Teaching the convicts: Behind bars in Banteay Meanchey

Why? That’s the question Cambodians invariably ask after I tell them I teach English at my town’s prison — not to guards, but to prisoners.

My answer: Why not?

The 16 students at Banteay Meanchey Provincial Prison are eager for something, anything, to do. Most are locked up for 10 years, some longer. My students tell me that the prison has only one lifer — a man accused of raping, cutting up and killing a young girl. Cambodia doesn’t have a death penalty.

The crimes that landed the English learners among the prison's 850 inmates are varied. Drug dealing, robbery, rape, murder.

That’s one of the first questions I ask the students, after their names and ages. Why are they in prison?

Two men volunteer their crimes — drug dealing and robbery. A third makes a crack about the rapist in the first row. The only woman in the class says she can’t talk about it. I later learn she was accused of killing her roommate by using some kind of gas.

My students come from across Cambodia, and one from Thailand. They are behind bars in Banteay Meanchey either because this is where they were accused of committing a crime or because they were transferred here from another prison.

One of Banteay Meanchey’s recent prisoners came from as far as Denmark. The businessman was locked up for about 10 months after being charged with having sex with three girls under age 15. He was arrested with a 13-year-old girl near the Thailand border. My students tell me that the Dane was joined in prison for those 10 months by the mother of one of the girls, accused of prostituting her daughter to the man.

One of my students asks if I’m afraid to teach at the prison. I’m not.

I had imagined teaching at a prison would be scary. My students would carry shivs and wear chains linking their wrists to their ankles. I pictured myself hurrying down a dark hallway, covering my ears to sexual slurs like Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs. At the end of the hallway, I would seek refuge in a classroom, only to be assailed with further insults and racial jabs like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds.  

Fortunately, my imagination proved far worse than reality. Clad in purple pajamas trimmed in white, my group of 25-to-35-year-old students is far from intimidating. Like so many Cambodians, they are quick to laugh, and many of their faces are painted with constant smiles. Still, several of these smiles are contradicted by eyes glazed with sadness and struggle. 

I’ve yet to see a shiv, but most the students wear prison-issued tattoos. Chinese characters snake up an arm, a spiderweb peeks out from a pants cuff, a tamer “I LUV U” inches along the outer edge of a thumb – all inked in army green.

“I think all prisoners have them.”

This from the guy with the spiderweb on his leg. He goes by David in class. Because each student has chosen an English name, the class is populated by Allens and Franks and Jerrys, names typically assigned only to foreigners in Cambodia.

“Really? All prisoners?” I ask.

“OK, a lot,” he corrects himself.

“I think they have too much free time; they don’t know what to do,” Vichet, my Cambodian co-teacher theorizes.

Eat, sleep and sing. That’s what the students say they do all day. Some also cook, wash clothes or do other work around the prison. Except for those who stay locked up all day, the inmates typically live 12 to 14 to a cell. 

Is life difficult? It depends if your family has money or not, a student says. Visits to the prison cost about $4.

A flood from Thailand sealed out any recent visitors. It took four generators to pump out the two foot-high water. The water didn’t enter the prisoners’ cells, but because the toilets were out of order, the inmates were forced to poop in plastic bags.

“They threw the pee and shit out the windows,” the usually mild-tongued Vichet says.

White chalky powder is now sprinkled atop the dirt of the prison’s courtyard to sanitize the grounds.

An American named Lynn — another Seattleite, actually — started the English teaching program at the Banteay Meanchey prison about five years ago. She taught there for six months before she left Cambodia and Vichet took over. He’s taught at the prison ever since.

I’d known about the opportunity to teach at the prison since arriving at my site a year ago. But it took a run-in with an eccentric American to sign me up.

This white-ponytailed expat, who has lived in my town for several years, told me teaching at the prison would be the most fulfilling thing I’d do in Cambodia. He used to teach yoga to the prisoners.

This 60-something man took to me after I admitted that I didn’t know much about teaching and could use some tips. He gave me tips aplenty, but said the only reason he was helping was because I looked like a Hollywood film star.

“You know, that one in that movie who dressed like a boy and got killed for it.”

Hillary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry.

“You’re thinking of my sister,” I told him. She usually gets that comparison, while I get Anne Hathaway, Keira Knightley or Molly Ringwald.

Regardless of his motive, this big, brash American has helped me as well as the prisoners.

