j*oono wrote:
Pardoning them from the death penalty doesn't mean they would be released from jail though. They are useful to others in the jail so I think they are gainfully employed already.
icyfroth wrote:
Who's paying them? Other prisoners who are either long-term or on the waiting list for execution themselves?
Certainly the Indon government get no benefit from them.
Do you even know what these two Australians have been doing while in prison?
... that to eat in the prison, inmates needed $2.50 a day. The average daily wage in Bali was the equivalent of $4 per day and so the bonsai plants that lined the quadrangle were an elderly convict's means of earning enough money for food without further burdening his family. The prison warden allowed the convict's family to sell the more mature bonsais in a Balinese flower market.
Another young convict sets up every day to dry paper-thin layers of ground rice. The rice cakes dry in the sun and are sold to other convicts and prison staff. I was hungry and they looked good. Chickens run the length of the art rooms, hemmed in by flimsy wire against the massive prison wall.
Over the next 12 months the warden of Kerobokan Prison allowed Myu's creative output to be sold as well, with all the profits pumping back into the art studio.
More than 40 convicts from every corner of the world meet studiously every weekday to attend art classes and the paintings that the students are willing to part with are sold in stalls in the bustling tourist markets of Bali.
