When the door closes: Independent monitoring as pandemic preparedness in Southeast Asian prisons 

In this expert blog for PRI, author Nasrul Ismail shares findings from the Penal Pandemic Project, a British Academy-funded study examining how prisons in Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines responded to COVID-19. The blog argues that pandemic preparedness is fundamentally a governance issue, showing how the suspension of independent monitoring during the crisis delayed detection of harm and weakened accountability. It introduces a new twelve-indicator framework, developed with partners, aimed at helping prison systems build in safeguards before the next crisis hits. 

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When COVID-19 arrived in early 2020, prisons across the world found themselves in an impossible position, since institutions designed for close and controlled contact suddenly needed distance, quarantine and elaborate infection control. Family visits stopped almost overnight, court hearings shifted online or were suspended and in many countries the ordinary channels through which the outside world could see into places of detention (lawyers, families, faith visitors, and independent monitors) went quiet or dark. What happened during that silence is only beginning to come into view. 

Over the past two years, the Penal Pandemic Project team has been examining how prison systems in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines responded to the pandemic. Funded by the British Academy and led from the University of Bristol, the project has combined analysis of 154 government policy documents, detailed interviews with 37 senior officials from prison administrations, health agencies, national human rights institutions, civil society and international organisations, along with financial data on prison spending across more than a decade. Our full project report presents the emerging picture in detail and it challenges some comfortable assumptions about how prisons prepare for health emergencies, including several assumptions that continue to shape how we plan for the next one. 

Preparedness begins with governance 

Ask a public health expert about pandemic preparedness in prisons and the conversation often turns quickly to clinical questions about testing regimes, cohorting, ventilation and supplies of protective equipment. These all matter, of course, though our research suggests they sit downstream of a more fundamental issue: whether the institutional arrangements that govern a prison make preparedness possible in the first place. 

Overcrowding illustrates the wider point clearly, and Malaysia offers a striking example. During the pandemic, procedural adaptations were sophisticated: task forces were formed, field hospitals were established inside prison compounds and digital court appearances kept legal processes moving. Yet the structural condition that mattered most, namely severe and long-standing overcrowding, remained largely untouched throughout the crisis. We describe this as a pattern of procedural resilience proceeding alongside structural fragility, and similar patterns appeared in Thailand, where the pandemic exposed dormitories designed for thirty people housing two hundred, and in the Philippines, where hard internal lockdowns became the default response precisely because there was little infrastructure available for anything less blunt. 

The uncomfortable conclusion is that governance conditions shape pandemic response deeply. Where a preparedness problem is fundamentally about political priorities and institutional design, better clinical protocols cannot resolve it on their own. 

Harm compounds when oversight is kept in the dark 

Our most striking finding concerns transparency and independent oversight. During the pandemic, monitoring bodies in many countries found their access to places of detention restricted or suspended, an approach that was often framed as an infection-control necessity because monitoring visits, like family visits, could bring the virus in. In the moment, the logic seemed entirely reasonable. 

Across all three countries we studied, a consistent pattern emerged. Where independent monitoring lapsed, problems inside prisons were detected later, responses were less proportionate and lockdown measures often continued long past the point where they were medically necessary. Some of the most consequential decisions of the crisis, taken in its earliest and most confusing weeks, could not be examined at all, because there had been no external observer present to see them. Deaths, mental-health emergencies and welfare failures were sometimes not documented until much later, when the acute phase had passed. 

This has a significant implication for how we think about monitoring itself. Independent monitoring, so often understood as a rights-protection safeguard bolted onto a well-run prison system, seems during a crisis to function as an operational feedback mechanism in its own right, a control loop that lets prison authorities themselves know what is happening inside their institutions. Prison staff we interviewed largely accepted this reading, with many telling us that trusted monitoring relationships established before a crisis made outbreak governance considerably easier when it came. One senior human rights commissioner captured the point elegantly, observing that when independent monitors speak, people tend to believe them, in a way that rarely happens when the same message comes only from within the system itself. 

The practical implication follows naturally: access for national human rights institutions, ombudspersons and other independent monitors should be built into pandemic response plans in advance, with remote and digital modalities available for use where in-person visits are genuinely constrained. Waiting to negotiate that access at the point of crisis when the door is already closing tends to guarantee that it will not arrive in time. 

What we are building 

Our project has now moved from analysis into a more practical phase. Working with partners in all three countries and with an international advisory board that includes the World Health Organization, Penal Reform International, DIGNITY and the Thailand Institute of Justice, we are developing a set of practical governance tools that emerge directly from what the comparative work revealed. 

At the centre of this work sits the Southeast Asian Custodial Preparedness Indicator Framework, a small set of twelve governance indicators that prison administrations, health agencies and oversight bodies can use to assess how ready their systems are for the next crisis. The indicators cover what matters most in practice:  

• whether occupancy thresholds exist to force review when populations exceed safe limits;  

• whether prison health is genuinely integrated into the national health system, with real referral and financing arrangements in place;  

• whether outbreak protocols are current, exercised, and reviewed after action; 

•  whether people detained retain meaningful contact with families and legal representatives during restrictions; and, most critically,  

• whether independent monitoring access is formally guaranteed in emergency plans so that access holds when a crisis actually arrives. 

We have designed the framework as a learning instrument, useful for institutional review and honest dialogue between partners within a system. Its purpose is to offer prison authorities, oversight bodies and multilateral partners a shared vocabulary for talking about what preparedness actually looks like and about what it would take to build in the ordinary, uncrowded years before the next crisis arrives. 

Looking forward 

Another pandemic will arrive at some point, whether soon or in a generation. When it does, the questions that Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines faced in 2020 will be faced again, in different combinations, by prison systems around the world. The clearest lesson from COVID-19 is that governance conditions determine whether clinical knowledge and technical resources can actually be used, at speed and with accountability, inside a place of detention. Some of the most important safeguards, with independent monitoring foremost among them, were the first things to be suspended at precisely the moment they were most needed. 

A deeper question about the pandemic’s legacy is one that our work has only recently begun to address. In a recent paper published in the Global Social Challenges Journal, my colleagues in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines and I drew on the Ship of Theseus analogy from ancient Greek philosophy, which asks whether a vessel remains the same ship after all its parts have been gradually replaced over time. Prisons across Southeast Asia absorbed real change during the pandemic, ranging from digital visitation platforms and health-screening systems to centralised data reporting. Whether those changes altered the underlying character of these institutions or made them more capable of absorbing future shocks without addressing what drives imprisonment in the first place is one of the central questions the field will need to work through in the years ahead. 

The encouraging news is that much of this is fixable, since the institutions and the frameworks are already emerging. What is needed is apolitical and institutional commitmentto embed preparedness into the ordinary running of prisons.When the next crisis comes, weshould not be starting from scratch, and the doors should not close next time on the people who need it most.