Asher Behind Bars

The Malaysian Prison Museum was established to serve a few purposes, an exhibit inside the museum explained. It aimed to provide a concrete history of punishment in Malaysia, an outline of all the jails that exist or have ever existed across the country and it was designed as a place for young Malaysians to learn about crime and punishment. This last reason is the one that stuck out most to me. After spending some time in the museum, I realised that the museum really existed as a place to scare the shit out of school students.

I passed a group of students leaving as I entered the museum. They looked remarkably upbeat considering where they had just been, with much happier faces than the one I would possess when I left a short while later. The museum was housed in a former prison that was closed about twenty years ago. The barbed wire and watch towers still surrounded the perimeter, though one section on the main road had been converted into ‘Kopi Jail,’ the jail cafe.

The staff, though very friendly, were all uniformed, armed public servants working for the department of corrections. Despite this, they seemed to have better customer service skills than a lot of other workers I’d met who were actually part of the tourism industry. All officers I passed said hello and were interested to know where I was from.

The first officer I met took the nominal entrance fee from me as I arrived at the jail and stepped through the heavy iron doors into an eery concrete building. If nothing else, the museum was excellent value. Entrance was a third of the price of entry to an old mansion I had visited earlier in the day and you could easily spend hours in the museum. Though if you did want to spend hours, you’d need to bring your reading glasses. The encyclopaedic knowledge plastered along the jail walls detailed the exact history of every jail to ever exist in Malaysia and regurgitated large sections of laws associated with crime and punishment in Malaysia. It wasn’t particularly interesting.

The venue itself was the scariest bit of the experience. The jail cells all had their doors opened and visitors were encouraged to enter, though I was afraid if I did I would be locked in. I continued past the cells to the second floor. A room was filled with information on ‘caning,’ an horrendous form of corporal punishment, along with various images and videos documenting the practice. I had reached the scare-the-shit-out-of-the-kids bit of the museum. This exhibit was closely followed by a history of capital punishment, with detailed information on the techniques used to kill offenders across the world. This information was housed in a nondescript hall of the jail. Little did I know where I was headed.

A few more displays on capital punishment lead me to the gallows. Not a display, not a recreation, a room with a noose still hanging and an open trapdoor in the floor. A whiteboard on the back wall had the name, height and weight of the last person to be killed there. I was in a former jail in a country that still practised capital punishment. Whilst it wasn't still practiced in the building I was standing in, I shuddered at the thought of how many people had been legally murdered in the room I was staring into. And so recently. After all, the name was on a whiteboard, not a blackboard.

I walked down the stairs and returned to the ground floor, looking into the room underneath the gallows. The room beneath the trapdoor still had medical equipment sitting in it, supposedly used to dispatch the body of the diseased that landed on the so-called ‘death stone’ in the centre of the room. The stone had been worn down from years of use. The room was next to the recreation and projector room where groups of inmates used to watch movies at night time.