“The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.”
That was said by the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and he knew something about prisons as he
spent four years in a Siberian prison camp.
He described his quarters like this, “In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter,
unendurable cold.
All the floors were rotten.
Filth on the floors an inch thick.
We were packed like herrings in a barrel.
From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs.”
While a 23-hour lockdown in a modern prison in the USA might be bad, contending with daily
violence, bullying, and boredom- there are some places in the world where, say, you might
wake up with a dead fellow next to you; you might be tortured, or you might live in abject
filth.
And those are the places we’ll visit today.
First of all, to know the world’s worst prisons we have to be able to research them.
The prisons we will include are those that have been home to people, often foreign prisoners,
or media for a short while, who have documented their experience.
There might be worse places we just haven’t heard about as some prisoners in far flung
places around the world haven’t written books, talked to media, or the prisons haven’t
allowed humanitarian organizations within their walls.
Now let’s start.
6.
The Bangkok Hilton There is probably no prison that has been
written about more by former foreign inmates than the Bangkok Hilton, known formerly as
Bang Kwang Prison.
Thailand has been home to many foreign criminals, and with a busy airport and being part of
the Golden Triangle (where much of the world’s heroin used to come from) it’s also been
home to many a desperate drug mule.
It still is.
The Thais nickname it the “Big Tiger” because when you go in, you get stalked and
then swallowed and often don’t come out.
As Warren Fellows described in his book, “The Damage Done”, you might go to sleep in a
packed cell and wake up to find someone has died next to you.
Disease is rife, and if you get out of hand, as has been described by many former inmates,
you might get beaten to death or close to it.
The book The Damage Done is quite old now, but you can read recent books where men describe
their first day, still in shackles (that often cause infection) and join a cell of 60 men.
There isn’t even enough space to turn at night, you are literally sardines in a can
being bitten by mosquitos in oppressive heat.
Then, still shackled, you might have to cross a lot of men that don’t want to be touched
to get to the one toilet in the cell.
This will no doubt happen as the water is often not clean and prisoners get stomach
bugs and dysentery.
As one person put it, people have to survive “human-rights abuses beyond imagination.”
And it’s bad for the women, too.
One former prisoner told the Guardian in 2000.
“But the worst was the beatings.
Old women and the mentally ill were all shoved in together and often beaten.
I saw a pregnant woman being battered by sticks.
It was terrible to watch.
One woman was really sick and died in our cell.
The guards told her family she had slit her wrists, but it was because they didn't get
her a doctor.”
The guards are people seemingly without any morals that spend their lives exploiting prisoners,
beating them, killing them.
The abuses are so many we just can’t list them all, but we can tell that those that
have survived the Big Tiger usually have one epithet for the place: Hell.
So, next time someone approaches you in a bar in Thailand and talks about how you can
make easy money, walk away or you might end up living on a diet of fish head soup and
dirty river water with another 8,000 desperate criminals.
The worst off prisoners are the ones with no money, which are often the prisoners from
parts of Africa that have been found dealing drugs in Thailand.
They often have no contact with anyone and no backup from embassies or organizations,
making them vulnerable to torturous prison staff.
You might get 10 years for murder in Thailand, but 50 years for selling illegal substances.
The justice system is often crooked, too, and many people here have complained about
being set up, then extorted.
If they say no to a cash payment, it’s behind bars they go…and as for getting an honest
lawyer, good luck with that.
5.
Sabaneta Prison, Maracaibo, Venezuela Given that Venezuela has an astronomical number
of murders, mostly related to gang violence, you might not be surprised to hear that the
prisons there can be dangerous places.
In 2013, the media reported that 16 prisoners were killed in one riot.
“Some of the inmates were beheaded and others dismembered,” wrote the BBC.
This is a different kind of animal from the first prison we talked about, in that while
you might still suffer from disease and malnutrition, the frightening aspect is that much of the
prison is controlled by the gangs.
In 2013 alone 69 prisoners were killed by other prisoners, which is more than the number
of homicides in some European countries for an entire year.
In 1994, 108 prisoners died in a riot.
There is hardly any space, and around 3,700 men are packed in a place that should only
take a maximum of 700 people.
The Venezuelan Prison Observatory tells us that 80 percent of the prisons in the country
are run by inmates, so while in some terrible South East Asian prisons you might find yourself
bowing and crawling in chains all day, in this kind of prison it’s the gang violence
that is the major concern of any prisoner.
The Economist writes that during one search guards found, “assault rifles, hand grenades,
a submachine-gun and 5,000 rounds of ammunition.”
