In his first two weeks in the Pingtung Detention Center, Dane Harris wrote thousands of words about the brief period of liberty he enjoyed between the act of arson for which he is awaiting trial, and his arrest. He then lost all urge to put his thoughts into words.
“I entered a weird fugue state. It’s like you can’t think your way out of the place,” he says.
Comparing the center to the psychiatric institution where he spent some time, he says: “Prison was worse than the crazy house in Florida. There, at least there was enough mental stimulation to inspire the part of me that wanted to express myself.”
Photo: Taipei Times
His depression wasn’t due to medical neglect, he stresses. On his third day in the detention center, he was taken to see a psychiatrist. He saw the dentist three times.
“I enjoyed better health care [in the detention center] than many middle-class Americans,” he says. Some inmates, he is sure, sought medical attention simply to get out of the cells for a bit.
CRAMPED QUARTERS
Harris says he is hugely grateful to both the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), which helped him in various ways, including arranging for him to get two pairs of reading glasses, and the visitors who brought reading material.
“If it weren’t for books, I could have gone mad. I couldn’t move in that cell. Overcrowding and lack of exercise… if you could solve those two issues, it would be a far less nightmarish place. If you had two people in a cell, you could exercise without disturbing others,” says Harris, who estimates the room he shared with three cellmates was not much more than 8 square meters.
According to Ministry of Justice Agency of Corrections (MJAC) data posted online, the average number of inmates over the past five years (64,300) is 13.05 percent higher than the approved capacity of its 51 correctional facilities (56,877).
After planned alterations are completed, the overcrowding rate is expected to fall to 0.28 percent. The corrections agency’s “one person, one-bed” policy had increased the proportion of inmates assigned their own bed to 75.23 percent by November.
Steven Chen (陳俞亨), an executive officer in the corrections agency, doesn’t expect much change in the current average cell-space of 2.17 square meters per prisoner.
“Penal populism leads our governments to use incarceration as a preferred method of punishment,” he says, citing recent amendments to the Narcotics Hazard Prevention Act as an example.
Now, those caught with more than 5g of certain drugs — the previous threshold was 20g — will face penalties.
“We expect more prisoners will come to our facilities due to this revision,” he says. “Finding places where we can build or expand is so difficult. Taiwan is not a big country. Even if there’s a suitable site, we usually face protests from those living nearby.”
According to the Web site of the International Justice Resource Center (ijrcenter.org), the European Court of Human Rights has held that “personal space less than 3 square meters in detention raises a strong presumption of a violation of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment) of the European Convention on Human Rights that may be overcome by other factors, including… the inmate’s freedom to engage in activities outside the cell.”
Lack of space was one of the reasons why, in 2016, Scottish courts rejected Taiwan’s extradition request for Zain Dean, a UK businessman convicted of killing a Taipei man in a hit-and-run collision.
LIMITED SNACKS
Throughout the two-and-a-half months Harris was held in the detention center, the facility’s commissary was a vital source of snacks and instant coffee for the 50-year-old American. Because he found prison meals generous yet unbearably bland, he also bought condiments. But finding out what items were available took him some time.
Harris couldn’t visit the jail’s shop in person. Like many inmates, a typical week saw him confined to his cell for 167 of the 168 hours.
“There was a list, but it was in Chinese. In a notebook, I started writing down the code numbers of things I might want,” he recalls.
After he mentioned to a visitor from the AIT that he couldn’t read the commissary order form, they provided him with translations of all 200-plus items.
Orders were placed on Tuesdays or Thursdays and delivered to the cell a week later.
“We couldn’t spend more than NT$300 each time, so I couldn’t get enough cookies and caffeine to keep me going until the next shopping day. It was maddening to have money in the commissary — which I did, thanks to my mother and father — and to be unable to spend it,” Harris says.
If a prisoner ordered a single item priced over NT$300, such as a portable TV, he couldn’t order anything else that session. Harris saw how some people got around the limit: “Visitors can spend as much as they like on commissary. There was a ‘rich’ older guy in my cell, and each time his wife came, he got a bunch of stuff. Meanwhile, I was just barely holding my own, and the other two guys in the room were pretty much mooching off the rich guy.”
Visitors could also bring cooked food from outside, so long as it was unseasoned. Each inmate was generally limited to spending 30 minutes with one pair of visitors per day.
The rationale for the NT$300 rule — which could be seen as discriminating against foreign nationals and others who seldom receive visitors — is that cells would become even more cramped if prisoners could buy as much as they liked. Inmates with special needs can request permission to make additional purchases, but Harris says that he didn’t know this was possible.
HYGIENIC CELLS
Harris was surprised to learn that his cellmates could buy cigarettes, but not lighters or matches. They used batteries to produce sparks to ignite toilet tissue, with which they could light up.
Apart from the smoke, everyone and everything inside the cell was very clean.
“We were expected to wash our own clothes every day. The tableware had to be washed, rinsed and dried. The floor was spotless. Inmates competed to do these chores, no doubt due to the extreme boredom,” says Harris.
Cells were inspected daily for hygiene, and at random for contraband.
In the corner, there was a tap for bathing and a toilet with a defective cistern. Inmates — who were issued with clothing and toiletries on arrival — had no privacy when showering, urinating or defecating.
A box fan in the window sucked stale air out of the cell, and a camera surveiled its occupants. Harris believes part of the cell beneath his bed could have been a blind spot. He doesn’t know what went on there, “because it was also in my blind spot when I was on my bunk,” but he surmises that’s where some inmates would engage in sexual contact, or surreptitiously spit out medication they should have taken.
There was no clock, and inmates weren’t allowed to wear watches. Harris sometimes noticed the time on his affluent cellmate’s TV set, but observes that, “time becomes elastic in a place like that… days I could sleep or doze through were good days.”
DEAFENING SILENCE
Those with TVs or radios (battery-powered, there being no power outlets in the cell) listened through earphones. Throughout the institution, “the silence was deafening, even during the day, when everyone was expected to be awake and perhaps doing things. If you raised your voice to any degree, your cellmates would shush you in case the noise drew the guards’ attention,” says Harris, who majored in English literature at the University of Miami. “The guards treated you like a human being. They’re not angry at you. You rarely heard a guard yelling… and you could hear everything on that cell block.”
Like many Western countries, the MJAC, “emphasizes security levels in prisons, but I don’t think that identifying inmates’ risk levels should be the priority,” says Edward Y.L. Lai (賴擁連), a professor in the Department of Crime Prevention and Corrections, Central Police University. “The priority should be on helping inmates successfully reenter society. Many ex-prisoners reoffend, the admission ratio of newcomers to recidivists being 2:8. Barriers to reentering society include social support, jobs, places to live and medical services — but little effort is devoted to these.”
Many Taiwanese hold “old-fashioned ideas,” so the function of prisons continues to be deterrence, retribution and containment, Lai says.
“In recent years, more and more people started to believe that prisons’ function covers education, reform and rehabilitation, but whenever a rape or homicide by an ex-inmate is reported, many people doubt the effectiveness of rehabilitation. I think the shift to correction and rehabilitation will take time.”
“Prison is a perfect hell for someone who needs distracting from what’s going on in his mind. There isn’t the constant threat of physical violence which I believe you have in American jails, but I wasn’t getting better. I sat in that room, thinking of ways in which it’d be possible to kill myself,” says Harris.
The MJAC reports that five inmates killed themselves in 2018, and another five between the start of last year and the week before Christmas.
“I have a lot at stake,” says Harris, who may be sentenced to up to 10 years’ imprisonment.
“Jail needs to be a place where people don’t want to die.”
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