Aug 5, 2009
The 10 Worst Prisons In The World
The thought of going to prison is enough to scare the living daylights out of anyone, especially with the horror stories that you can read in newspapers and books and those you see on TV.
Stabbings, murders, violence, gang rape and any number of other horrors are all widely broadcast by people that have spent time on the inside. Of course, they’re not your run of the mill prison stories because you don’t tend to hear much about the ones that don’t see any action from one year to the next, but the same names do keep coming up time and time again.
Certain prisons, both old and new, are notorious for violence and some easily out perform others in the horror stories stakes. The 10 worst prisons in the world are listed below. Read ‘em and weep!
1. ADX, Colorado – This is the ultimate prison, literally. Since it opened in 1994, ADX is nothing but slow and inhumane torture. Although those there are the worst of the worst, human rights protestors from all over the world have targeted it. Inmates are only allowed out of their cells for 9 hours a week and barely interact with anyone. There’s hardly any sunlight and you have to do everything in your cell. If ever there was a way to destroy any semblance of hope an individual had then ADX is it!
2. Tadmor Military Prison, Syria – This is one of the most brutal prisons ever. Torture, executions and untold brutality goes on within these walls. The medieval methods of torture have been well documented. Innocent and guilty alike have been dragged via a rope until they’re dead, beaten to death with pipes and chopped into pieces with an axe. However, that’s nothing compared to the massacre of June 27, 1980. Approximately 500 inmates were killed for no apparent reason by the guards and commandos. This is the worst known massacre of its kind to ever have taken place.
3. Carandiru Penitentiary, Brazil – Prison massacres, HIV, legalised torture… Whatever you can imagine from a prison, they have it here. A fifth of all 7,500 inmates have HIV and the vast majority of them didn’t have it when they first walked through the gates. On top of that, if they have to have surgery then forget the anaesthetics. Apparently, anaesthetic is a luxury soothe patients are operated on without anything to numb the pain at. Instead, they’re left to scream. Every now and then there’s a massacre or riots as well but at least that’d be relatively painless in relation.
4. La Sante Prison, France – La Sante is well known for its suicide figures, with 124 suicides occurring in 1999 alone. Prisoners have actually eaten rat poison to escape the depravity here. Some prisoners become slaves, others only leave their cells for 4 hours a day and the violence is horrendous. The punishment block has no running water and many are left down there for days because of minor misdemeanours. The treatment just isn’t humane by any stretch of the imagination.
5. La Sabeneta Prison, Venezuela – With 1 guard to 150 inmates here its no wonder that this is one of the worst prisons on Earth right now. Corruption and bribery run riot here, and that’s just the staff! The prisoners are worse with 624 inmates being hurt and 196 being murdered within the walls in 1995 alone. Yes, all of that happened in just one year! The previous year though 108 died in a day when the inmates had a gun battle… between themselves. Not a nice place to be methinks.
6. Rikers, New York – 5 years ago, this prison would’ve been at number 1 on the list but recent reforms have forced a dramatic improvement so it’s a little tamer than it used to be. For example, the 70 stabbings that take place there every year now used to be around 1,000 a decade ago. The violence is legendary and guards reported that they lived in fear of their lives. Although this isn’t the case anymore, it’s a ghost that’ll haunt the prison forever.
7. Diyarbakir Prison, Turkey – This is a lovely prison to be in. With children imprisoned for life and guards masterminding attacks against the prisons, it’s definitely less than a safe place to be. Prisoners are classed largely as political so they have no rights whatsoever. This may sound a little like the Dark Ages, and it really is. The guards do as they please, as an attack against 33 prisoners in 1996 proves. 10 died and 23 were injured, all at the hands of the authority.
8. San Quentin State Prison, California – As one of the world’s best known prisons, San Quentin is synonymous with violence, executions and the worst of the worst criminals in California to date. It has over 1500 employees and they still can’t control the inmates. The riots in February 2006 proved a good example of that. Racial attacks led to 100 prisoners being badly injured and 2 killed. That’s not the only incident but it’s a great example of just what goes down behind the walls.
9. Mendoza Prison, Argentina – It isn’t the violence here that you have to worry about but the conditions that you’d have to survive if you were sent there. The prison should cater for 600 prisoners but there are over 1000 more there than should be so the overcrowding is horrendous. That isn’t to say that you wouldn’t be exposed to torture because you most likely would at some point.
10. Nairobi Prison, Kenya – Some prisons make their way onto the list of worst prisons not because of violence but because of the conditions that they house prisoners in year in and year out. Inmates here tend to be naked and infected with horrible diseases that kill them slowly. Overcrowding means that they don’t get the medical help they need and most die in agony.
The criminal mind never sleeps.
Working In An All Male Maximum-Security Prison For
25 Years I Understand Why Prisons are failing?
IT ALL STARTS WITH OUR JUDICIAL SYSTEM TURNING THESE INSTITUTIONS INTO PLAYGROUNDS FOR CRIMINAL’S RIGHTS; SUPPORTING HARDCORE CRIMINALS WHO THRIVE ON ACTING LIKE PSYCHOPATHIC MONSTERS AND PREHISTORIC MAN EXISTING ALL OVER AGAIN.
This article will inform the mind and startle the soul. Crime and punishment in this country is out of control. Many are in agreement in, how lawmakers and prison bureaucrats are controlling our modern prisons, and turning them into political arenas that operate like a circus of shams and charades.
When we started building modern prisons in the 1800s, air, food and space was all that the constitution called for when incarcerating criminals. It was understood that prisons were built to punish criminals for their crimes and reform them to live productive lives.
