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Following in the Broadway tradition using the most unlikely subjects for musicals, Ana Serrano, Romeo Candido, and Carmen De Jesus are turning the story of the dancing inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines into a web-only musical production. It will debut on the prisondancer YouTube channel in 12 episodes beginning in March. -via Buzzfeed
Photo: Lynn Zwerling
Forget snitching - the hot word in this Maryland prison is stitching. Behold, the most popular course in prison, Knitting Behind Bars by Lynn Zwerling, where even the most hardened criminals got hooked on the joy of knitting:
In late 2009, Lynn Zwerling stood in front of 600 male prisoners at the Pre-Release Unit in Jessup, Maryland. “Who wants to knit?” she asked the burly crowd. They looked at her like she was crazy.
Yet almost two years later, Zwerling and her associates have taught more than 100 prisoners to knit, while dozens more are on a waiting list to take her weekly class. “I have guys that have never missed one time in two years,” Zwerling says. “Some reported to us that they miss dinner to come to class.”
GOOD Magazine has the story: Link
Scheveningen prison near the Hague in the Netherlands holds prisoners for the the UN International Criminal Court. Some of those inmates think that Dutch food served in the prison is a form of torture.
“My rights are not being violated, but the food is an abomination,” declared former Liberian president Charles Taylor when he was brought to trial at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Scheveningen in 2006.
Taylor, who was accused of crimes against humanity and orchestrating war crimes carried out by militias, was used to his own personal cook who made spicy African meals.
Unable to adjust to Dutch culinary blandness, he set up a cookery club using the facilities at the Scheveningen remand centre.
Yes, inmates are allowed to cook for themselves, but they have to buy their own ingredients from the prison shop.
Extreme Serbian nationalist and former paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj is another notorious prisoner who slams the Dutch diet. Seselj, who was charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with crimes against humanity, arrived in Scheveningen in 2003.
During one of the hearings in his trial, he publicly castigated the remand centre’s menu. The food was “a daily torture. Even pigs wouldn’t go near it.”
Prison officials defend their menu as “healthy and balanced.” Just one more reason you shouldn’t commit crimes against humanity. Link -Thanks, Ed!
Steve Swatton has been campaigning for years for the release of a “notorious” prison inmate Charles Bronson. Now that he would like to visit the bank robber Swatton is being prohibited by prison officials who may believe that he would swap places with the prison inmate. Which begs the questions: A. Why would Swatton want to swap places with a prison inmate? B. What kind of maximum security prison would make it possible for Swatton and Bronson to swap in the first place? Are they that easily confused by bald men with mustaches?
Back
in 1994, an American teenager named Michael
P. Fay was caned in Singapore for theft and vandalism. That incident
sparked an outcry here in the United States, as many people found it barbaric
(to be fair, the reaction was far from uniform - a lot of Americans actually
favored it).
Fast forward to today. Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is advocating flogging as a viable punishment to replace prison time:
[Moskos] argues that our prison system is not only overcrowded and violent, but that it is completely ineffective. "I can't think of another institution that has failed as mightily as the prison has," he writes. As an alternative, he says, the least dangerous convicts should be given a choice — jail time, or two lashes for every year of their sentence.
Moskos predicts the prison population would see a massive decline, freeing up billions of dollars for more useful purposes. Others suggest government-sanctioned violence would do nothing to reduce crime, and might even increase criminals' violent tendencies. Is flogging really our best option?
What do you think? Should we bring back the cat o' nine tails? Would you prefer flogging to years of imprisonment?
Environmental Graffiti has a great list of crazy tools inmates used in their escape attempts. My personal favorite is the shotgun above.
This was more than just ingenious; it worked as well! A shotgun made of iron bedposts. The charge came from lead in curtain tape and was set off by AA batteries. Prisoners took a hostage, fired at a pane of glass and broke out into a waiting car on May 21, 1984.
They’re all fascinating though.
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One hundred years ago, women in Britain who wanted to vote were considered terrorists. Many were jailed, and although Scotland Yard wanted to record them in photographs, the women refused to cooperate. So in 1912, officials purchased a camera and hired a paparazzi-style photographer to shoot the inmates from a distance. BBC news explained how and why these photographs were taken. You can see an online collection of the photos, which give us a glimpse into the world of suffragettes and how they were treated by police. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: © National Portrait Gallery, London)
The Soviet Union had a terrifying system for handling both criminals and political dissidents we know by one word: Gulag.
