This Mongolian Prison Kept Its Prisoners in Coffins
By: Radha Kapadia
Tags: Mongolian, Prison, History, Mongolia, Prisoners

This Mongolian Prison Kept Its Prisoners in Coffins

Image of Mongolian Prison Coffins by History Collection

The idea of setting up a strict prison sounds about right when it comes to fixing the morals of an offender. A person like that deserves a specific correctional treatment if they are to succeed and improve in the future. However, in trying to achieve that, some prisons are known to have messed up. When a crime happens, common sense deems it suitable to punish the criminals with a few years — or a lifetime — of imprisonment, but in addition to that, some prisons treat their prisoners like animals. These institutions neglect human rights laws and go so far with their brutality that it becomes almost difficult to tell who’s the real monster.

For the Mongolian people, it was the prison of Urga (now Ulaanbaatar) which treated its prisoners in a way that is beyond what words can describe. Cutting across all levels of brutality, the prisoners were given a barbaric treatment in what you can call “the Box of Death”.

Sitting behind a fenced wooden enclosure was a group of small houses. Each house, like a dungeon, was so dark that not much could be seen on the inside. The houses didn’t manage to keep out the cold, only protecting the inmates from the vicious winds. All of these houses had a bunch of wooden boxes inside of them. These boxes, measuring four feet long by two and one-half feet high and surrounded by a 15-foot high stockade of sharpened timbers, were the prison cells. They were so small that a regular-sized human could not fit in them. When the prisoners were locked inside these boxes, it was so cramped and uncomfortable that they could neither sit nor lie properly. Hence, they were called Coffin Prisons.

As described by the American explorer, Roy Chapman Andrews in his book Across Mongolian Plains, there was only one small hole in each box and hardly any light got inside. As a result, men often lost their vision, not to mention, their sanity, after a time. These six-inch holes were also used to feed the prisoners once a day and their human waste was cleaned once every two to three weeks. Some of the men who had a high chance of escaping had their necks chained to a pair of manacles that fastened around their hands. Eating in a scrunched-up position itself was really difficult for the normal prisoners, let alone the manacled ones.

Manacled Prisoner by Albert Kahn

For the fortunate ones, who had committed lesser crimes, the torture in these so-called prison cells would only last a few weeks but the rest of them underwent it for almost all of their entire stay at the prison. This would take away their ability to use their limbs as they’d shrink and shrivel away. Though most of these men were sentenced to death, many would die in the coffins before their death sentence could be carried out. Since the temperature in Ulaanbaatar drops below zero during the winter, it was common for prisoners to freeze to death. Due to these death coffins, Mongolia’s name has been engraved in the list of one of the worst prisons in history.

Out of all the men who were locked up, the majority were Chinese. This is because the Chinese people had invaded the country of Mongolia at that time but had only managed to occupy some regions.

Though this practice was banned in 1920, even today, Mongolia’s prisons are known for their harsh and cruel punishments. According to Amnesty International’s report from 2002, the prisons were far better than before but the prisoners were still tortured and neglected. Furthermore, they stated that if the prisoners didn’t have any outside connections, they would often starve to death. There was evidence of people being locked up without due process and of prisoners having their food held back so they would confess to a crime, whether they committed it or not. Unnecessary and unfair treatments were used in order to extract these confessions.

A report by the National Human Rights Commission from 2017 also mentioned that the prisoners were still kept in inhumane conditions. However, without first-hand accounts of the prisons’ conditions, it’s still difficult to say what the conditions really are today. For now, we can just hope that some boundaries are set on how prisoners should be treated.