| Summary: | The brutality of the Thai prison system is infamous. Now, after two years of negotiations, the BBC has been granted unprecedented access to film inside its facilities. Thailand has long been a major through-route for drugs. Now Thailand is paying the price: new, incredibly cheap amphetamine pills are flooding the local market. Two thousand drug traffickers were shot on Thailand's streets last year; even so, the prison population has trebled. The jails can't cope with the influx. The guards are under-funded, undertrained, and dangerously out-numbered. In some of the more dangerous cell blocks, they live in fear - their only weapon a billy-club. Most of the time, the prisoners police themselves. A surreal culture of freedom is combined with anarchy at the level of governance. Backpackers make "banana" visits to ogle the foreign inmates - "banana", because the visits make the inmates feel like monkeys in a cage. Hundreds of prisoners may be housed in a single dorm. Lockdown is at 3.30pm, after which the prisoners are in their cells for 15 hours. One in ten prisoners is suicidal; a thousand have already lost their minds. Comedy re-runs are broadcast on the Jail TV Station - the governor says they calm the prisoners down. The Thai prison service is determined to show that it's cracking down on crime and cleaning up its prisons. But is it really possible for them to do both at the same time?
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