A Mongolian prisoner screams out from what can only be called a coffin.
His words only bounce off the wooden walls where he is confined.
To some extent, this man that broke the law, is buried alive.
In the box which serves for a cell there is at least air to breathe, and perhaps once
a day he’ll receive a morsel of food and enough water to keep him alive.
It’s winter and the man is shivering so bad his teeth constantly chatter, his only
protection being a sheepskin that the prison has so kindly given him.
As one writer who’d witnessed this scene put it, he is “suffering the tortures of
the damned.”
Welcome to the hell of a Mongolian coffin prison, a place where Middle Ages’ brutality
persisted in modern times.
Before we upset the Mongolian government or mislead our dear viewers, we should explain
to you that the scene we just described we took from a book called, “Across Mongolian
Plains” and it was written by an American explorer named Roy Chapman Andrews.
The book was published in 1921, so we expect that Mongolian prisons have improved somewhat
since then.
First we’ll take a look at these hellish coffin prisons and later we’ll explain to
you just how things have improved since 1921.
We’ll just let you know right now that when Mongolian prisons are talked about today you
still hear the words, “cruel and inhuman”, but the question is, how much of a step-up
from the coffins are these new prisons.
Ok, so if in 1921 you walked into that prison what you’d see is an entrance to a wooden
enclosure.
That is what you might call the prison walls, and the wooden fence posts were spiked at
the end.
The prisoners were in fact outside, and that’s why so many men died during those cold winter
months.
Inside this fenced off area are small houses, and if you would have walked into one of those
houses you would have not been able to see much.
They were more like small dungeons.
These did not keep out the cold, but at least shielded the inmates from the vicious winds.
But these rooms are not where the men stayed, that would have been too good for them.
What were actually inside the rooms were piled wooden boxes, about four feet long by two
and one-half feet high.
About the size of a cage where you might keep a dog...if you were a cruel kind of person.
Those boxes were the men’s cells, and they were so cramped that all they could do was
sit in them all scrunched up.
Hence: coffin prisons.
Hardly any light got into the boxes, so those men’s vision after time, not to mention
their sanity, was very negatively affected.
But it gets even worse.
To ensure that men didn’t escape from those coffins, some of them had their necks chained
to a pair of manacles that fastened around their hands.
When it was feeding time, a jailor would push a small amount of food through a small hole
in the coffin, and we expect for a manacled man, eating wasn’t exactly that easy.
For the fortunate men who’d committed lesser crimes, this coffin torture might only last
a few weeks or months, which would be enough we imagine to break anyone watching this show.
But others would spend years or even their entire life in those boxes, which according
to the book we just talked about, would result in some men losing “the use of their limbs,
which shrink and shrivel away.”
Ok, so one source isn’t really adequate and perhaps the American explorer was exaggerating
a little.
We are going to say that we believe him, though, because we found a news clipping online from
the New Zealand Herald of a story titled, “Immured in Coffins’: Mongolian Barbarity.”
The article was written by someone who’d just traveled to Mongolia and had visited
the prisons.
Here’s some of the text: “The prisons and dungeons of the Far Eastern
country contain a number of refined Chinese shut up for life in heavy iron-bound coffins,
which do not permit them to sit upright or lie down.
These prisoners see daylight for only a few minutes daily when the food is thrown into
their coffins through a small hole”.
The photo you are about to see is a depiction, and shows the boxes not stacked, but just
lying around.
The small size of the boxes is quite shocking: If you’re wondering why Chinese folks were
locked up in those boxes as well as Mongolian prisoners, the reason was the Chinese had
invaded the country.
They managed to occupy some regions, but not others.
That’s not something we’ll get into today.
We found some more research about these coffins, and found out that the human waste was collected
from them every two to three weeks, so you can only imagine the stench.
Some sources say that some inmates might stay in a box for only a few weeks, and this was
more like a stern warning to them.
Most inmates in the coffins were sentenced to death, but many died in the coffins before
the death sentence could be carried out.
To see how things have improved, we had to look at Amnesty International reports from
the 90s and early 2000s.
We’ll go out on a limb here and say that the new prisons sounded better than the coffins,
but those reports said prisoners were tortured, neglected, and if a prisoner had no outside
connections, then they would often starve to death.
There is evidence of people being locked up without due process, and evidence of prisoners
having their food held back so they would confess to a crime, whether they committed
it or not.
Amnesty wrote that deliberate starvation would sometimes lead to the death of pre-trial prisoners,
and in the period from 1993 to 1994, 90 inmates died inside one prison.
15 to 30 prisoners were said to have died of starvation.
The rest from illness or work accidents.
We should say that Mongolian officials denied this, and said prisoners were given enough
food rations to survive.
A medical professional in Mongolia said this wasn’t true at all, and he said many men
died from immune system suppression which was a result of starvation or malnutrition.
Even recently, children have found themselves locked up with adults.
There was a now famous case in 2008 when a child was given seven years in prison for
stealing some wine and chocolates.
In 2017, a report by the National Human Rights Commission said prisoners were still being
kept in inhumane conditions.
It said unnecessary force, as well as degrading treatment, was used to extract confessions
from prisoners.
It’s difficult to find first hand accounts as to how the prisons are now, although some
photos can be found online which give an impression of what life might be like inside a prison.
According to the British Government, that has a webpage dedicated for Brits locked up
in Mongolian prisons, prisoners do now receive enough food and medical care and conditions
aren’t anything as bad as we have described from the past.
Saying that, if you’ve ever read a book by Brit who’s been locked up in a prison
in a distant nation, they will tell you that the British Embassy can’t do that much.
It’s actually the smaller humanitarian organizations such as Prisoners Abroad, who provide the
most help.
We’ll leave it at that, and we hope none of you ever appear on a locked-up abroad episode.
But just in case you’re wondering what it might be like to get locked up overseas, have
a look at this gritty video, “You DON'T Want To Be Sent To This Prison (Worst Prison
In The World In 2019)”.
Or, if you can’t bear to hear anymore about prisons, hit this video…