Prison.
The final frontier for some, a place where they end their days.
Others will get to leave, but wish they’d never step foot inside.
Here’s 50 things nobody tells you about prison.
50.
We’ll start with the USA, the country that can claim to lock more of its citizens up
than any other, and by a long way, too.
According to 2020 data, there were 2.3 million US citizens behind bars, but when we say bars,
that included federal and state prisons, jails, juvenile correctional facilities, and immigration
detention facilities.
Just so you know, these numbers are not exactly stable, but close.
People enter and leave facilities all the time.
49.
It works out at around 639 people behind bars for every 100,000 people.
The US is still number one in per capita terms.
Here are the countries that follow in the top ten.
The number is per 100,000: El Salvador, 562.
Turkmenistan, 552.
Palau, 552.
Rwanda, 511.
Cuba, 510.
Maldives, 449.
Virgin Islands (UK), 447.
Thailand, 443.
The Bahamas, 442.
Let’s stick with numbers for now.
We’ll get around to the messed-up stories soon, we promise.
48.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, in the US, 600,000 people enter prison each
year.
But that’s nothing compared to jail.
Around 10.6 million Americans enter jail every year.
If you’re wondering why that number is so high, it’s because many people get out of
jail very quickly, once they’ve got bail.
Some of them have already been convicted for small crimes, so stay there for a while.
They number about 160,000 people a year.
One-quarter of people who go to jail will be there again after release within a year.
Another reason for staying in jail is the simple fact that many poor people can’t
afford to make bail.
In 2019, the Chicago Tribune wrote that of the 5,736 inmates in Cook County Jail, 5,390
were waiting for a trial.
Half of them couldn’t afford to pay bail, or they didn’t have a place to stay where
they could be electronically monitored.
That begs the question, how many are innocent?
47.
It’s hard to say, because statistics tell us that a person is nine times more likely
to say they are guilty of a misdemeanor crime if they can’t make bail.
They just want to move things on, even if they are innocent.
In fact, 95 percent of cases never go to trial.
People take plea bargains, sometimes if they’re innocent.
That doesn’t mean prisons are teeming with innocent people, but quite a few people have
been wrongly convicted of a crime.
The Innocence Project says it’s between 2.3 percent and 5 percent of prisoners in
the US.
Other sources put it as high as 10 percent.
But why?
46.
The answer is for many reasons.
Some innocent people take a plea, especially if they think they have a less-than-great
lawyer and they’ve been convinced that if the case goes to trial, they are looking at
a hefty prison sentence.
In court, an innocent person could lose because of prosecutorial misconduct, or because a
witness lied, or even a cop lied.
Maybe during the interrogation, the police were somewhat heavy-handed, and the victim
was overwhelmed.
Let’s now look at an extreme case when this happened.
45.
We’ve picked on the US enough, so now we’ll sail across the pond to the UK.
In 1974, a 17-year old council worker named Stephen Downing confessed to murdering a 32-year-old
woman named Wendy Sewell.
The case would become known as the greatest miscarriage of justice the UK had ever seen,
although that’s questionable given witches were burned there.
Anyway, this young lad first told cops he’d found the woman at the cemetery where he was
working as a groundskeeper.
He said he moved her body, and that’s why he got blood on him.
He was interrogated for nine long hours.
He also had learning difficulties, and there wasn’t any lawyer with him during the questioning.
Guess what?
At the end of the grueling interrogation, he said he’d done it.
He was given a long sentence, with the condition that he could meet with a parole board after
ten years.
Inmates believed this guy had hurt a woman, so he was beaten badly and had to change prisons
eight times.
Later he was caught in something called the “Innocent prisoner's dilemma”.
He couldn’t be paroled because he refused to say he’d committed the crime.
Talk about a Catch-22.
It’s actually not that uncommon.
We won’t get too much into it, but the whole case was a shambles.
He should never have been sent to prison.
The cops knew this.
One journalist that tried to help Downing told the BBC that police harassed him.
He said, “They made my life absolute hell for five or six years.
I was pulled up for speeding, stopped and searched, victimized…I was very worried
for my family.”
