If both prisoners remain silent, they can both go free. But each is afraid the other will implicate him, and both realize that if they don't talk, they might get the worst punishment. From an individual standpoint, each prisoner has every incentive to confess and implicate the other. But from a collective standpoint, the total result of each prisoner following the best strategy for him personally is the worst possible result for both prisoners as a pair.
This (highly simplified) model assumes one important thing: that the jailers can be trusted to deliver on their promises. In Cambodia and Malaysia today, a few prisoners are facing a dilemma of their own, and the assumption that the cops are honest is absolutely invalid. Former Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok, the one-legged general known as "The Butcher," has recently been arrested and charged under a 1994 law banning the radical group that was responsible for over one millions deaths in the 1970s. Several other former Khmer Rouge leaders are also being held, while the government decides how best to prosecute. The former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, is currently on trial for a slew of charges of high treason and gay sex.
The choice they all face is a familiar one to political scientists and prosecutors alike: if they openly confess, and implicate others (including, in the Cambodian case, each other), they are likely to receive a reduced punishment, if any. But if they resist the temptation to self-interested behavior and stonewall their inquisitors, according to the prisoners' dilemma theory, they are more likely to walk free for lack of evidence. How well does the social science theory apply to these political prisoners in Cambodia and Malaysia?
Let's start with Cambodia. Two other high level Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, left their posts in the outlying forests last December and returned to the Phnom Penh. Cambodia's Prime Minister, Hun Sen, ordered that they be greeted with garlands and kisses, in the spirit of reconciliation. Hun Sen (himself a former Khmer Rouge soldier), at first promised amnesty to the pair, but later recanted under considerable international and domestic political pressure. Ta Mok, on the other hand, was arrested last month, and is being kept under heavy military guard.
