Maryam Tadin was 21 years old when she was sentenced to death.
Police found more than half a million pills of “yaba”, an illegal cocktail of methamphetamine and caffeine popular in many parts of Southeast Asia, in the house she was renting in southern Thailand.
“I spent 20 years, five months and 15 days in prison. I was sentenced to death, along with a man who was executed by lethal injection.
I knew I was next, that I was going to die.
There were enough yaba pills in that house to fill the stomach Complete truck. They were not mine; But it didn’t matter.
I got to jail and everything happened fast: I was accused of drug trafficking and sentenced to death. At that time, I was ready to die.
death penalty stigma
For the next two years I had to wear a sign at all times that read Death Penalty. I faced death for eight years. But during the last two I accepted it because I was put on a special training course to face the countdown to death.
That same year, there was a major flood and I was transferred to another jail. There I was told that I had been granted royal pardon on death. My Nigerian friends also got amnesty. There were nine of us. We baked the cake.
Mariam Tadin has shown a video in which her entire village is coming to welcome her after her release from jail.
We were relieved to be alive, although I thought I was already dead, as I was spending the rest of my life in jail.
However, I told myself: It’s going to be a long wait, so I should focus on something.
I learned to sew in prison classes and then was put to work. The more I worked, the more meaning I felt.
I focused on the fabric and thread patterns. Thread after thread. Every day.
I also earned privileges like being in prison with 4,000 other women, like showering later in the day. Life became easier.
The hardest time for me was when I was transferred to Songkhla Prison in southern Thailand. Other prisoners were very poor.
Prisoners in a prison in southern Thailand take part in sewing training.
It was difficult for me because at one point my family stopped meeting me. They thought I would stay in jail forever. What did you mean by going? My husband moved forward; He remarried. It was very difficult to figure out.
I’m very proud of how I was able to focus on work. I will focus on different patterns.
I won’t allow myself to focus on my story, which is why I went to jail. Or on my husband’s new life. I couldn’t change him. it had been. I needed to move forward.
When I felt bad thoughts coming, I would go back to the fabric, to the pattern.
patterns of life and death
Everything changed during the 2004 tsunami. I was asked to sew cloth bags for dead bodies. I kept cutting a lot of clothes because there were a lot of deaths.
In this way I became disoriented about my life. I will focus on patterns.
In 2021, Maryam received a second royal pardon for good conduct at the age of 52 and was released from prison. The owner of a tailoring business, who had previously trained prisoners, offered him a job. Today, at 56, she works and sews, and lives with her children and husband, with whom she has been reunited.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)UNODC) has provided vocational training equipment to approximately 60 prisons in Thailand, enabling access to practical skills such as woodworking and sewing, increasing opportunities for prisoners during and after imprisonment.