Downing got out after 27 years, and subsequent investigations found that the police in the
past had done some very sketchy work indeed.
On release, he received around $1 million in compensation and became a chef.
He told the press, “I never allowed myself to feel angry or bitter.
Who could I have taken it out on anyway?
I still refuse to.”
44.
The vast majority of prisoners in the US are not in for violent offenses.
We looked at the latest 2021 data from the US Bureau of Prisons and saw that 46.2 percent
of prisoners were in for drug offenses.
No other crime came close, although offenses relating to Weapons, Explosives, and Arson
accounted for 20.2 percent of prisoners.
Every 25 seconds, someone is arrested for drug possession in the US, although they don’t
all end up in prison, of course.
43.
We looked into drug possession offenses, and it is a very, very contentious issue.
One reason is that drugs are widely available in prisons.
In fact, there are reports stating that people have gone in for possessing soft drugs and
got addicted to hard drugs inside to deal with the mental issues they faced.
The vast majority of prisoners in for drugs are not trafficking drug kingpins, they are
merely addicts.
Research shows that importers or high-level suppliers only amount to 11 percent of drug
offenders doing hard time.
On top of that, there is ample data to suggest that more poor people get stopped by cops,
and more of them go to prison for drug offenses than the middle class or wealthy people.
As the Marshall Project said, “Rich drug abusers go to treatment, not prison.”
The UK Guardian echoed that, saying, “The wealthy 'make mistakes', the poor go to jail.”
The story said you’re much more likely to have a drug problem if you have suffered trauma
growing up or grown up poor.
Prison is like a double-whammy.
Pew Research said this, “More Imprisonment Does Not Reduce State Drug Problems.”
Pew discovered that the deterrent of prison hasn’t and doesn’t stop people from taking
drugs.
This is why this is one very big hot potato of a subject.
Ok, enough of that.
Who’s served the most time ever?
42.
We found a few names.
Paul Geidel served 68 years in the US after being convicted of second-degree murder in
1911.
The weird thing is, it was looking like a parole board might have released him in 1926
because of his good behavior, but then he was found to be legally insane.
He could have gotten out after 63 years, but by then he was so institutionalized he chose
to stay in another for five years.
He died a free man in 1987, aged 93.
41.
Francis Clifford Smith served over 71 years in prison for the murder of a nightwatchman
in 1950 in Connecticut.
In 2020, he was moved to a nursing home.
Now you’ll see how innocent men can spend many years behind bars.
40.
In 1972, aged 26, Richard Phillips went to prison as an innocent man.
He was released 46 years later.
He wrote this poem a few years into his incarceration: “Ain’t it a crime.
When you don’t have a dime.
To buy back the freedom you’ve lost?
Ain’t it odd.
That when you pray to God.
Your prayers don’t seem to be heard?
Ain’t it sad.
When you’ve never had.
The freedom of a soaring bird?”
He was finally exonerated in 2018, and later told he’d receive $1.5 million in compensation.
He told the media, “I just want to keep a low profile, travel, and enjoy life.
That’s what I wanted to do in the first place.”
39.
In a paper titled, “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” it was said that four
percent of people in the US on death row are probably innocent in the past and right now.
38.
Eighteen people in the US have gotten off death row after DNA testing proved that they
were innocent.
They had collectively served 229 years.
Sometimes innocent people get executed, too, as you’ll now see.
37.
US man Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 and later his innocence was proved
after the case was said to have been heavily flawed.
His last words were, “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man
- convicted of a crime I did not commit.”
This is what an investigator later said, “The whole case was based on the purest form of
junk science.”
Johnny Garrett was executed in the US in 1992, and later DNA evidence proved he was innocent.
It’s said he didn’t want to share any last words, although some sources say he said,
“I'd like to thank my family for loving me and taking care of me.
The rest of the world can kiss my…”
We omitted one word.
When innocent Florida man Jesse Tafero was executed in 1990, “Old Sparky” malfunctioned,
and witnesses said what they saw was pure horror.
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel wrote, “flames and smoke erupted from his head.”
Now you’ll see that executions of innocent people don’t only happen in the USA.
36.
In Russia in 1983, a man named Aleksandr Kravchenko was executed for murder.
