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According to Ho Ngoc Nhuan, an opposition member of South Viet Nam's lower house, many of the prisoners "have never committed a political act in their lives. Political activities have been excuses used against the poor who haven't the money to protect themselves from police corruption." There is even a kind of fixed scale of bribes. A suspect against whom nothing definite has been found may be able to buy his release for $3 or $4. More prosperous businessmen are held up for more; if gold or large amounts of currency are found in their possession when they are arrested, for instance, the rate can soar to several hundred dollars. Prisoners seriously suspected of Communist or antigovernment activity sometimes are able to buy their way out and sometimes not. Many of them are tortured for confessions, which in South Viet Nam are admissible in court no matter how obtained.
Horror stories of torture by security agents abound, and most Saigonese accept them as true. One woman recently released from central police headquarters reported that her interrogators shoved a rubber stick up her vagina. She also claimed that police had tortured other women with electric shocks. Another woman, who never discovered why she was being held, was crammed for ten months with six others into a pit cage at the most notorious prison on Con Son island. "It smelled so foul at times that we wanted to die," she said. "When we asked for water, they dropped lime on us. It burned our skin and eventually blinded me." Prisoners who cannot buy their food from guards subsist on the prison diet of rice, salt and occasional dried fish.
"The distinction between revolutionaries and others disappears in prison," says a 26-year-old social worker who was jailed for two months on the excuse that his identification card was mutilated. The prisoners' common enmity toward Thieu is bound to complicate negotiations over their release. It is unlikely that the political prisoners will be granted their freedom until Thieu is forced to act by international agreement. But by throwing more people into jail, meanwhile, the government is enlarging the ranks of the anti-Thieu activists.