Graphic design by akarawut
In the previous chapter “Until Incarceration Ends,” we gave an overview of the disbursement of funds under our care last year (2024), along with our projections for the coming years, in support of detainees and their families. In this chapter, we will lay out our protocol for support for the costs of travel for accused, defendants, and detainee relatives. For two years in a row now, this category of support has seen more traffic than the support for detainees. Most recently, in April 2025, at the three-year mark of the Ratsadonprasong Fund under the Siddhi-Issara Foundation’s care, this category of support just reached eight figures in total expenses (10 million baht, or about 300,000 US dollars).
Total Costs of Travel
The three full years of the Foundation (26 April 2022-30 April 2025) saw the Ratsadonprasong Fund lend travel-related support to 709 individuals (accused, defendants, and detainee relatives) in 504 freedom-related cases in Thailand.
As we reported in the first chapter “A Drainpipe for Money,” 443 defendants (or 311 unique individuals) in 216 cases are still in transit in the justice process; we will retroactively lend support for their costs of travel in the coming years, as you can see in the graph that remains unfinished.
Not Just Travel Costs
What we call “costs of travel” refers not only to such costs as gas or fare but also the burden of expenses and lost income that comes with travel. The work of processing reimbursements for costs of travel is no less time-consuming than the work of tracking down bail money and that of inmate support. There’s a lot of legwork to do before such a reimbursement can be made: from gathering the information on court dates from documents and from the Court of Justice’s online case tracking system, to verifying the submitted receipts and accounts of travel. As a result, the Fund’s staff always have some catching up to do even as bail-related work has been slowing down. Precisely because an increasing number of cases are concluding in quick succession, we often have to triage the reimbursements for costs of travel based on need and urgency.
Furthermore, as stated in the previous chapter, we also lend support to travel by detainee family members, including weekly visits, pickup on release day, running errands for the detainee at a healthcare facility or an educational institution, and acting on behalf of the Fund. We began supporting detainee family members on a case-by-case basis in 2023, but only in the last year (2024) did we establish the general protocol.
At Courthouses Near You
Geographically speaking, our reimbursements have involved travel to at least 187 justice institutions in 42 provinces throughout the country. The “assembly line” diagram in the last image categorizes the institutions according to their place in the justice process.
For this year (2025), the sum total of the costs of travel reimbursements is projected to be as high as that of 2024. For next year (2026), we hope to go through the queue as much as we can, especially before the exhaustion of the Foundation’s resources—financial and otherwise—to manage the Fund, at which point we will have to downsize our small organization so that remaining tasks can be taken care of in the long haul.