It turned out that the killer was none other than “the Butcher of Rostov”, Andrei Chikatilo.
In 1950, a man named George Kelly was hanged in the UK for murder.
There had been unbelievable police corruption in the case.
The cops basically set him up.
In fact, police had the confession of another man, but since they’d made a mess of the
case, they held that information back.
In 1989, a man named Teng Xingshan was executed in China for the murder of a woman.That woman
later turned up to the surprise of everyone.
Xingshan had committed no crime at all.
35.
Prisoners get drunk while locked up on alcohol they make themselves.
It’s sometimes called hooch, or pruno, or prison wine.
The best brewers can earn ok money from selling it.
One former prisoner said, “You can sell half a gallon of wine for $25.
Each pant leg makes two and a half gallons, so you do the math.
It's a good hustle.”
He said he cut pant legs and sewed the bottoms, and lined them with plastic bags.
Then he filled them with water.
After that, he threw in five pounds of sugar, a load of diced tomatoes, and tomato paste.
He then let all that ferment.
Other prisoners have used bread for yeast.
As for the sweetness, any kind of fruit works, but you can also add candy.
It’s important to “burp” the bag.
We saw a guy on a podcast who said he’d forgotten to do that, and he got covered in
the stuff when it exploded.
34.
Another thing prisoners will pay good money for is mobile phones.
It’s not easy getting them in.
Sometimes an officer can be tempted with cash, or even threatened.
Other times the phones are “plugged” in the rear, which you can imagine can be quite
uncomfortable.
For a run-of-the-mill phone, you might be able to charge US$1000 inside prison.
33.
In 2015, Brazilian prison officers discovered a unique way prisoners were getting phones
inside.
They used cats.
One cat that frequently went in and outside of the prison was found with four mobile phones,
four chargers, and seven cards attached to it.
32.
Just how much a man can plug is anyone’s guess, but we saw a documentary where an officer
showed how a prisoner had plugged a foldable knife.
The British Prime Minister was recently given a lesson on such acts, when he learned some
British prisoners were hiding “Kinder eggs” in themselves filled with drugs.
31.
Why would people go to such an effort, you might ask?
The answer is the mark-up.
Drugs in prison are way more expensive than on the outside, so much so, officers might
sometimes get in on the dealing.
It is a license to print money, and there is no shortage of prisoners wanting something
to take the monotony away.
In fact, because opiates can’t be detected in urine after around 2-3 days, some prisoners
get into them even though they just want to smoke weed.
Weed can be detected up to 21 days after ingestion.
One podcast we watched said he took opiates in prison, but every so often, he got caught
out.
He said then he went back to the first floor, where he had no privileges.
He’d slowly get back to the upper floor, where he’d do more opiates.
Then he got caught again and was sent back down.
He called it the merry-go-round.
30.
Even tobacco is expensive inside.
One prisoner said he was getting stuff brought in, and then he charged two or three dollars
for just one small, rolled cigarette.
That meant one pouch, cheap outside prison, was worth a lot of money.
In 2020, in an Irish prison, officers discovered one haul that included mobiles phones, 800
grams of weed, two grams of cocaine, and 10,000 pills.
To give you an idea of how much that is worth, we will go to another news story that said
in the UK, just in 2017, 15,000 phones and a massive 189 kilos of drugs were confiscated.
A phone in a UK prison might go from $300 to $1300.
And those are low-quality devices.
The same article said the synthetic drug called “spice” can cost over 30 times more in
prison than on the outside.
Cocaine, depending on quality, might cost $100 on the outside for a gram.
That might go for $1,000 on the inside.
The mark-up was even higher for a gram of heroin.
This is why some people put eggs in their behind.
29.
Another way to get stuff in is when violent cons groom officers.
That happened to a man named Lee Davies in England.
He was on incredibly low pay for such a stressful job, and then he helped some gang members
get phones and drugs inside.
His money problems were over.
He was told to wait in a car park some place, then a car would pull up and throw something
into his car.
He then smuggled the package inside, and he kept doing that for months.
He was eventually caught.
He said later, “There’s no excuse for what I did, but I have deep sympathy for people
working in that environment.”
