Hong Kong: on the inside looking out, doing life in HK’s maximum security prison

Mario de los Reyes is gasping for air. It’s just after midday on a hot afternoon in late May and the sun is baking the concrete yard where the 64-year-old has been playing football with fellow maximum security inmates at Stanley Prison. But this isn’t just the heat and exertion from exercise; something is wrong.

This fatigue is abrupt, like a switch has been flipped and his energy zapped immediately. His face flushed, he staggers to the side of the field and slumps to the ground. Soon, medical staff appear at his side. In this, his 24th year in prison, Mario is having a heart attack.

A quarter of a century ago, Mario was involved in a violent altercation in Sai Kung. A man was fatally stabbed. While the attacker who wielded the knife was never caught, Mario and another man were convicted on a joint-enterprise charge of murder. He is now among 264 inmates in Hong Kong serving an indeterminate life sentence, meaning there is no set date for release.

After 10 rejections, and following the health scare in May, he’s holding out hope of release next year. But, with the review board characterized as harsh by critics, uncertainty prevails.

While life in prison implies a definite, albeit long, jail term in some countries, those serving indeterminate sentences in Hong Kong have no fixed date of release. Their fate, instead, rests in the hands of the Long-term Prison Sentence Review Board, which makes recommendations to the city’s leader.

The board’s decision-making process has been criticized as opaque and harsh by prisoners’ rights advocates, with inmates often legally unrepresented and rarely given the chance to present their case in person.

Outcomes, usually, are negative. Of 221 indeterminate sentences reviewed in the past two years, 21 were recommended for conversion to a finite term. The board also advises on sentence reductions for terms of longer than 10 years. It’s reviewed 510 in the past two years. It’s reduced six.

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