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A prisoner/geek in Wales had his secret stash of matchstick weapons, including the Buster Sword and Squall’s Gunblade from the Final Fantasy video game series, confiscated because:
“…the realism of the swords presented a threat to staff safety, not because they could be used to send the staff back to the Lifestream, but because they look real from afar and could be used to threaten people.”
This guy will have a sweet job waiting for him when he gets out-making replica weapons out of balsa wood.
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
42-year-old Roberto Carrillo didn’t want to be in jail for New Years Eve. He tried to escape the cell in Valle Hermoso, Mexico by squeezing through a gap he saw where the roof met a wall of bars, but there wasn’t enough room. He became stuck hanging upside-down and had to be rescued by laughing guards.
A source at the jail told The Sun: ‘If he’d had a brain, it could have been embarrassing.’
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Photo: James Reynolds
One of James Reynolds’ projects is photographically documenting Death Row prisoners’ requests for their last meals before execution. Included is a pack of cigarettes complete with health warning label.
Link.
Last year, an archive of World War II maps was donated to the British Library Map Library. Some of these maps are now on display to the public, and they have fascinating story behind them!
Waddington PLC, the printing company best known for its games including Monopoly, was involved in a most unusual venture during the Second World War: printing maps on silk, rayon and tissue paper for military use and smuggling some of them to prisoners of war.
[...]
During WWII hundreds of thousands of maps were produced by the British on thin cloth and tissue paper. The idea was that a serviceman captured or shot down behind enemy lines should have a map to help him find his way to safety if he escaped or, better still, evade capture in the first place. A map like this could be concealed in a small place (a cigarette packet or the hollow heel of a flying boot), did not rustle suspiciously if the captive was searched and, in the case of maps on cloth or mulberry leaf paper, could survive wear and tear and even immersion in water. The scheme was soon extended to cover those who had already been captured, although a certain amount of ingenuity was required to get the maps into the POW camps.
Link – via holeinthedonut
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