He believes he was partly groomed by the prisoners.
28.
He started on twenty thousand pounds a year, or $27,000.
That is a very low wage, but the job has got to be one of the hardest you could do.
According to job websites, a starting prison officer’s wage might be $31,740 a year in
the US.
Overstressed and underpaid is what you hear from most officers.
They are dealing with violence and outrage, and sometimes severe mental issues, almost
on a daily basis.
27.
Then there’s what’s called the prison industrial complex.
Mass incarceration has become a business, one that is booming in the US.
The American Civil Liberties Union says mandatory minimum sentences helped create the US’s
bursting prisons, and on top of that, there was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act.
This led to more mass incarceration and massive profits for the private prison industry.
There are many kinds of businesses that make money, not just the private prisons.
You have the food services, handcuff makers, clothes services, the ones earning from cheap
prison labor, and much more.
This is how one person put it, “The 'prison-industrial complex' is not only a set of interest groups
and institutions; it is also a state of mind.
The lure of big money is corrupting the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions
of safety and public service with a drive for higher profits.”
26.
These are some companies benefiting or that benefited from cheap prison labor in the US:
McDonald’s, Wal-Mart.
Microsoft, IBM, Target, Intel, Victoria’s Secret (yep, they make lingerie), Honda, Starbucks,
Nike, Nintendo.
25.
If you want to know how much the prisoners make, NPR interviewed a guy that worked at
Omaha Correctional Center after getting eight to sixteen years for theft and forgery.
He was paid $2.25 a day for a 12-hour shift.
But he also said one phone call cost him $5 and a bag of chips also cost him $5.
24.
For some regular prison work in some prisons, you get nothing.
Just getting out of your cell is payment.
Prison Policy said in Florida, if you are laboring for state-owned industries, you can
earn between $0.20 and $0.55 an hour.
That seems to be about the going wage.
Now for some more prison violence.
23.
Not surprisingly, prisoners get killed in prison.
Gang violence is usually to blame, or at times people are killed for a certain crime they
committed on the outside, or someone just gets killed over an argument.
In 2008, there were only 40 homicides in US prisons.
That number pretty much increased every year.
In 2020, the last data we could find, the number was 120.
As you’ll now see, violence inside prison is much worse in other countries.
22.
We looked at prisons and jails in Ecuador and what’s been going on in 2021.
In February, the BBC reported that 79 people were murdered in four different Ecuadorian
jails, although they were related to the same gang squabbles.
In April, the BBC reported five men were murdered and 16 injured in just one Ecuadorian prison,
again, gang-related.
In July, Aljazeera wrote that 22 men were murdered, and many others were injured in
two prisons in that country.
Gang rivalry was to blame, but overcrowding and bad conditions was also mentioned.
After that, Ecuador's president declared a state of emergency.
21.
Ok, so you’ve all seen the movies that suggest in some US prisons, you have to join a gang,
or you’ll either get beaten or exploited.
Really, do convicted accountants end up putting work in for the Sureños?
It’s actually a complex question, but we guess the best people to answer it are folks
who’ve done a lot of prison time.
There is no shortage of these people who now have their own YouTube channel.
People say it depends on where you are doing your time, but it still might not mean you
have to get involved with a gang.
Most prisoners give the advice, “Just keep your head down and do your time.”
They usually agree on one thing, though, and that is, you will likely at least need alliances.
A British stockbroker agreed.
He had the bad idea of starting an ecstasy empire after moving to the US.
After being locked up in Arizona, he said the first thing that happened scared the hell
out of him.
Gang members came into his cell and asked for his papers.
He didn’t know what that meant.
They actually wanted to see what he’d been convicted of to make sure he hadn’t hurt
society’s most vulnerable.
In some prisons, that could mean KOS, or Kill On Sight.
It’s why some prisoners are housed in protective custody.
After he was deemed ok, he said he didn’t join a gang, but he also said he made some
friends.
That made his life much, much easier.
One former prisoner in the US said this, “The commonly held belief that joining a gang is
the only way to survive prison is one that I sincerely wish would forever go the way
of the DooDoo.
I honestly think it's the gangs themselves that try their hardest to propagate this false
notion.”
