Graphic design by akarawut
Previously, our opening chapter for the 2024 annual report went into the “one-million-dollar question” of the future whereabouts of the Will of the People Fund’s 33 million baht in bail currently in the Thai justice system: that in the coming years, this money will be disbursed to defendants, detainees, and detainee families—until incarceration ends.
In this chapter, we go into more detail about our support to detainees that stretches backward in time to the 2014 coup d’etat as well as forward to the decades to come. When and where do we support detainees?
“To provide assistance to ensure access to rehabilitation and moral repair for those convicted, and to support those who have served time along with their families in the restoration of their quality of life” is Objective #6 of the Siddhi-Issara Foundation, which we submitted to the government foundation registrar in 2024 for the amendment of our charter to broaden its scope of support. Formerly, the foundation’s original objectives focused on assisting political accused/defendants in their access to legal rights during the judicial process, as in the right to bail. This proved no longer sufficient at this time where many lawsuits had ended in prison sentences.
When the new objective was approved by the foundation registrar under the Ministry of Interior on 28 June 2024 (sadhu!), we began expanding our support into three new groups of people: detainee families, former detainees, and detainees currently serving their sentences. We’d like to present an overview of these three groups via the topics “A Look Around,” “A Look Back,” and “A Look Ahead,” respectively.
A Look Around: Detainee Family Members Supported
Our support for detainee families begins with the request to the detainees to specify in writing the person or persons entitled to receiving the support money as their family. By “family” we do not necessarily mean biological family nor family according to the house registration document, but family as it actually exists and actually counts in people’s lives. The monthly rate of support is set at 3,000 baht per family (if the detainee specifies two beneficiaries, the same rate is divided into 1,500 baht per family representative). We made the first bank transfer to a detainee family on 24 July 2024, and by the end of the year we managed to render support to 41 family representatives from 40 detainee families. The family support totaled 654,000 baht.
More recently, in the first four months of 2025, 4 new detainees have specified 5 family members for support, raising the total number of beneficiaries to 46. In the diagram “A Look Around,” the 46 family representatives are displayed in dots of varying colors depending on their relation to the detainee.
(In addition, there are 10 convicted detainees in political cases whose families do not currently receive support from the fund; of the ten, three are currently serving time for non-political offences, one does not wish to receive support at this time, one has no family beneficiary, and five are in the process of initiating family support).
To note, before the official creation of the category of support for detainee families, five detainees had already individually given their own monthly stipend to family outside prison. When we reached out to the three remaining detainees among them about the new category of support, each of them specified the same family representative, doubling the stipend.
Apart from the monthly stipend, we also have reimbursements for various costs of travel for detainee families. These include a once-a-week allowance for visits to prison or a correctional facility. In addition, we reimburse the family based on receipts for necessary travel in case the detainee has an illness, whether physical or mental, and needs their family to personally deliver medicine or medical supplies prescribed by the doctor, or in case the detainee needs their family to run errands related to their schooling. We compensate the family for acting as the go-between for the Foundation in delivering documents or depositing stipends. Lastly, we cover the final trip the family makes on release day to pick up the detainee and bring them home.
A Look Back: Retroactive Support for Lost Time
The former detainees who received our support in 2024 consisted of 5 people prosecuted in the aftermath of the 2014 coup d’etat. Of the five, three were declared not guilty after years-long detention during trial in the “Men in Black” case, where they were accused of being the shadowy armed contingent who targeted soldiers during the crackdown on Red Shirt protest on 10 April 2010; the other two were declared guilty and served time in the “Organization for a Thai Federation” case. The duration of the five’s incarceration added up to 21 years 6 months; at the same rate of 3,000 baht per month, the total back-pay was 774,000 baht. (This did not include our support for their costs of travel to court dates prior to their detention.) See the diagram “A Look Back.”
(Find out more about the Men in Black trilogy of cases in the 2022 Annual Report of the Ratsadonprasong Fund, Part 7: Top Expenses.)
A Look Ahead: Estimates of Time Left
Based on our database of detainees under our care at the moment, we combine the prison sentences of the 41 convicted to gauge roughly how much money we will spend in monthly stipends if they all serve their sentences in full (in case there is no commutation, parole, or amnesty).
In the two slides titled “A Look Ahead,” you can see that the total estimates in monthly stipends for detainees and their families in the next half-century (if there is no commutation, parole, or amnesty) go up to 31.8 million baht, which is neck-in-neck with the Fund’s 33-million “no-interest savings deposit,” i.e. bail, in the court system. (We count only the sentences of convicted detainees; cases undergoing trial are not included, since their results are not yet known and cannot be predicted.)
If you look carefully, you may notice that the combined detention timeline of 41 people here is like a next-level progression of that of the 5 former detainees in “A Look Back”: instead of a straight line, we have a winding, overlong snake that is about to fill the square like in the classic video game genre. What a coincidence that the remaining duration of 441 years is pretty close to the five former detainees’ 21-and-some years squared. (441=21×21)
This illustrates that the total mass of lost time due to incarceration has not gotten any smaller in this era compared to the junta years after the 2014 coup; to the contrary, the more recent losses are adding up—to the second power! Of course, many contextual factors account for the difference, from the number of detainees; the capacity/competency in legal defense; the at-will, on-again-off-again enforcement of such laws as Article 112; to the willful yet seemingly automatic pens in courts’ hands. But what’s undeniable is that the costs exacted from Thai people for their exercise of the right to freedom of political expression remain steep, especially the cost at the other end of bail which may be called “time deposits for royal corrections.”
Previously: