarcerated women seems to carry an added emotional resonance.

There is now a shuddering realization coursing through elite ranks of Thai police, judges and policymakers. Many have come to regard their drugs-and-prisons policy as a sickness — and they believe its treatment of women is the ugliest symptom.

This moral crisis may very well prove to be a tipping point, one that forces an unraveling of the US-style drug war in Thailand.