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…