From 1930 until 1960, Russian authorities ran a tightly-controlled network of forced labor camps, known as Gulags. Gulag was actually a Russian acronym for Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies, and these camps were often freezing, and forced prisoners to work and live in harsh conditions with very little food. Thriving under both Stalin and in the aftermath of WWII, Gulags housing petty criminals and political prisoners alike. The Gulag network was officially dismantled in 1960, destroying (almost) all of the prison camps, but their legacy lives on today – in memory and in the formation of many towns in the Russian Arctic.
Today most of those sites are totally gone, with little evidence remaining. However, there is a Gulag museum in Perm, and a KGB museum in the legendary Lubyanka building in Moscow that once housed the city’s political detainees. Read more about them at Atlas Obscura. Link
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Available: free lodging with frequent bikini parties, drugs, and guns. All you have to do, is get caught smuggling into Venezuela.
Welcome to the infamous San Antonio Prison on Margarita Island, where the inmates run the show and prisoners can do anything, except leave:
On the outside, the San Antonio prison on Margarita Island looks like any other Venezuelan penitentiary. Soldiers in green fatigues stand at its gates. Sharpshooters squint from watchtowers. Guards cast menacing glances at visitors before searching them at the entrance.
But once inside, the prison for more than 2,000 Venezuelans and foreigners held largely for drug trafficking looks more like a Hugh Hefner-inspired fleshpot than a stockade for toughened smugglers.
Bikini-clad female visitors frolic under the Caribbean sun in an outdoor pool. Marijuana smoke flavors the air. Reggaetón booms from a club filled with grinding couples. Paintings of the Playboy logo adorn the pool hall. Inmates and their guests jostle to place bets at the prison’s raucous cockfighting arena.
“The Venezuelan prisoners here run the show, and that makes life inside a bit easier for us all,” said Fernando Acosta, 58, a Mexican pilot jailed since 2007.
Simon Romero of The New York Times has the story: Link (Photo: Meridith Kohut)
John F. Ptak came across an 1908 newspaper photo essay entitled “The Pleasant Lot of the Inebriate in Captivity: The comfortable quarters of the inmates of a state reformatory for inebriates.”
The life in the state reformatory as an alcoholic British woman was hardly “pleasant” as the title states, though we don’t know what the author was comparing this to. I suspect it was a general prison that was the benchmark for pleasantness, though perhaps it could have been an insane asylum , assuming of course that they didn’t seem nearly as pleasant as the “pleasant” scenes in these pictures. The reformatory for alcoholics in Great Britain was established more along the lines of an almshouse or mental institution and seemed not terribly coercive–though given the border decorations for the photos on these pages–keys–there is no doubt that these people were incarcerated “for their own and the community’s good.”
Although the photographs are obviously posed, they are worth a look for their historic value. Link -via Everlasting Blort
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Forget prison work of breaking rocks and digging trenches! There’s a new (and far more profitable) trend in prison labor: turning prisoners into gold farmers!
"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," Liu told the Guardian. "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off." [...]
"If I couldn’t complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things," he said.
Well, maybe the end of the world is coming after all, if you’re the law-and-order type in California. The Supreme Court has ordered the release of up to 46,000 inmates because of prison overcrowding:
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, speaking for the majority, said California’s prisons had "fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements" because of overcrowding. As many as 200 prisoners may live in gymnasium, he said, and as many as 54 prisoners share a single toilet.
Kennedy insisted that the state had no choice but to release more prisoners. The justices, however, agreed that California officials should be given more time to make the needed reductions.
In dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia called the ruling "staggering" and "absurd."
He said the high court had repeatedly overruled the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for ordering the release of individual prisoners. Now, he said, the majority were ordering the release of "46,000 happy-go-lucky felons." He added that "terrible things are sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order." Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with him.
David Savage writes this story at the Los Angeles Times: Link (Photo: Gary Friedman/LA Times)
A prison break usually involves someone wanting to get out, but someone actually broke into New Plymouth Prison in New Zealand Friday night. Firefighters responded to a blaze in the prison administration building and found the curtains on fire. Police were called because the window was found to have been forced open. A 50″ plasma screen TV set was missing.
