On happiness—notes from prison
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Who is James Ricketson and why was he imprisoned in Cambodia?
This is an ABC podcast.
Hi, it's all in the mind on RN. I'm Lynn Malcolm. Today, insights into happiness from a miserable prison cell in Cambodia.
Uh searches by prison officials, I'm hoping that they haven't.
confiscated my books. James is on a high at the boat. He's out of prison. He's come home. There's that whole surprise, that feeling of freedom.
When I first heard that James was arrested and charged with espionage, I I probably
laughed. Australian filmmaker James Rickardson is facing 10 years in prison if he is found guilty of espionage. Mr Rickardson was arrested last year after flying a drone above a political rally in Nom Penn. There's one stage where we thought he was gonna die. He looked like a caged lion. He was covered in saws and fleas and bed bugs. We realized this is a hellhole. Evidence at all that I'm guilty of any crime.
From ABC's Australian story broadcast in December last year. Journalist and filmmaker James Rickerson's love affair, as he puts it, with Cambodia, began more than 20 years ago when he read an article about the plight of street kids there. As a privileged person, he felt compelled to help and subsequently supported and adopted a young Cambodian girl called Shanti, who now sees him as the grandfather to her children. His ongoing interest in Cambodia and its politics led him to fly a drone to film an anti-government rally in Phnom Penh in June 2017. Soon after that, he found himself surrounded by 13 police who violently arrested him with no warrant and charged him with espionage, a charge he denies.
He was held in the notoriously overcrowded and under-resourced prison called Pray Sar for 15 months until he was pardoned for the offence by Cambodian authorities in September 2018. He then returned to Australia. James Rickardson first explained to me the conditions he was living in at Praysow Prison.
I was in three or four different cells. The cell that I spent most of the time in was 140 plus prisoners. We had about one square metre each with our living space. Because I'm basically two meters tall, it meant that my space was two meters by half a metre, essentially a coffin space for me to to live in. There were only three squat toilets for say 140 men. We were in the cells for twenty hours a day. I was very fortunate because I'm white and because I had some money. I was able to get out of the cell for four hours a day, roughly, and I'd spend all of that time walking and talking to some friends that I made in there. Most of the prisoners didn't have that opportunity. Most of them would get maybe twenty minutes a week out of the cell.
So the the living conditions are very, very cramped. It's very hot and the humidity is close to a hundred percent. So it's very uncomfortable.
What were the living conditions like inside Prey Sar prison?
Anybody who has scabies in the cell gives it to everybody else. Anybody who has the flu gives it to everybody else. So everything everything is shared and everybody's sick. Or most people are sick most of the time.
So you didn't really know Exactly how long you were going to end up in jail, did you No. Can you describe the r the range of emotions that you experienced in any one day?
Well, what I found most curious was that I experienced a very similar range of emotions in jail to the ones that I experienced out of jail. There wasn't a huge difference. Of course there were times when I was very pissed off, there were times when I was angry, there were times when I got into battles with the guards and battles with the um investigating judge. But fortunately my son came to live in Cambodia and bought me books and bought me healthy food. And I found myself slipping very quickly into a kind of a routine that was I was gonna say not dissimilar to the routine that I have back in Australia. It was completely different, of course, but I in emotional terms it wasn't all that different. And I think that one of the reasons for that, and this is kind of curious, I'm still in a sense processing this, is that when you're in jail you don't have very much choice about anything at all, right?
And there's a certain kind of freedom that comes with not having choices.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is James Ricketson and why was he imprisoned in Cambodia?
0:02–3:42
2
What were the living conditions like inside Prey Sar prison?
3:42–7:08
3
How did James cope with the lack of choice and extreme confinement?
7:08–10:49
4
What role did reading and writing play in his daily routine?
10:49–14:32
5
How did he build relationships with guards and fellow inmates?
14:32–17:13
6
What insights did he gain about happiness and resilience from prison?
17:13–20:33
7
How does he view happiness versus contentment in modern life?
20:33–24:13
8
What future projects does James plan to create to share his lessons on happiness?
24:13–29:05