From palace to prison: Impeached Park goes behind bars!

• A court on Friday ordered the ousted South Korean leader arrested as a criminal suspect in a vast corruption and influence-peddling scandal.

AFP/Seoul

Daughter of a dictator and later head of state herself, South Korea's Park Geun-Hye has spent nearly two decades living in Seoul's sprawling presidential palace. Now she will be locked in a cell, eating $1.30 meals and doing her own washing up.

A court on Friday ordered the ousted South Korean leader arrested as a criminal suspect in the vast corruption and influence-peddling scandal that brought millions of people into the streets, and culminated with her impeachment.

She will join other key figures in the scandal, including her secret confidante Choi Soon-Sil and the heir to the Samsung business empire Lee Jae-Yong, at the Seoul Detention Centre in Uiwang.

The complex south of the capital is made up of cell blocks - women and men are segregated - and other facilities, behind a barbed wire fence and a high wall interspersed with watch towers.
Its list of past residents reads like a Who's Who of South Korean business and politics, among them an army-backed ex-president jailed in the 1990s for bribery, a former spy chief, and SK Group chairman Chey Tae-Won, who leads the country's third-largest conglomerate.

Most detainees at the centre share 12-square-metre cells designed to hold about six people, but prominent figures stay in one-person facilities due to safety concerns.

The humble, 6.5-square-metre space features a foldable mattress on the floor serving as a bed, a television, a small cupboard, and a toilet and cold-water sink - although reports suggested that given her status Park could be allocated one of the larger cells to herself.

Inmates can use communal hot bathing facilities twice a week.

Three meals are provided, budgeted at 1,440 won ($1.30) each. Inmates are required to eat in their cell and wash the meal tray at the sink before returning it. No outside food is allowed.

Detainees are required to wear uniforms - the women's are green - with morning roll call at 6am and evening 9pm. An hour's outdoor exercise is allowed each day.

She'll eat $1.30 meals and do own laundry

> Park Geun-Hye has spent nearly two decades living in Seoul's sprawling presidential palace.
> She was caught in the vast corruption and influence-peddling scandal that brought millions of people into the streets.
> Now she will be locked in a cell, eating $1.30 meals and doing her own washing up.
> Given her status Park could be allocated one of the larger cells to herself.
> Inmates are required to eat in their cell and wash the meal tray at the sink before returning it.