For two-centuries in this country, we have been processing criminals in our Judicial-System and building prisons to punish criminals. And in all that time, I am appalled, how lawmakers have not revised the system to correct the lack of administrative and prisoner discipline. Nor impeach those who are still contaminating our prison with flaws, embedding them with unthinking, unknowing or corrupted officials and political bureaucrats.
When politicians run for public office they want to impress taxpayers with solutions to lower the deficit, stabilize taxes and protect public safety. I realize that most politicians have never seen the inside of a prison and the ones who have been were short visit and shown the best parts. It’s appalling and a shameful act, the way so many political officials come into office and start abusing tax-dollars and the legal system by clamming, that closing prisons will lower the deficit. When in fact; it will increases prison violence, spending and crime rate.
Federal and State Prisons have deteriorated to their worst condition in the history of these institutions? They have changed from being run with dignity and strong security into a hellish nightmare where corruption is the norm. With the loss of positive leadership in our prisons came the increase of prisoner’s power, primarily caused by their ability to hide behind highly-defended “Civil Rights”, which has now taken precedence above all else. These rights allowed them to live without fear of strong retribution for their actions, thereby leading to a breakdown in inmate behavior and resulting in riots, fights, and physical and verbal abuse of prison workers.
The recidivism rates are now at the highest point in prison history. Prison bureaucrats know that approximately 70% and 80% of repeat felons’ including 90% of pedophiles and sex-offenders are returning in one-to three-years committing the same crimes, which is a sure sign of a failing prison system.
After working in a maximum-security prison for almost three-decades, it’s my firm conviction that “The criminal mind never sleeps”. Our Justice System processes so many criminals throughout the prison systems at taxpayers’ expense, and they still continue to rebel against the system by violating prison rules and regulations, breaking laws and committing more crimes.
Each year, taxpayers’ are spending over $450-billion dollars on our Justice System to fighting crime in this country, and approximately $50-billion dollars of that money is spend on the Department of Corrections.
In 1966 when I started working in the prison system our prison security was intact and ran well because administrators were in control. Three years later we started getting a new breed of administrators from Central Office, (the main headquarters for all prisons in the state) they were politically orientated, inexperienced, arrogant and controlling. Their goals were plain and simple; they worried more about pleasing their superiors and prisoner’s rights then prison safety. That was the beginning of how our prisons went from good to bad and ugly in the last several decades.
In today’s prisons the lack of prison security has diminished. The security correctional officers, who were the backbone of the prison system, have now been downgraded to glorified babysitters. Now prison staff is forced to move daily between freedom and captivity while walking a delicate line between administrative politics and the threat of inmate violence.
I was a vocational instructor working and supervising murderers, rapist, pedophiles, and drug-pushers and mentally unstable prisoners. My vocational shop was dangerously filled with trade tools, including shape knives, screwdrivers and machineries. The new administrators ignored security procedures and removed the security officer from all the vocational shops and tripled their workload to patrol several shops a day, which left me without security for several hours. Needless to say, my inmates became reckless and became a security risk. These new administrators and prison security put me in life-threatening situations. The inevitable happened. Several inmates begin challenging me and setting me up to be harmed. The leader of the gang started pressuring me and violating prison rules and regulations to impress other inmates. He was a mass-murderer serving two-life-terms for killing several people.
I had written several misbehavior reports when locking this inmate up. Most of those reports were downplayed by prison security leaders because of pressure from above to have fewer incidents and look good to Central Office and feared they would violate prisoner’s rights. Within the month the same inmate wrote a threatening letter to security heads and the superintendent, quote. “Take me out of Pecchio shop or there will be trouble” unquote. I was never warned of the inmate’s letter nor were my misbehavior reports taken seriously.
As expected, this 280 pound muscular inmate charged me from behind and brutally attacked me. With blood pouring down the side of my face where he hit me, he then picked me up and threw me hard against a 600 pound steel machine; I hit it with such force it moved. I then fell hard to the concrete floor next to my desk on a platform. When he stopped punching me for a few seconds and turned towards the door I reached up with one arm and knocked the phone off the hook and that alerted security. They rushed in and took control. Both the inmate and I were medically treated in the facility hospital. He was taken to the guardhouse and I was transported to the outside hospital for further medical treatment.
Then several months later, a jury trial found this inmate guilty and added a three-to-seven-years sentence to his two life terms. I was put on a medical disability for the rest of my life. This traumatic experience was caused by a failing prison system.
IT IS TIME TO ACT AND I HOPE THE DIVERSITY OF MY TRUE, COMPELLING AND GRIPPING STORIES WILL BE A POSITIVE INSTRUMENT IN PRISON REFORM.
VISIT MY WEBSITE 3W dot JOHNPECCHIO dot COM AND READ TRUE COMPELLING AND GRIPPING STORIE ABOUT WHAT GOES ON BEHIND THOSE PRISON WALLS. “HELL BEHIND PRISON WALLS” AND “THE DEVIL’S DEN OF PRISON AND JUSTICE” LOOK AT HOW PRISONS ARE STILL FAILING WHILE TAXPAYERS ARE SUPPORTING THE HIGHEST INCARCERATION RATE IN PRISON HISTORY. WE HAVE THE MOST SERIAL-KILLER IN THE WORLD? ALONG WITH APPROXIMATELY 2.4 MILLION SCHIZOPHRENICS, WITH MANY BEING BORDERLINE CASES, WHO ARE MIXING IN WITH REPEAT FELONS AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, WHICH ARE COMMITTING MOST OF THE CRIMES IN THE UNITED STATES.
BY AUTHOR JOHN J. PECCHIO