Living Conditions of the Nearly Three Hundred Practitioners Still Detained in the Shandong Province Women's Prison

At the northeastern corner of the intersection of Gongyenan Street and Huaxin Street in the Licheng District, Jinan City, Shandong Province, there are a group of white buildings behind a high wall covered with barbed wire on top. Along the wall there are watchtowers, one after another, a short distance apart with fully armed police on patrol. The Shandong Province Women's Prison is where nearly three hundred Falun Gong practitioners are currently being detained.

There is no way that an outside person can find its main gate. You can only see a south facing entrance with a placard saying "Shandong Province Xingye Development Company."

The next door to the north is the Shandong Province Men's Prison with no placard at the entrance.

A lot of inhumane tragedies are deeply buried here.

When you go through the gate marked "Xingye Development Company" and walk to the north through a red and white arch, you will see the placards "Shandong Province Women's Prison" and "Inspection Room of the Shandong Province Women's Prison" on both sides of the iron gate facing west located between the prison hospital and the sixth ward.

Inside the iron gate is a moderate sized courtyard surrounded by several white prison buildings that are also workshops holding more than 2,000 people. The prison was originally built to hold 1,200 inmates, but now it is severely overcrowded. The prison authorities do not fear this fact being known to the public. Currently the prison detains nearly 300 Falun Gong practitioners. The inmates do hard labour without pay, bringing tremendous financial benefits to the privileged authorities.

The Distribution of Different Wards and Buildings Inside the Prison

Inside the main gate and to its left is the prison hospital building, where there is a lockup chamber in the north wing of the first floor. Neighbouring the lockup chamber is the prison orientation team. Any new prisoners must stay in this orientation team first, where they are forced to go through a series of mind-distorting so-called "education." This orientation team has now become a place where practitioners are coerced by all kinds of low-handed methods to give up their belief. This is the so-called "transformation¹." After their transformation they will then be assigned to other wards to do heavy manual labour. The orientation team is located on the first floor in the west section of the south-facing building. On the second floor there are the second, third and seventh wards. The open area in front of the building near the flag pole is often used to hold meetings and stage performances.

Across from the main gate and to the east of the courtyard is a small, west-facing building. The first floor has a boiler room and a dining hall and the second floor is the auditorium. The basement used to be the fourth team's workshop. The basement is air-tight, without light and is filled with filthy air. The inmates are often forced to do manual labour from early morning until late night. Sometimes they have to work though the night until dawn. In August of one year, the fourth team's inmates were forced by the prison authorities to work continuously in the basement for eight days and nights, without being allowed to go back to the prison cells for sleep. When they felt sleepy they could only lie down on the floor with their clothes on for half an hour before getting back to work. Practitioners' prison uniforms were soaked in sweat and became smelly. Many people fainted from the extreme fatigue and heat, but the guards just ignored them as if they did not see anything. After these inhumane tortures and ill treatments were relayed and finally exposed on the Internet, international pressure forced the prison authorities to put up a deceiving appearance and they moved the workshop to the slavery labour building by the side of the street.

To the south of the courtyard is the building of the sixth and eighth wards, division of education, juvenile section, and the fifth ward's prison cells and workshop. The west half of the building is the sixth ward, where the first and second floors are production areas. The third and fourth floors are prison cells. The sixth ward consists of all kinds of inmates from other wards who are old, weak, disabled or mentally ill. Those mentally ill all became mentally ill after they were sent to the prison, where they face endless prison terms, do heavy manual labour day in and day out, and suffer from loneliness. To make it worse, Falun Gong practitioners are forced to go through brainwashing sessions and are even injected with a poisonous drug that harms the central nervous system. All these sufferings make their prison lives even harder. In spite of all the sufferings, the ward authorities would not release them but instead exploited them to an extent just as inhumane as other wards. The workshop hours are usually over ten hours per day. After the regular hours, inmates have to routinely take work back to their cells to continue.

To the north of the main gate are two newer buildings holding slave labour workshops. One of the two buildings is right by the street, across which is a newly developed modern residential area. As there are always lights on at night in the workshop, the people living nearby including business owners and passers-by have a direct feel of the inhumane slave labour. Under pressure from media, the prison once again tricked the public and forced the inmates to take their work back to their prison cells to continue after a long day's labour (usually over 10 hours). Sometimes, in order to trick the inspectors, inmates have to suddenly stop the work at hand and evacuate the workshop. In the dark and in a hurry. It happened so often that a water heater was broken and people got burned by the boiling water splashing out.

This is the exterior of the "Ministry Level Modern and Civilised Prison" named by the malicious and conniving CCP's Ministry of Justice.

Since 2000, the warden Yin Guangxia, deputy warden Li Shuying, and political instructor Wei Jianhua made an effort to carry out the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) order of persecuting Falun Gong practitioners. For those practitioners who would not be "transformed" and those who have come back to believing in Falun Gong after serious thinking after being "transformed," they would lock them up in solitary cells repeatedly.

In the solitary cell, which is two meters wide and four meters long, there is a bed 40 centimetres high and made of cement. There is also a water tap and basin and the walls are covered in quake proof blankets. It is very cold in winter. It is even more uncomfortable in summer because the summer in Jinan City is very hot. Anyone in this place will feel that it is hard to breathe with sweat all over her body. Furthermore, there are a lot of mosquitoes in summer. When Falun Gong practitioners are locked in this solitary cell, they are given salty vegetable pieces for all three meals daily. For each week, three and half days are for regular buns (125 grams each and one per meal) and three and half days for small buns (as small as the eyeball of a bull and only one per meal). The criminal inmates often follow the guards' orders to beat steadfast practitioners so as to get their prison terms reduced.

Note

1. "Reform or Transform" Implementation of brainwashing and torture in order to force a practitioner to renounce Falun Gong. (Variations: "reform", "transform", "reformed", "reforming", "transformed", "transforming", and "transformation")

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2007/7/28/159736.html