His portable whiteboard hangs from the roof of the grass hut that is our classroom. We teach in the courtyard, outside the saffron-colored houses for prisoners and staffers. The squat yellow buildings are accented with red roofs and blue shutters, giving them a Playskool look. The prison is at the end of a gravel road lined with trees. Dirt roads leading to villages branch off in both directions.

Because our class is just before lunchtime, smoke is often curling above the nearby outdoor kitchen. Men in yellow hard hats above bare brown chests, purple prison pants and yellow galoshes work while we study, squatting in mounds of dirt while they till the soil into rows or churn concrete for the new visitor’s building.

An old man with a buzzcut and wire-rim glasses repairs mosquito nets day after day. A cigarette in mouth and needle and thread in hand, he squats at the edge of our classroom, stitching the holes together. Others squat around him, drinking soda from small plastic bags and chatting. A mangy dog is usually roaming the grounds, along with the occasional child.

During one English class, a little girl with a plastic bag full of drink clambers onto a bench behind a desk. She is later scooped up by a woman with a long braid and a weathered face.

This girl and others, like the young boy cycling out with a pack of cigarettes in his mouth, drift in and out of the prison. Others are in for a longer stay. 

A boy who looks no older than 12 is loitering around the perimeter of our classroom one morning. He wears the purple pajamas that mark him as a prisoner.

Painting and Khmer classes are starting up for this boy and other young inmates. But for the older prisoners — aside from the occasional visit from a Christian missionary — English is the only option.

In English class, we talk about the usual subjects: families, jobs, past experiences.  

“Could you stay out as long as you wanted?” Vichet asks the class about their pre-prison lives.

A couple students say they had to be home by 8 p.m., (two hours past dark in Cambodia), another says 10 p.m. was his curfew.

“No limit!” yells a guy with hair spiking above a smiling face.

The guy with the Chinese characters crawling up his arm raises his hand. He could also stay out as long as he wanted.

“Yes,” he says, “I was a gay man.”

When his friend sitting next to him calls him a gangster, I realize he must have said gang man.

A game of “I’ve never” reveals more shadows from the past.

“I’ve never taken drugs,” teacher Vichet says.

Hands go up. These are the people who have taken drugs. 

One of these drug-takers keeps on the same track. “I’ve never taken marijuana,” he says.

More hands go up. 

Many of the prisoners have taken drugs, and some have even taken drugs in prison. Students tell me that a guard was recently locked up for selling yama to prisoners. Yama, also called yaba or ma, is meth.

The prison director and three other prison guards also landed in hot water a couple months ago when they were accused of accepting bribes and helping a Khmer-American prisoner escape.

Because bribery is so rampant in Cambodia, these four officials weren’t fired. They were simply given jobs in another arm of the government until the investigation ends.

I met the escapee shortly before his escape.

“Morning!” he chirped in a perfect American accent as he shook my hand. “Are you from the U.S? Me, too… Minnesota.”

He told me he returned to Cambodia two years ago, after a 30-year exile in America. The Phnom Penh Post identified him as only 29.

The Post said he was sentenced to 17 years in prison in 2008 for illegally detaining people. But now he’s free. Missing since late September. My students doubt he’ll be arrested again.

Guards aren’t the only corrupt characters lurking around the Banteay Meanchey prison.

A class discussion about jobs leads us to lawyers, whom most prisoners work with during their stays.

“Did you like your lawyer? Did you think your lawyer was good?” Vichet asks the class.

“No, he just wanted money,” a student replies. “He took the money and when I went to the court he did not go there.”

David, the guy with the spiderweb tattoo, has short, dark hair and perfect nails. Pail pink beds with pearly white tips, sculpted like press-ons. Beautiful moons of keratin at odds with his spiderweb tattoo and the other vicious-looking arachnid stretched across his left hand. The inking is labeled “SCORPION.”

“Very nice for me,” David says about scorpions.

Further up his arm is a white wisp of yarn, like the red bracelets monks give out for good health.

Another student with raised red circles on his forehead like the marks from cupping, a common Cambodian medical treatment that entails suctioning hot glass cups to the skin, has a tattoo on the outer edge of his thumb that reads, “JAIL AMBITION.”

What does it mean?

“I think it’s good for me,” he says. And by it, he means jail.

“I like it ... I remember it all my life.”