Another guy agreed, but he said hanging with your own race in some prisons is a must.
He also said this, “In the yard, all the races hang with their own, with the gangs
and shot callers.
They may take advantage of the weaker ones, making them pay 'rent' and such .. but once
you stand up for yourself, they will usually stop and often ask you to join the gang . If
you say no, they usually accept it.”
So, no, you won’t have to join a gang.
But as you’ll now see, you also won’t be completely independent.
20.
There’s the dining room, or “chow hall.”
If you don’t get told where to sit by officers, you’ll sit with your own race.
This is where it helps to have made friends.
You certainly have to show respect, so just plonking your behind down without thinking
about it will lead to you getting a bust head.
One prisoner said at his prison, there were what he called “short bus” tables.
These were the tables where anyone could sit, but he said they were reserved for the less
respected prisoners.
Most former prisoners agree on one thing; it’s in the chow hall where you see alliances.
Even if you are a fiercely independent person, some former prisoners say going it alone is
not recommended.
19.
In the UK, race doesn’t matter all that much.
You usually hook up with friends, and if you’re a long-time criminal, you’ll likely have
some.
If there are gang rivalries, it’s not about the color of your skin, but where you come
from.
In London, or Liverpool, there have been what the media called post-code wars.
In some podcasts, former British prisoners from the south said they didn’t like getting
sent to the northern part of the country, and vice versa.
18.
If you do get attacked in prison, it is sometimes with a homemade knife, or shiv.
Sometimes it’s just with a razor blade.
Other times, the instrument will have a few razor blades attached close to each other.
This is so the wound is almost impossible to stitch.
The British media has reported a lot on this.
Apparently, the wound leaves a really big scar.
That’s bad, but this is worse.
17.
One of the most horrendous things prisoners do, and it seems it’s not all that uncommon,
is throw boiling water in someone’s face.
They usually fill the water with sugar because that makes the water caramelized and sticky.
In the past, in the UK, this has been referred to as “napalm.”
After that, you need some good advice.
16.
Prisoners often talk about the prison code, which, to be frank, sounds hypocritical or
nonsensical a lot of the time.
Still, there are some dos and don’ts prisoners talk about.
DO Keep your head down.
Be polite and respectful as much as possible.
If you are picked on or attacked, fight back even if you're the lamest fighter in the world.
Develop an exercise routine.
Study the lay of the land.
Educate yourself when something is available.
Choose your friends carefully.
Maintain good personal hygiene.
DON’T Act tough.
Now you’re nobody.
Gamble.
Take drugs.
Borrow stuff, even if someone seems really kind.
Judge people.
Steal.
Stare.
Talk to everyone about your crime.
Fart, if you can help it.
Snitch.
15.
Sometimes inmates locked in their cells create what are called biological projectile weapons.
These are to spray officers with urine, feces or even bile.
Just in California at three prisons there were 111 gassing attacks in 2017.
In that state, you can get five years in segregation for gassing an officer.
14.
Prisoners sometimes use coded letters to get messages to each other, which might look innocuous,
but if you can decode the message, something darker lurks between the words.
In 2018, a letter sent from a prisoner to the outside that didn’t say anything out
of the ordinary, was an order to kill a staff member in the Atlanta jail.
You just had to read between the lines.
Other times prisoners create their own ciphers, with symbols designating a letter of the alphabet.
A gang expert who specializes in breaking codes said about this, “Not knowing what
a code says can give us nightmares.
We need to know what these gang codes say, but sometimes we need to know ‘what they
don't say’ even more.”
13.
Perhaps one of the strangest things to happen in a woman’s prison is someone gets pregnant
when they have never had a conjugal visit, i.e., a private visit with a lover or spouse.
That happened in 2019.
A woman had been behind bars for a year and a half, waiting to be sentenced for a capital
murder, when she had a baby.
She’d been charged with being the getaway driver when an elderly man was shot and killed.
It later transpired that she’d somehow “conspired to get pregnant” by sleeping with a male
inmate working at the prison.
News reports say she hoped having a new child might sway the judge to grant her some leniency.
This next one is heartbreaking.
12.