The level of security at the prison varies from building to building, according to the Corrections Department website.
The old jailhouse is surrounded by a large stone wall topped with razor wire, while a newer unit is surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire.
Security measures include searches, dog teams, electronic security devices, cameras and closed circuit television.
(Image source: New Plymouth Prison)
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Raymond Daniel Towler was imprisoned for almost 29 years for a crime he did not commit. Convicted by eyewitness testimony in 1981, he heard about DNA testing during the OJ trial in 1995. Fifteen years of trying to get proper tests done on the physical evidence of his case finally paid off when he was exonerated in 2010. But so many years behind bars makes the real world seem a strange place.
So many choices. Which car insurance. Which cereal. Which deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, soap, shampoo. Rows and rows of products. Varieties, sizes, colors. Which is cheaper? Which is better? What’s the best buy? Which gum to chew? When he went into prison there were, like, two kinds of chewing gum. Now there are a zillion. One of the small gifts he gives himself is trying all the gums. “I can spoil myself a little so long as I stay within my means,” he says. Papaya juice! Kiwi and strawberry nectar! Green tea! Arnold Palmer — he was a golfer when Towler went down. Now he is a drink, sweet and so incredibly thirst quenching.
The entire compelling story can be read at Esquire. Link -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Michael Edwards)
US prisons are used more and more for manufacturing. You know about license plates, but private companies also contract for prison labor to make some of the things you use every day.
The companies who employ prison labour for making dentures and other dental appliances are members of the National Association of Dental Laboratories, so they must have their workers properly trained to do the job. This may actually give a skill that could be used on the outside and keep prisoners from re-offending.
That’s just one of the items on the list of Everyday Things You Didn’t Know Are Made in Prisons. Link
Well, I’ve never been imprisoned and I hope I never will, but according to The Week magazine, life in New York’s notorious Rikers Island prison isn’t all that bad. At least not if you’re a rap star like Lil Wayne:
Hip-hop superstar Lil Wayne — real name: Dwayne Carter — is currently serving time at New York’s infamous Rikers Island prison on drugs and weapons charges. But, based on media reports and the 27-year-old rapper’s own account of his life behind bars, life on the inside isn’t all bad for a pop culture icon. Here’s a numerical look at Wayne’s incarceration:
12
Duration, in months, of Lil Wayne’s prison sentence at Rikers Island for illegally possessing a handgun [...]1
Minimum number of times Rikers guards have busted Lil Wayne for possession of "contraband," including headphones and a charger for an Mp3 player11 a.m.
Hour at which Lil Wayne wakes up each day. According to the rapper, his prison routine consists mostly of talking on the phone to his kids and "wonderful mother," reading fan mail, doing "pushups," listening to ESPN radio and reading the Bible90
Length, in seconds, of the vocal solo Lil Wayne recorded over the phone, from jail, for Canadian rap artist Drake, one of his musical protegés
More at The Week (fantastic mag, btw – well worth subscribing): Link
There’s a good reason that all those Hollywood movies show prisoners escaping in laundry trucks. An inmate who escaped an El Paso jail in a garbage truck found out the hard way:
After escaping through the garbage disposal system, Medina-Bailon then hid in a dumpster when the trash was picked up by a garbage truck. The sheriff’s office checked with the company providing garbage service to the jail facility which revealed they had already dumped their load at the landfill in Sunland Park, N.M. [...]
U.S. Marshals confirmed to ABC-7 Friday afternoon that a body found in a Sunland Park, N.M. landfill was that of a federal inmate who escaped the El Paso jail earlier in the day.
You’d think that prison would be kind of hard for Bernie Madoff, the perpetrator of what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history. After all, he’s used to the lifestyle of the rich and famous.
In the outside world, the name Bernie Madoff elicits disgusts, but inside the prison walls, he is a hero:
From the moment he alighted, he had “groupies,” according to several inmates. Prisoners trailed him as he took his exercise around the track. (Persico had also attracted a throng when he arrived, but was disgusted and quickly put an end to it.) “They buttered him up,” one former inmate told me. “Everybody was trying to kiss his ass,” says Shawn Evans, who spent 28 months in Butner. They even clamored for his autograph.
