NO BED OF ROSES IN SIGHT FOR WA ADDICT

PRISON should not be a new experience for Holly Deane-Johns who served
five years in WA's Bandyup women's jail for drug offences in the early
1990s.

But the conditions of Bangkok's main women's prison are markedly
different to those she encountered in Australia.

She is one of 6318 prisoners at Bangkok's Central Women Correctional
Institution which skirts Bumbut men's prison over a ravine in a region
that prison volunteer worker Susan Aldous had dubbed Bangkok's golden
mile of jails.

Of the 6318 prisoners, 5245 are drug cases which carry some of the
heaviest penalties. For example, the crackdown on amphetamines, yar-bar
in Thai slang, has seen sentences equating to one year per pill so that
someone caught with five pills gets five years.

Ms Deane-Johns is not alone in facing the death penalty - often
commuted to life imprisonment for Westerners - if convicted of drug
offences.Prison official Chaowaras Jaruboon is one of 10 executioners
and has personally despatched 30 prisoners in 20 years.

Two hundred and three of the 6700 prisoners are in Bangkok's biggest
maximum-security jail for men, Bangkwang Central Prison, on death row.

Ms Deane-Johns is confident of beating the executioner's bullet. But
communicating with the outside world is tough.

Visiting days are an ordeal. Visitors must sign a form requesting whom
they wish to see and the purpose of their visit.

They then wait sometimes up to three hours for the name of the person
to be called over a megaphone system. The visitor is directed to a seat
in the open air facing a metal grille with a microphone and speaker.

Other visitors are seated either side less than a metre apart. Noise
and cross-talk from these conversations are offputting. But time is
precious because only 20 minutes is allowed before the microphone is
switched off, the prisoners are called away from their booths, and a
new batch of visitors led in.

Ms Deane-Johns had been living in Thailand but wanted to return to
Australia after her boyfriend was caught with a quantity of heroin in
Melbourne. He is not named for legal reasons.

She went to Mt Lawley Senior High School where she had a reputation for
wildness. She was friendly with another student, Prudence Carter, whose
qualifications brought her fame as a Playboy magazine centrefold.

Carter was jailed in 1995 for five years for her part in the murder of
Perth hotelier Chris Norvilas in the Kings Hotel, in Hay Street, in
November 1994.

By 1992, Ms Deane-Johns had met an Australian man who was suspected of
running drugs from Thailand to Perth. She was caught in a sting
operation in Perth and jailed, serving five years. But her boyfriend
remained in Thailand and was not caught.

But plans to marry him were put on hold this year when he was arrested
on drug charges in Melbourne. Ms Deane-Johns then decided she had no
future in Thailand and planned to return to Perth before she was
arrested.