toilets regularly blocked and overflowed, spilling sewage onto the floor. Some locals would just squelch around in the faeces with bare feet. Several were peasants from tiny villages, serving a few months for crimes as trivial as stealing one sachet of coffee or one apple. They’d lived primitive lives and knew nothing about cleanliness or hygiene, often horrifying their cellmates with a gross lack of decorum: urinating and defecating on the bathroom floor; bleeding menstrual blood directly onto the cell floor, refusing to use pads or wear underpants. Some almost never washed their clothes or bodies, causing disturbing body odour in the cells.
After developing calluses from weeks of sleeping on a concrete floor in the police cells, one improvement for new prisoners was having a thin mattress. Poor inmates unable to afford a mattress still slept on bare concrete or threw down a sarong. Hotel K provided nothing but the four walls of the cell. Everything, from essentials like soap, detergent and drinking water, to emptying out the septic tanks, was paid for out of prisoners’ pockets. The poor simply went without or depended on the charity of others, or earned cash by massaging wealthier prisoners or washing clothes for them.
Those with money brightened their lives with contraband luxuries in their cells, like televisions, DVD players, mobile phones, and single gas burners to boil water, cook simple meals or heat heroin, although the guards often swept it all up in random cell searches. But aside from the drugs, which could potentially involve a new case in court, the guards would simply sell this all back to the prisoners within a couple of weeks.
Primarily functioning as a men’s jail meant the women in Hotel K were treated as second-class citizens, rarely allowed out of their block and banned from the privileges of playing tennis and walking freely around the jail. Their sexuality was an issue. The authorities didn’t want the women inciting the men sexually. Doing a weekly aerobics class or yoga session in the hall, walking across the jail to a visit, collecting mail or walking to the little canteen or church were their only permitted outings.
As in the men’s block, there was no segregation between cold-blooded killers, card sharks and callgirls; no lines were drawn between a woman who stole an apple to feed her hungry baby and a woman who pre-meditated the stabbing death of her husband’s mistress. The huge divide between petty crimes, like stealing a bag of prawn crackers or playing cards at the kitchen table, and dark crimes, such as assisting in illegal abortions on eight-month-old foetuses, was invisible. They all slept side by side, so tightly squeezed in that they often woke with their limbs entwined.
In Block W there were many callgirls who’d been swept up in police stings at karaoke bars in Kuta and Denpasar. Many of the girls had deep resentment towards the police who’d used their services, asked them to procure a couple of ecstasy tablets, then turned around and snapped on handcuffs. Others were angry at being harassed by police for sex in exchange for a lighter sentence. While some refused, others acquiesced but were left bitterly disappointed when their sentences were read out in court.
Police at Poldabes said, ‘Do you want to have sex with me, we can drop the charges?’ She agreed and was taken out of Poldabes and had sex with the policeman . . . But her sentence was not cut. She got the maximum of five years .
– Elsa, inmate, talking about her friend
One policeman asked me for sex in a flirty way. He asked in a very nice way. He wasn’t scary .
Was he serious?
Yes. He asked many, many times during the two months I was in police cells. He told me sex would reduce my sentence. I said no and finally he stopped asking me .
– Wanda, Indonesian inmate
Block W was a highly charged environment, tempers fraying and snapping at the smallest things. Within a split second, a slow
After developing calluses from weeks of sleeping on a concrete floor in the police cells, one improvement for new prisoners was having a thin mattress. Poor inmates unable to afford a mattress still slept on bare concrete or threw down a sarong. Hotel K provided nothing but the four walls of the cell. Everything, from essentials like soap, detergent and drinking water, to emptying out the septic tanks, was paid for out of prisoners’ pockets. The poor simply went without or depended on the charity of others, or earned cash by massaging wealthier prisoners or washing clothes for them.
Those with money brightened their lives with contraband luxuries in their cells, like televisions, DVD players, mobile phones, and single gas burners to boil water, cook simple meals or heat heroin, although the guards often swept it all up in random cell searches. But aside from the drugs, which could potentially involve a new case in court, the guards would simply sell this all back to the prisoners within a couple of weeks.
Primarily functioning as a men’s jail meant the women in Hotel K were treated as second-class citizens, rarely allowed out of their block and banned from the privileges of playing tennis and walking freely around the jail. Their sexuality was an issue. The authorities didn’t want the women inciting the men sexually. Doing a weekly aerobics class or yoga session in the hall, walking across the jail to a visit, collecting mail or walking to the little canteen or church were their only permitted outings.
As in the men’s block, there was no segregation between cold-blooded killers, card sharks and callgirls; no lines were drawn between a woman who stole an apple to feed her hungry baby and a woman who pre-meditated the stabbing death of her husband’s mistress. The huge divide between petty crimes, like stealing a bag of prawn crackers or playing cards at the kitchen table, and dark crimes, such as assisting in illegal abortions on eight-month-old foetuses, was invisible. They all slept side by side, so tightly squeezed in that they often woke with their limbs entwined.
In Block W there were many callgirls who’d been swept up in police stings at karaoke bars in Kuta and Denpasar. Many of the girls had deep resentment towards the police who’d used their services, asked them to procure a couple of ecstasy tablets, then turned around and snapped on handcuffs. Others were angry at being harassed by police for sex in exchange for a lighter sentence. While some refused, others acquiesced but were left bitterly disappointed when their sentences were read out in court.
Police at Poldabes said, ‘Do you want to have sex with me, we can drop the charges?’ She agreed and was taken out of Poldabes and had sex with the policeman . . . But her sentence was not cut. She got the maximum of five years .
– Elsa, inmate, talking about her friend
One policeman asked me for sex in a flirty way. He asked in a very nice way. He wasn’t scary .
Was he serious?
Yes. He asked many, many times during the two months I was in police cells. He told me sex would reduce my sentence. I said no and finally he stopped asking me .
– Wanda, Indonesian inmate
Block W was a highly charged environment, tempers fraying and snapping at the smallest things. Within a split second, a slow
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