And Madoff was usually more than happy to respond. “He enjoyed being a celebrity,” says Nancy Fineman, an attorney to whom Madoff granted an interview shortly after his arrival at Butner. (Fineman represents victims who are suing some of Madoff’s “aiders and abettors,” as she calls them.) Madoff seemed surprised and tickled by the lavish treatment, though he steadfastly refused to sign anything. Even in prison, he wasn’t going to dilute the brand. “He was sure they would sell it on eBay,” Fineman told me. “He still did have a big ego.”
Here’s a fascinating story by Steve Fishman of the New York Magazine about Madoff’s new life behind bars: Link
(Picture: Bernie Madoff by former fellow inmate and bank robber K.C. White)
Previously on Neatorama: 9 Most Brazen Ponzi Schemes in History
How would Cracked commemorate Memorial Day? By posting a list of The 5 Most Badass Prison Escapes in the History of War. These escapes took imagination, intelligence, and nerves of steel, plus a fair amount of desperation. Henri Giraud was 63 years old when the Germans captured him during World War II and took him to “escape proof” Konigstein Castle. Giraud spent two years planning the perfect escape.
First, he addressed the part of prison escape that every other escapee forgets–what you’ll do once you’re outside the walls. The prison was right there in Germany, after all, and he didn’t even know the language. So, he convinced his captors to start classes in how to learn German.
Next, he needed to coordinate with somebody on the outside. His letters to and from his wife were read and censored by the guards, but they somehow developed a system of embedding coded messages that the captors never picked up on. Next, he got ahold of a map and memorized every detail of the surrounding geography.
All right, now there’s just the matter of the, uh, 150-foot drop outside the prison walls that had made escape utterly impossible for the last eight centuries.
He and a friend came up with some twine, thin stuff like they use to bind packages. They twisted it together, bit by bit, until they had 150 feet of it. It took a year.
Last, he got himself a Tyrolean hat.
Together, these preparations helped Giraud pull it off. Link -via Gorilla Mask
Well they would have the element of surprise. It’s like those kids who tried to hold up a police station. Who would expect that criminals would try to break into a prison?
It would make a good gag for a comedy if it weren’t actually true – thieves have broken into a Dutch prison to steal the inmates’ televisions.
Twice in the last six weeks, burglars broke into a minimum-security prison and stole TVs from cells while prisoners were away for the weekend, a spokesman for the justice ministry said on Wednesday.
Link | Image: FBI
Since they’ll be doing drugs after their release from prison anyway, why not give them a head start?
Here’s the strange story of how some English prisons are actually "retoxifying" former addicts who’d been clean for years in prison:
The process, called "retoxification", is allegedly designed to boost the tolerance of former addicts who are deemed likely to start using drugs on their release, to minimise the risk of them taking an overdose. [...]
The Sun reported that the process has been ongoing in English prisons for the last five years and that more than 460 prisoners have undergone retoxification. It was already known to be in operation in Scotland.
Senior police officers were said to be furious at the news, with one saying: "We have enough difficulties coping with drug-fuelled crime without ministers sanctioning this.
"It’s one of the craziest ideas from any government."
Paul van Bree has been hired by prisons in the Netherlands to help prisoners contact and make peace with dead relatives:
He has claimed that by talking to both the prisoner and the prisoner’s dead parents he can discover key psychological insights to help the prison authorities rehabilitate criminals.
“With my antennae I sometimes reveal more than a psychologist or a prison welfare officer,” he said. “My work can be compared to mental health care in widest sense of the words.” [...]
The Dutch employment service has also looked beyond the normal to use “regression therapy” and tarot cards to help the jobless.
Uncooperative welfare claimants have been told they will lose benefits unless they accept the guidance of a regression therapist to help them get in touch with their past lives.
Link via Andrew Stuttaford | Photo: Getty
Would you like to get away from the stresses of the daily life for the next five to ten years? Then Norway’s new Halden prison/spa is for you!
[...]every cell comes with a private bathroom and a flat-screen TV, as well as a view–the windows don’t even have bars in them. But what about facilities, you might ask? My college dorm had a foosball table, and a vending machine! This prison can’t match that, right? Wrong. Halden has a gym, training room, chapel, library, family visiting unit, football (possibly soccer) field, a school, and, most unbelievably, a sound studio. But it’s the design that’s most strikingly different from American prisons. Halden doesn’t shy away from bright, cheerful colors, and actually spent about $1 million to hire a graffiti artist named Dolk (sort of their version of Banksy) to paint beautiful murals all around the grounds.
