Madeleine presents: Picnic at the Lonesome Rock

[Raven]

Picnic at the Lonesome Rock

The women’s prison on Batu Kesepian island was one of these South Asian hellholes you hear about in drug mule stories. A naive college student gets a sealed package for a “friend of a friend” in a tropical paradise, gets arrested at the airport and swiftly given a traditional harsh sentence, usually death. Two pounds of cocaine guaranteed that you would be shot in Indonesia, hanged in Malaysia or given a lethal injection in Thailand, and Panau was no different. It was just a little more old-fashioned: as a former French colony, Panau used guillotines, even after gaining independence. In some prisons, especially those housing male inmates, executions were carried out by hanging instead, but older ones, Batu Kesepian among them, kept their old devices.

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