A British man jailed in Thailand over a botched visa arrangement has spoken out about the brutal conditions he endured inside Bangkok Remand Prison.
Oliver Hardy, a Muay Thai trainee, was arrested in March 2023 and served roughly 16 months after a court convicted him of using fake documents and overstaying his visa. He gave his account for its Minutes With series, describing a system he called plainly inhumane.
Hardy had moved to Thailand to train in Muay Thai and sought a long-term visa to stay legally. Rather than use official channels, he paid approximately 40,000 baht (about $1,220) to a man he met at a gym who offered to handle the paperwork. He said he was trying to do things properly, but the fixer turned out to be a scammer. Other travellers later flagged that his paperwork did not match the genuine process, by which point he was already in overstay and unable to correct it.
The situation escalated dramatically when Hardy flew back into Thailand through a different airport for a family visit. Immigration staff spotted stamps in his passport for flights he had never taken. After roughly eight hours of interrogation, he was sent to court, where the fake-document and overstay charges combined into a 16-month sentence at Bangkok Remand Prison.
Hardy said the first couple of months were the hardest, largely because of the heat. He was arrested in March and served much of his early sentence through April, typically Thailand’s hottest month, when temperatures approach 97°F. His cell had a single fan and no windows, only open railings, leaving him effectively exposed to the elements at all times.
“There’s one fan. The buildings are all concrete with no windows, just railings,” he said, adding that he was effectively sleeping outdoors for a year and a half, storms and violent winds included.
He continued: “When the rain would be coming into the building, you’d be getting absolutely soaked, and you just have to sit there and pretend to sleep while you’re covered in rain, completely drenched.”
Conditions worsened during a stint in an immigration detention centre, where Hardy said as many as 120 foreign detainees were crammed into a single room “like sardines.” He noted it was common to sleep with someone else’s feet in your face.
The food was barely edible, Hardy recalled, and a week-long breakdown in the prison’s water supply pushed hygiene to catastrophic levels. He described the prison’s “extremely bad smell,” caused by prisoners defecating on top of each other’s waste because the system was broken.
“The whole water system had broken for, like, a week before I turned up, and people are now sh*tting in bags and trying to throw them in the bin,” he said. Inmates were reportedly limited to washing once every three days.
“Yeah, it is inhumane, what happens in there,” Hardy reflected of the overall experience.
Since his release, Hardy has urged other travellers to avoid shortcuts with Thai visas entirely. He insisted anyone facing problems should deal directly with immigration authorities rather than unofficial fixers, even if that risks swift deportation.