This is how one writer explains the place, “Poor, low-status inmates are forced to
pay the more powerful inmates just to secure a place to sleep, and if they want water,
many prisoners must drink straight from corroded bathroom pipes.”
And former president Hugo Chavez famously called it “the gateway to the fifth circle
of hell.”
4.
Black Dolphin Prison, Russia And this is another kind of hell from the
two places we have talked about.
The living conditions may not be as bad and there are no heavy-handed gangs, but Russia’s
most infamous lock-up is home to the country’s worst criminals.
It houses only life sentence inmates, many with convictions of murder, terrorism, sick
acts with children and even cannibalism.
They get 90-minutes exercise in a day, but while under constant supervision they are
not allowed to sit down on their bunk for the 16-hours they are awake.
If they get moved around, they are blindfolded and put in a stress position.
Food equals soup and bread, four times a day.
As many prisoners are in for homicide, Business Insider tells us that there is an average
of five murders per inmate.
We’ve seen plenty of photographs inside this prison, and compared to the other places
it is extremely clean and well-organized.
But when you consider you are in with only Russia’s most depraved criminals, and the
fact the guards treat you like a madman (you most likely are if you are there), it’s
one place you certainly don’t want to end up.
3.
Saydnaya prison, Damascus Again, this is a different type of hell.
The Guardian reported in 2017, “Thousands of civilians considered opponents of the regime
are systematically starved, deliberately dehumanized, mercilessly tortured and finally hanged in
the utmost secrecy in the dead of night, 20 to 50 at a time.”
We are told starvation is common and so are “sadistic beatings.”
This information came from former guards at the prison, while Amnesty took statements
from 31 former Saydnaya detainees.
We are told the prisoners have to sit in certain positions when guards are around; they are
not allowed to talk, or even whisper, and they can’t even make a sound while they
are being beaten, according to testimonies.
This is part of one of those testimonies, “If you keep silent, you will get less beating
at Saydnaya.
But these people were screaming like they had lost their minds … It wasn’t a normal
sound – it was not ordinary.
It sounded like they were skinning them alive.”
Before being hanged, we are told there is a mockery of a trial that lasts a few minutes
with no evidence, no lawyers, and a predetermined guilty verdict.
Then you are handed a death sentence and sent back to your cell for some more torture.
2.
Diyarbakır Prison, Turkey If you’re an American who has seen the movie
“Midnight Express” you might harbor a special fear of Turkish prisons.
Saying that, things have changed in the world since that film came out, a movie depicting
the story of a young man brutalized while doing time for trying to take weed home to
the land of the free (if you discount the US’s massive prison population, that is).
Well, it seems this prison sounds a lot like the one depicted in that movie.
This is how one former inmate described a day in the life there, “One day I was told
to stand on one foot.
After some time I collapsed.
This was to be punished.
They made me open the lid of the sewage near the wall and take a handful of excrement and
put it in my mouth.
I was ordered to stand at attention with the excrement in my mouth without moving and without
spitting it out.”
Admittedly, that still happened some time ago.
In 1996, 10 inmates were killed by guards during what guards said was a riot, but it
later transpired that some of the guards acted with undue extreme violence.
We are told the barbarity isn’t anything like it was before, but still, as prisons
go this place has to be on a “worst” list.
For a time it had the title of being the prison with the most human rights violations per
prisoner in the world.
Camp 22, North Korea It’s not easy getting information about
anything that happens in North Korea, but we know that if you break the rules there
you might at one point have joined around 50,000 prisoners at Camp 22.
A former guard there has talked to the media about what he saw, saying he regularly witnessed
people next to starvation, people missing limbs, missing other parts of their body,
and just in terrible condition.
He said for sustenance the people would often eat snakes, insects or frogs they could catch,
while if you broke the rules hell was on its way.
Two former guards talked about regular torture and executions, with one of them saying he
witnessed an entire family, including children, getting gassed.
Torture, according to those guards, also took the form or water torture.
But if you think that’s bad, there is something called hanging torture, where the victim is
hung upside down and beaten.
Then there is box torture, where a prisoner is put in a box for days enclosed in a space
where its impossible to stand or lie down.
Kneeling torture means kneeling in a position with something hard attached to the knees
that causes loss of blood flow.
We are told this often disables the person for life or later kills them.
We are also told there was a part of the prison where inmates were experimented on.
Some reports now say the place has closed, and some prisoners were moved on.
To where we don’t know, but reports say within a short time 27,000 people died at
Camp 22, so we expect it was easy enough to relocate inmates under ground.
Which of these places would you least like to go, what prison do you think should be
on the list?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Prison Escapes That Went Horribly Wrong.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.