The youngest person ever to sit on death row was George Junius Stinney Jr.
This African American boy was arrested in June 1944, charged with killing two people.
In June, he was executed in the electric chair.
He was so small that a bible had to be propped under him on the chair.
The investigation was an absolute travesty of justice, and the jury that sentenced him
was all white.
The grave he was buried in was unmarked.
In 2014, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, said this, “There is compelling
evidence that George Stinney was innocent of the crimes for which he was executed in
1944.”
There wasn’t any substantial evidence to support his guilt and his defense lawyer was
less than useless.
In fact, he had no support at all.
It was a kid against the racist cops and indeed, the racist justice system.
The real murderer of Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames got away.
His conviction was overturned in 2014.
11.
The oldest person executed was Walter Moody.
He died by lethal injection in Alabama in 2018.
He’d been convicted of killing a judge with a mail bomb in 1989.
10.
Prison is supposed to rehabilitate.
That’s why it’s there, but often those that go in, go in again.
Officers sometimes call the prison gates a revolving door.
It’s hard to compare recidivism rates worldwide because you have to choose certain years to
conduct a study, and there is lots of data from all over the world.
The US National Institutes of Health did a study, but the data was from different years
regarding different countries.
Nonetheless, it found that the percentage of released prisoners that were arrested for
another crime within two years in England and Wales was 48 percent.
In France, it was 40 percent.
In Finland, it was 36 percent.
In Norway, it was 20 percent.
In Australia, it was 53 percent, and in the US, it was 60 percent.
9.
The US Supreme court in 2011 called California’s recidivism rates “stratospherically high.”
It was said then that a whopping 70 percent of released prisoners in that state were back
behind bars within three years.
The state’s prisons were accused of not rehabilitating but producing “additional
criminal behavior.”
That’s why prisons are sometimes called “crime school”.
It’s hard to fully understand why people end up back in prison, but parole violations
and habitual drug use, as well as falling back into poverty and hopelessness, count
for something.
Critics have said US and other countries’ prisons focus a lot more on punishment rather
than rehab, which is the opposite of the Norwegian model.
As you know, that country has very low recidivism rates.
Ok, we think you need to hear some good news.
Well, it’s kind of positive.
8.
A British guy named Stephen Akpabio-Klementowski was locked up in England in 2002.
While serving his 16-year sentence for drugs offenses, he earned a bachelor’s degree
and two master’s degrees.
He had zero qualifications when he went in and started with his GCSEs and A levels.
That’s equivalent to junior and senior high school.
He worked in the kitchens all day and studied on the toilet at night, where he said it was
quiet.
He told The Guardian, “Sometimes I wonder how I did it.
The idea that you can study in an environment designed for punishment is ridiculous.”
He said it wasn’t easy, studying in what he described as a hellish place.
“I still have nightmares, 10 years after leaving.
It’s a really damaging environment,” he said.
He’s now a lecturer and a regional manager and spends a lot of time going back into prisons
to help prisoners.
While he did well locked up, he is still very critical of British justice.
He doesn’t believe prison acts as a deterrent to crime.
He said, “People aren’t being deterred – the number of people in prison has increased
by 69% over the past 30 years – and they’re not being rehabilitated.”
7.
Anthony Ray Hinton spent close to three decades in isolation on death row in Alabama.
He was exonerated in 2015.
He’s since written an award-winning book, “The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and
Freedom on Death Row” and was awarded an honorary degree.
Now you’ll hear about a man who’s more locked up than anyone else.
6.
The British man who’s spent the longest time in prison is Robert Maudsley.
He’s been locked away since 1974, but for the last 25 years, he’s been in the worst
prison cell in the whole of England.
He killed three men while in prison, and one of those murders earned him the name, “The
British Hannibal the Cannibal.”
It was a brutal murder, but not as bad as those British tabloids made it out to be.
Now he’s in a special cell which is underneath the prison.
It has thick doors with bulletproof glass.
Even when you open those doors, he is actually in a cage within the cell.
He is allowed no contact at all with other prisoners.
He gets out once a day for an hour, but has to have six guards around him at all times.
They try not to make eye contact with him or speak to him.
