Life behind bars

HONG KONG'S most gruesome museum opened in Stanley last week. The Correctional Services Museum is not for the faint-hearted. Be prepared for headless bodies and barbaric instruments of punishment. You can even peer through the bars of a prison cell.

The two-storey museum is a 10-minute walk from Stanley market and housed in the Correctional Services Department(CSD)'s former married officers' quarters. The CSD parade ground is next door, but the sound of the trainees going through their drills fades as you enter the museum. You are going back in time to a far more lawless Hong Kong.

These were the days when pirates regularly attacked ships, killing the crew and taking the cargo. Desperate times demanded desperate measures and the early Hong Kong courts were tough on hardened criminals - they were put to death. If a person was suspected of being a pirate, they were sent into Chinese territory where they were certain to be executed.

In the early days, those convicted of murder or piracy were sentenced to death and hung outside Victoria Prison on Hollywood Road. A chilling thought to consider next time you walk past Central Police Station. Later the executions were carried out at Stanley Prison, each one meticulously logged in a large leather-bound ledger. The museum has several such journals on display, recording the first hanging on April 1, 1946 and the last on November 16, 1966.

If you have a macabre interest in hangings, the museum will surely satisfy your curiosity. It has created a mock gallows. As you stare in awe at the hangman's noose firmly secured to a thick wooden beam, a voiceover details a condemned man's final hour.

Those whose crimes were not severe enough to warrant the death sentence faced jail terms in prisons that were much more brutal than today's. Victoria Prison, built in 1841, was the first. An underground tunnel was built to transfer prisoners from the police station to the prison. It soon became overcrowded and conditions were dire.