Man sent to Thai prison over passport issue describes 'inhumane' conditions inside jail

A British man who ended up behind bars in Thailand after a visa arrangement went badly wrong has opened up about just how grim conditions got inside the country's prison system.

Oliver Hardy was living in Thailand in 2023 when he tried to switch from a standard tourist visa to one that would let him train in Muay Thai long-term.

Rather than going through official channels, he paid a stranger he'd met at a gym roughly 40,000 baht ($1,220) to sort the paperwork for him, a decision that would unravel his life for well over a year.

The documents turned out to be forged.

Hardy was charged with using fake papers and with overstaying his visa, and a court in Bangkok handed him a sentence that worked out at 16 months inside Bangkok Remand Prison.

Speaking to LADbible for its Minutes With series, Hardy said it was the physical conditions, as much as anything else, that broke him down early on.

Brit Oliver Hardy ended up spending over a year in a Thai prison following a grave visa mistake (LADbible Stories)

What were conditions like inside the Thai prison?

Hardy told LADbible the first couple of months were the hardest, largely down to the heat.

He was arrested in March, meaning he served much of his early sentence through April, typically the hottest month in Thailand, when temperatures can climb toward 97°F.

His cell had a single fan and no windows, just open railings, meaning he was effectively exposed to the elements around the clock.

"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."

'It is inhumane, what happens in there'

Conditions were worse still during a stint in an immigration detention centre, where he says as many as 120 foreign detainees were crammed into a single room 'like sardines'.

He said that it was not uncommon to sleep with someone else's feet in your face.

Hardy also described the food as barely edible, and said a week-long breakdown in the prison's water supply left inmates going to extreme lengths just to stay clean.

The prison had dozens of inmates crammed into one room (Getty Stock Photo)

Oliver described the prison's 'extremely bad smell', which is caused by prisoners 'pooing on top of each other's poo', because the water system was broken.

He said: "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.

Prisoners were reportedly limited to washing once every three days.

"Yeah, it is inhumane, what happens in there," Hardy said of the overall experience.

Hardy was sent to Bangkok Remand Prison, where he said the conditions were 'inhumane' (Photo by JACK TAYLOR/AFP via Getty Images)

What was Oliver Hardy's Thai prison sentence for?

Hardy has explained that he'd been trying to do things properly, seeking out a long-stay visa so he could keep training, but was scammed by a man posing as a visa fixer.

He only realized something was wrong when other travellers pointed out that his paperwork didn't match the genuine process.

By then, he was already in overstay and unable to fix it.

Matters escalated when he flew back into the country through a different airport for a family visit and immigration staff spotted stamps in his passport for flights he'd never taken.

He was interrogated for roughly eight hours before being sent to court, where a fake-document charge and an overstay charge combined into a custodial sentence.

He's since urged other travellers not to take shortcuts with Thai visas, insisting anyone with a problem should deal directly with immigration authorities rather than unofficial fixers, even if it risks a swift deportation.