Martial arts in a Bangkok prison

[Tee Sok]

When I went to Thailand last time I bought a book about an australian guy who spent 12 years in Bang Kwan, a thai prison also known as The Bangkok Hilton. The book is called "The Damage Done", by Warren Fellows. It's really hard-core, and I understood that thai prisons are among the worst-if not the worst-in the world. I recomend this book to anyone.

Anyway I did I quick search on the net to know more about Bang Kwan and I fould this: http://home.freeuk.net/mounsey/bkt1.htm#C

An inmate there, with a very good martial experience, founded his own fighting system and called it YUN DON BANG KWAN DO. He helds sparrinour g sessions and his system as also been recognised by the W.U.M.A.
MA can fortify your will and make you tougher, and for these guys it means survival and preservation of mental sanity and phisical fitness.

[silapathai]

wow

interesting article!

[Dopey]

Whoa,awesome. Whats better than Military Martial Arts? Prison Martial Arts. =) Looks kinda cool.

[Garland]

....hm.
I'm wondering just how credible that thing is. The whole paper just seems like mishmashed stuff on Thailand's seedier side.
Everybody who knows enough about Thailand knows about the fleshpots and the golden triangle, the odd fashion, and the corruption of many people in authoratitive positions.

Is the prison martial art just a made up thing on paper, I mean, I could just say, I have a new martial art, it's called Boran Dekititi Do.
It's a mixture of old school muay boran, philippino martial arts, and kyokushin kickboxing I coined while in a Singaporian prison.

It could have easily been written by any American Thailand enthusiast.
OR it's real, I don't know...just my speculation, don't take it for more than food for thought...

[Tee Sok]

Yes, this can be true. But the guy who founded his "style" will stay in prison for something like 20 years, so I do not see why it should bea lie. But it is true that in prison you have nothing to do, and from what I read, in thai prisons the situation is even worse as there aren't work programs for prisoners (they just let the ones who behave well clean the strets and stuff like that ). So yes it can be a lie, or an exageration, but there are good possibilities that the guy is telling the truth. Also because he's in the WUMA, he gavethe contacts and stuff.

[chalambok]

I was watching a program about the Thai prison system. Seems the average survival time for a prisoner, before they die, is 11 years. A United States DEA supervisor who was interviewed for this show stated the only thing one could say for sure about any American imprisoned there was 'they will learn to speak Thai'. I am surprised they would allow anyone to practice muay Thai in any prison, anywhere.

[Tee Sok]

Mmmmmmm..............that is true, but then why write an article like that? I mean, what can the guy get from telling a lie like that?
Notoriety? Money? Seems very improbable to me.....I was thinking that thai jails were getting lees strict-the events in the book I read date back to around 10 years ago-but if that program you said is recent, the situation there hasn't changed.

[Garland]

Mmmmmmm..............that is true, but then why write an article like that? I mean, what can the guy get from telling a lie like that?
Notoriety? Money? Seems very improbable to me.....I was thinking that thai jails were getting lees strict-the events in the book I read date back to around 10 years ago-but if that program you said is recent, the situation there hasn't changed.

man...prison or jail in ANY southeast Asian country would suck like nothing else. Even in Singapore, which is a relatively calm place compared to Thailand, they cane you for minor offenses, or hang you for drug charges.
Thailand...is pretty corrupt. I bet if you handed the arresting officer or military man a couple hundred bucks, they'd let you off. Foreign countries, man, life is cheap.
Hell, even look at Brazil.

American prison is a cake walk compared to those of other countries, man, someplaces, they'd just shoot you. Straight up, right before you could call your embassy or anything (not that THAT would help).

[Tee Sok]

Yes I was aware of the difference between western and asian prisons, and about the situation of the south american ones. The brazilian movie "Carandiru" shows very well how life goes on in brazilian prisons, it was inspired by the killing of inmates by the elite police which occured not so long ago. But I thought that maybe the situation got a bit better in thai prisons, also because executions in Thailand are no longer done by shooting the prisoner and I interpreted it as a sign of changes in the prison administrarion.
And I didn't know they hang prisoners in thai prisons, so I am probably wrong.

[SOUTHPAW]

American prison is a cake walk compared to those of other countries, man, someplaces, they'd just shoot you. Straight up, right before you could call your embassy or anything (not that THAT would help).

Let me tell you guys something. Doing time in ANY prison is a nightmare. That's no joke.

[aseepish]

.
Is the prison martial art just a made up thing on paper, I mean, I could just say, I have a new martial art, it's called Boran Dekititi Do.
It's a mixture of old school muay boran, philippino martial arts, and kyokushin kickboxing I coined while in a Singaporian prison.

No lah! If you were in a Singaporean prison, you would have done TKD!

That's an inside joke for anyone familiar with the martial arts scene in Singapore.

Getting nostalgic now. Sniff...

T.

[William]

This is something that was told to me by one of my (Not Chalambak ) MT instructors.

A guy that was a brother or boyfriend (I don't remember the exact relation) of someone he knew came to watch them train. When he joined in the training he unleashed holy heck on some of the students. Turns out that he had spent 2-3 years in a Thai prison and had pretty much been forced to learn (some form of MT) to fight to take care of himself. Sure, that goes for any prison, but betting and "un-official" fights happened a lot for the amusement and gain of guards and/or prison officials. Being an American in a Thai prison has a way of singling you out for attention...mostly of the not so good kind.
This guys take on Muay Thai was that if your just hitting the Thai Pads, your not practicing MT, you're only pad training.

Again, I was not there at the time, but he has never given me any reason to doubt his word. He never claimed to have learned any ~"SECRET"~ or "JAIL HOUSE" techniques from the guy. It was more along the lines of ,"Sh*t, you should have seen this guy go!"

William