I am a Prisoner in the Bangkok Hilton

Current (At time of Posting) Issue COURRIER INTERNATIONAL 6-8, rue Jean-Antoine de Baif 75212 Paris cedex 13 tel:  (33) 1-46-46-16-24 Fax :  (33) 1-46-46-16-02 /01 THAïLANDE • Viol à tous les étages Condamné à la perpétuité pour possession d’héroïne, Gary Jones purge sa peine à Bang Kwang, que les détenus surnomment avec dérision “Bangkok Hilton”. Le Britannique décrit la violence qui y règne. 03.12.2009 |  Gary Graeme Jones This Post is presented both as an experiment and as a very belated thank you to Courrier International  (a Paris-based French weekly newspaper which translates and publishes excerpts of articles from over 900 international newspapers). It also gives me a chance to have a "rant" about the appalling lack of bi-lingual ability on the part of the English! Welsh, Cornish and Scots are daily exposed to variants of Gaellic, but are forced to conduct their affairs in English. Admittedly English is the most widely spoken o...

I caution all readers of this blog to acquaint themselves with the alert in the opening paragraphs of the diary entry entitled 28/11/11 - 7/7/12. Thomas Jefferson. First a bit of a "rant" telling it how it  is. Perhaps others with blogs have expressed similar views, but the Internet being the vast repository that it is in the 8 weeks that I've been at liberty, ever since HMPPS dumped me on the streets of Southwark with just £46 to my name, destitute, I've not stumbled across those sites yet. Perhaps those of you that are aware of them, can pass me the URL(s)? Forty years ago, I left these lean and mordant shores as I thought I could see the direction that the country was being railroaded towards. Basically, I "sensed" that the country was heading towards a grey, featureless society where all decisions were decided by (un)civil servants, unelected and of themselves so lacking in charisma that they would be unelectable. Automatons ruling upon...

One of the better descriptions that I've seen regarding "Execution Day" comes from Kay Danes' website FPPS. It was posted anonymously - which, in the case of her site is probably a bloody good idea. If the author, whom I suspect to be a Westerner given the level of English used, would care to identify himself to this blog, then I will willingly give him credit for a succinct piece of prose. “Most times we did not know when they were coming. Sometimes they would lock us down early but would use an excuse like important visitors were coming into the building. They would tell us that we had nothing to fear and that we should remain calm. They would always come at 4:30 p.m. and the sound of the steel bars and chains being unlocked and removed from the door would strike fear and terror into the hearts of every man on the Row. The trouble was that those men who had exhausted all possible avenues of reprieve and were on the ‘Blacklist’ were spread equal...

I learnt that this entry was marked as a "draft"; i.e. Pending publishing. In all likelihood this may well have been my doing and not that of Wanda and Jake or my Editor emeritus, JCS of Chiang Mai. Being unused to this level of technology I'm bound to drop a few clangers. Whatever the cause, it has now available for scrutiny. The problem being is that it was likely entered at some time around 2012, and we are now in the latter part of 2017. I hope this doesn't cause too much confusion if you are viewing the blog in chronological sequence. At some stage during their incarceration all Britons will consider whether to repatriate from Thailand back to the UK. After cursory research the majority reject the facility. Those that feel that possibly they have an advantage by doing so formalise their intentions by requesting that Mrs Dufall of the Embassy initiates the request by contacting the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) – a division of the UK Mini...

There are only so many synonyms for the word "Prison", so when inspiration strikes, seize it with both hands. Such a word is Gulag, which is Russian. But, before I could safely season my scripts with it, first I had to check it out in a dictionary. Being the transliteration (a word written with a foreign alphabet that uses the regular ABC of English to translate), and a foreign word to boot, my Webster's app couldn't find it. Unlike the poor sods still banged up, I had an alternative, Wikipedia. This was that entry: Gulag (Russian: ГУЛАГ, tr. GULAG; IPA: [ɡʊˈlak]; acronym of Главное управление лагерей, Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerej, "Main Camps' Administration" or "Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps") was the government agency created under Lenin which reached its peak as Soviet forced-labor camp system during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s up until the 1950s. The term is also commonly used to refer...

I caution all readers of this blog to acquaint themselves with the alert in the opening paragraphs of the diary entry entitled 28/11/11 - 7/7/12. Continuing til 6/7/12 HMP Whitemoor, Sentence remaining to serve: 29+ years. Years incarcerated to date - 9 After a decidedly one sided meeting with La Jabba (my OS, Sonja Smith) during a panel headed by IT to determine my suitability to be moved  to a Cat B prison rather than being held in a maximum security penitentiary, La Jabba rails to a point approaching inchoherence complete with spittle spraying. Fortunately I am out of range of the misted drool. What I do gather is that it has taken extreme exception to 2 issues: attempts to engage an independent OASYs assessor, Denise Marshall, via my then solicitor,  Karen Rogers (nee Collis) of Tuckers, and that I've instructed Tuckers to seek a Judicial Review challenging that I'm being inappropriately being classified as a moderately high medium risk prisoner. Judici...