He once said, “I am left to stagnate, vegetate and to regress; left to confront my solitary
head-on with people who have eyes but don't see and who have ears but don't hear, who
have mouths but don't speak.”
Many people have called this inhumane.
They know his story and feel sorry for him, given his childhood and the nature of the
offenses of the people he killed.
We won’t go into details, but we think you can work it out.
He is possibly the most locked-up man in the world.
He once said, “I feel like I’m buried alive.”
The prison wouldn’t even allow him to have a pet budgie.
5.
The polar opposite of this is Bolivia’s San Pedro prison.
It’s more like a village than a prison.
There are cells to rent, markets to shop in, and even tourists can visit.
Prisoners make cash by selling cocaine paste to them.
Wives and children can live with the prisoner.
There’s also a prison hotel, a soccer pitch, a few churches, and a hospital.
Officers work there, but the prisoners themselves ensure bad things don’t happen inside.
If a prisoner does commit a crime, they are disciplined in let’s say a very stern way.
If they commit a serious violent crime, they are likely dead soon after.
4.
We think the biggest prison in the world has to be Turkey’s Silivri Prison.
It spans over 250 acres and is home to more than 10,000 prisoners.
Are Turkish prisons bad?
Maybe they were in the 70s when 100s of US citizens occupied them, mostly for smuggling
that quality hashish they so loved.
When Billy Hayes was a student.
he was sent to one.
He wrote a book on his release, and it became the harrowing movie, Midnight Express.
He actually escaped in the end.
He also said the movie exaggerated a fair few things.
The next country’s prisons are bad, and no one denies it.
3.
One prison with lots of westerners serving hard time within its walls is Bangkok’s
Klong Prem prison.
Many smugglers have lived there and felt what it’s like to sleep with 60-odd men in a
cell, packed like sardines.
One man actually holds a record there to this day.
He’s a British guy named David McMillan, a former big-time drug smuggler with a rather
posh accent.
He’s the only westerner ever to have escaped the prison.
In prisons such as this, if you have money, you can live well.
There’s a kind of anarchy in there and the guards take a piece of everything.
McMillan had a personal cook, someone to do his laundry, and he had a cell with few people
in it that had a TV.
He even had a little office area.
But when he heard that he would be transferred to Bang Kwang Central Prison, aka, the Bangkok
Hilton, he made a plan to escape.
The Thais call this prison the Big Tiger, because it eats men.
Many that go in, die there.
McMillan successfully escaped, but the funny part is once he got to the street, he opened
an umbrella he’d taken with him.
When asked why he did that, he said, “escaping prisoners don't carry umbrellas.”
2.
One of the worst prison disasters we could find happened in the US at Ohio state prison
in 1930.
There was a huge fire, except the guards wouldn’t open the cell doors.
One person described it like this: “There was nothing to do but scream for
God to open the doors.
And when the doors didn't open, all that was left was to stand still and let the fire burn
the meat off and hope it wouldn't be too long about it.”
Some prisoners managed to overpower the guards, but outside the cells, they were given orders
to shoot to kill.
One prisoner later said, “Naturally all of those men were in there and hollering and
screaming for help and some of the men was praying and some of them was cussing and some
of them were raving.
It was a question to do what you could do to help them.”
322 inmates died from the fire or smoke inhalation, and another 230 had to be hospitalized.
Ok, let’s finish on a positive note.
1.
There’s a prison in Finland called Suomenlinna Prison.
The prison walls are actually just a small fence.
In the past it’s has problems with prisoners not trying to break out, but people trying
to sneak in.
The cells are like nice dorm rooms, and the shared kitchens have all the modern appliances
you could ask for.
Some prisoners are in for the most serious offenses, but they go to this prison when
their term is close to the end.
It’s kind of like finishing school, the halfway house before prisoners enter society
at large.
Still, they do their last few years there even though they could easily just walk out.
Why, you might wonder?
A prison official said this, “The main idea here is to prepare the inmates for release
into the community.
It doesn’t make sense for an inmate to be in a closed prison for, say, six years and
to suddenly enter civilian life.
We also offer rehabilitation for people who have had problems related to alcohol, drugs,
or mental illness.”
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