Corrections Dept reveals prisoners' tricks

The Justice Ministry launched Monday a project at Bangkok's Miracle Hotel to train officials to stamp out drug trafficking and other crimes.

The scheme is aimed to help corrections officials obtain narcotics information from inmates so that related agencies can act on the information to arrest drug dealers.

Wanchai Roujanavong said department officials target inmates convicted of drug offences and if they cooperate, they are given "goodbehaviour" status which offers them a chance of a royal pardon or a reduced jail term, he said.

The policy has led to some 1,000 items of information being obtained in two years but much of it was of no practical use and only 215 items could be acted on, he added.

He maintained that his department had been the provider of useful information that had led to the arrest of major drug dealers.

Wanchai said that a complicated system was in place to ensure none know who gave which piece of information to prison officials in order to protect informant inmates' identity for fear of avenges such as sending someone in to kill the inmates.

Regarding the drug trafficking among inmates' networks, he admitted that it was hard to prevent because nearly 80,000 were drug offenders thus prisons had many major drug dealers.

Some also continued their trades by ordering drugs via their lawyers who had legal rights to visit them in private, he said.

Despite officials' random search of prison cells on every other day, the drug trades continued and inmates used many tricks to smuggle in drugs and mobile phones, he said.

Officials often found and seized SIM cards from toilet, underneath tiles and in some inmates' rectums and sometimes found a bag of mobile phones and drugs inside a toilet bowl, where inmates did not think officials would dare to search it, he said.

Wanchai revealed that the department was studying a new technology to scramble telephone signals around the prisons. He said that, while waiting to get such technology in place, the prisons would in the mean time use telephone signal taping devices and string operations.