Link | Photo Gallery | Photo: NRK
UPDATE: In the comments, Courageous Grace brings up a very good point. The prison opens on April 1. Is this a hoax?
An unnamed 35-year-old female inmate broke out of a prison in Breda, the Netherlands. She was housed on prison grounds in a special building for inmates preparing for release. To escape, she dug a tunnel with a spoon!
The woman’s tunnel began in a cellar under the building’s kitchen, with its entrance concealed by a removable hatch. According to Dutch public broadcaster NOS, the police are assuming that the fugitive had at least one accomplice, who is believed to have loosened paving stones that were part of a sidewalk next to the detention center, allowing the prisoner to emerge from her tunnel.
The woman had only 22 months left on her murder sentence. She is still at large. Link -via Arbroath
(image credit: Flickr user Jeremy Brooks)
Most people want to bust out of a prison, not in – but love makes us do crazy things. Here’s the story of a man who break into a prison not once, not twice but night after night to visit his girlfriend:
The suspect, 33-year-old Daniele E., was arrested in November for scaling a steel fence to break into the prison where his girlfriend was serving time for drug-related offenses, according to the local daily Westfalen-Blatt. On Tuesday, the Bielefeld public prosecutor charged Daniele E. with trespassing and announced a trial date in March.
Lawyer Carsten Ernst, who is representing Daniele E., said he thought the charges were excessive. "Couldn’t we have just laughed this one off and cancelled the trial?" he commented. [...]
Nov. 8 proved to be the fateful night for Daniele E. When prison officials noticed a man climb over the fence and enter the building where the woman was being held, they called the police. Using dogs, the police sniffed the unlucky lover out — in his girlfriend’s cell.
"I love her — we’re engaged!" Daniele E. reportedly pleaded with the arresting officers.
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A setting such as a prison, jail, work farm, or what have you is fertile fodder for drama, character, and plot in a story. So it’s no surprise that there have been a lot of films made with that setting as a centerpiece.
Gunaxin has compiled a list of the fifteen best, including one I would be riveted to every time it aired on HBO in the 80′s: Bad Boys starring Sean Penn, which landed at number seven on the list.
Shortly after portraying everyone’s favorite surfer dude Jeff Spicoli, Penn signed up to play a teen hood sent to a rough and tumble juvenile detention center reserved for the baddest of the bad. Gritty and brutal, this movie is not for the faint of heart.
Did your favorite make the list?
A woman arrived in prison to visit her husband – cue the ominous music – then was led by a leering guard down a dreary hall to the visitor’s room. As soon as she sat down, her jailed husband ratcheted up the pressure: did she bring it? Would she do it right then and there for him? Curious inmates began to stare …
You’ve won’t see an advertisement quite like this on US television (and for McDonald’s no less!), but thankfully our partner Very Funny Ads got it: Link
Necessity may be the mother of inventions, but prison seems to be a particularly fertile birthing ground. Take a look at these collection of improvised tools, escape equipments and weapons made by inmates undoubtedly inspired by MacGyver.
This one to the left is the crucifix shiv:
Disguised as a wooden crucifix; found in an inmate’s cell in Wolfenbüttel prison, Germany, sometime around 1994; intended for use in an escape or as a general weapon. At that time a lot of crucifixes were fashioned in prison woodshops until jailers finally dug their true purpose.
Marc Steinmetz has the photos of what surprisingly creative inmates have made (first published in Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin in 1999) : Link
Remember the story of how prisoners in Brazil have been smuggling in cell phones using pigeons?
Well, that’s low tech compared to what these other prisoners did:
Four suspects were arrested late on Sunday outside a maximum security facility in the southern town of Presidente Venceslau in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state after the mini-chopper, 14 mobile telephones and the equivalent of 500 dollars in cash were found in their rented car, according to reports in local media.
Note that this is also in Brazil: what’s up with that? Can’t they smuggle things the good ol’ fashioned way – in their butts – just like all other prisoners do in the rest of the world?
(image credit: Mike Graham)
See also: 6 Criminals Who Lived Very, Very Well
