Bang Kwang Central Prison

Bang Kwang Central Prison (Thai: บางขวาง) is a men's prison in Nonthaburi Province, Thailand, on the Chao Phraya River about seven miles north of Bangkok. It is a part of the Department of Corrections.

History

The prison houses many foreign prisoners. It is a harsh prison that handles death row and long-sentence prisoners. All prisoners are required to wear leg irons for the first three months of their sentences. Death row inmates have their leg irons permanently welded on. In the book The Damage Done, former prisoner and drug courier Warren Fellows recounts that the prison was nicknamed "Big Tiger" by the Thais because it "prowled and ate". Fellows's associate Paul Hayward also served part of his sentence there.

Prisoners receive one bowl of rice in vegetable soup each day. Other food must be purchased from the prison canteen. The prison works on a chit system. Each prisoner has an account with the canteen. Poor prisoners do chores for wealthier prisoners and prison guards to earn money for food. Some Westerners, particularly British, American, and Canadians receive extra money per month from charities. The British Embassy also provides food and vitamins for their prisoners. Prisoners are provided with cooking facilities and gas for the stoves is provided by the prison.

Bangkok Hilton

Bangkok Hilton is a three-part Australian mini-series, made in 1989 by Kennedy Miller Productions and directed by Ken Cameron. The title of the mini-series is, in the story, the nickname of a fictional Bangkok prison in which the protagonist is imprisoned, a mordant reference to Hanoi Hilton, the prison known as such used by North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Plot

Bangkok Hilton begins as Hal Stanton (Denholm Elliott) leaves Bangkok by ship in the present day. He explains that he has been travelling for years, since a shameful incident when he was a prisoner of the Japanese right there in Bangkok in WWII.

He then takes us to 1960s Sydney, where he was working as a lawyer under the assumed name of Graham Greene. He falls in love with Katherine Faulkner (Judy Morris), the lovely but sheltered daughter of a wealthy family who live in a huge, isolated mansion in the outback. He visits the estate and woos Katherine and they fall passionately in love, but Hal's secret identity is soon exposed. During the war he notoriously betrayed a group of his own men, who were planning an escape, to their Japanese captors, and was later court-martialled for it. The fact that he did so to protect the rest of his men from reprisals was considered irrelevant, and he has lived with the shame ever since. Katherine's family break up the relationship and Hal moves, despondently, away. Katherine is pregnant, however, and soon gives birth to Katrina. The young girl is raised on her own at the estate, treated as a shameful product of the illicit affair. A few years later, Katrina, now grown (Nicole Kidman), loses her mother to cancer and inherits the family fortune. Having never ventured off the estate, she travels to Sydney, where she learns that her father is not dead, as she was always told. She decides to go to London, where his family lived, to track him down.

The Real

The Real refers to that which is authentic, the unchangeable truth in reference both to being/the Self and the external dimension of experience, also referred to as the infinite and absolute—as opposed to a reality based on sense perception and the material order.

In psychoanalysis

Lacan

For Jacques Lacan, the order of the real is not only opposed to the imaginary but is also located beyond the symbolic. Unlike the symbolic, which is constituted in terms of oppositions such as "presence" and "absence", there is no absence in the real. The symbolic opposition between "presence" and "absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the symbolic, the real is "always in its place: it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from there." If the symbolic is a set of differentiated signifiers, the real is in itself undifferentiated: "it is without fissure." The symbolic introduces "a cut in the real," in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things." Thus the real emerges as that which is outside language: "it is that which resists symbolization absolutely." The real is impossible because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order. This character of impossibility and resistance to symbolization lends the real its traumatic quality.

Bangkok

Bangkok (English pronunciation: /ˈbæŋkɒk/) is the capital and most populous city of Thailand. It is known in Thai as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon (กรุงเทพมหานคร, pronounced  [krūŋ tʰêːp mahǎː nákʰɔ̄ːn]) or simply  Krung Thep . The city occupies 1,568.7 square kilometres (605.7 sq mi) in the Chao Phraya River delta in Central Thailand, and has a population of over 8 million, or 12.6 percent of the country's population. Over 14 million people (22.2 percent) live within the surrounding Bangkok Metropolitan Region, making Bangkok an extreme primate city, dwarfing Thailand's other urban centres in terms of importance.

Bangkok traces its roots to a small trading post during the Ayutthaya Kingdom in the 15th century, which eventually grew in size and became the site of two capital cities: Thonburi in 1768 and Rattanakosin in 1782. Bangkok was at the heart of Siam's (as Thailand used to be known) modernization, during the later 19th century, as the country faced pressures from the West. The city was the centre of Thailand's political struggles, throughout the 20th century, as the country abolished absolute monarchy, adopted constitutional rule and underwent numerous coups and several uprisings. The city grew rapidly during the 1960s through the 1980s and now exerts a significant impact among Thailand's politics, economy, education, media and modern society.

Prison

A prison,correctional facility, penitentiary, gaol (Ireland, UK, Australia), or jail is a facility in which inmates are forcibly confined and denied a variety of freedoms under the authority of the state as a form of punishment. The most common use of prisons is within a criminal justice system. People charged with crimes may be imprisoned until they are brought to trial; those pleading or being found guilty of crimes at trial may be sentenced to a specified period of imprisonment. Besides their use for punishing civil crimes, authoritarian regimes also frequently use prisons and jails as tools of political repression to punish what are deemed political crimes, often without trial or other legal due process; this use is illegal under most forms of international law governing fair administration of justice. In times of war, prisoners of war or detainees may be detained in military prisons or prisoner of war camps, and large groups of civilians might be imprisoned in internment camps.