Location: New york, USA
Rikers Island is New York City’s main jail complex, as well as the name of the 413.17-acre (1.672 km2) island on which it sits, in the East River between Queens and the mainland Bronx, adjacent to the runways of LaGuardia Airport. Supposedly named after Abraham Rycken, the island is home to one of the world’s largest correctional institutions. The island itself is part of the Bronx, though it is included as part of Queens Community Board 1 and has a Queens ZIP code of 11370. The jail complex, operated by the New York City Department of Correction, has a budget of $860 million a year, a staff of 9,000 officers and 1,500 civilians managing 100,000 admissions per year and an average daily population of 14,000 inmates. However, it is notorious for abuse and neglect of prisoners in recent years, which has attracted increased media and judicial scrutiny that resulted in numerous rulings against the New York City government. In May 2013, Rikers Island ranked as one of the ten worst prisons in the United States, based on reporting in Mother Jones magazine.
Location: Paris, France
La Santé Prison (literally meaning Prison of the Health) (French: Maison d’arrêt de la Santé or Prison de la Santé) is a prison operated by the Ministry of Justice located in the east of the Montparnasse district of the 14th arrondissement in Paris, France at 42 Rue de la Santé. It is one of the most famous prisons in France, with both VIP and high security wings. Along with the Fleury-Mérogis Prison (Europe’s largest prison) and the Fresnes Prison, both located in the southern suburbs, La Santé is one of the three main prisons of the Paris area.
Location: Petak Island, Russia
Petak Island Prison, Russia – Known as Russia’s Alcatraz, Petak Island Prison located in the White Lake houses the most dangerous Russian prisoners. Vyacheslav, a former prosecutor, was sentenced to life behind the physical and geographical walls of Petak Island. Vyacheslav, then 29, was sentenced to death for stabbing two women to death. He admitted to barely knowing either of them. “I took a knife, killed a bookkeeper and a cashier and stole their money. I didn’t need the money, but I needed to feel again. I was bored with my life . . . Maybe you understand,” said Vyacheslav, now 46. Vyacheslav was originally sentenced to death, but the Russian decree outlawing the death penalty halted his execution while it was in progress. He was thus sentenced to life in Petak. Petak functions under a strict set of rules that dictate order. Prisoners are kept two to a cell where they spend most of their time, a total of 22 and a half hours per day. For the remainder, prisoners are locked inside cages that are fenced in with barbed wire. No bathrooms or libraries are available. Only two visitors are allowed each year. Many go insane.
Location: Thailand
Bangkwang Central Prison is a male maximum security prison built on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thailand in the 1930’s. It was built to hold 3,500 prisoners but currently holds in the region of 8,000. It is known as “The Bangkok Hilton” in the West and in Thailand as “The Big Tiger” as it eats men alive. The inmate population is made up of prisoners whose appeals are pending in the Appeal Court and Supreme Court, convicted prisoners whose terms of sentences range from twenty-five years to life imprisonment and prisoners who have been sentenced to the death sentence and are awaiting excecution.Until October 2003 excecution was carried out by the firing squad, lethal injection is now used.
Location: Venezuela
In the Venezuelan prison system, there are 25,000 prisoners housed in facilities designed for about 15,000; and with roughly one-third of Venezuela’s population below the poverty line, jails like Sabaneta are stuffed. Some prisoners are forced to sleep in hammocks strung up in narrow pipe-access corridors, while the corruption of the system allows inmates with more power and money to attain rooms with more space. Combine this with an understaffed guard detail of about 1 guard to every 150 inmates, and you have a prison in desperate need of reform.
The worst part: There are countless violent incidents. One of the most frightening was the death of 108 prisoners as a result of a fierce gun battle in January 1994, and the level of violence has hardly decreased. The killings were indeed one of the most vicious and tragic in the country’s history, but it’s a common trend: In 1995 alone, an astounding 196 prisoners were killed and 624 were wounded as a result of jail violence.
Location: Diyarbakir, Turkey
Turkish prisons certainly have a shady past, to say the least, and Diyarbakir is no exception. From incarcerating children for lifelong sentences to overcrowding to sewage-flooded hallways, the prison redefines fear and hatred. There is no love lost between guards and prisoners, but a 1996 incident hints at a brutal authoritarian rule that leaves no inmate safe. In what one prisoner described as, “a planned massacre,” an attack on 33 prisoners resulted in 10 dead and 23 injured, 9 of which were left in critical condition. An investigation revealed a startling possibility that the guards masterminded the attack, which featured guards and police in full riot gear and equipped with batons and truncheons.
The worst part: It’s clear that the inmates have few rights. There is a large population of political prisoners, therefore “certain people” actually get all their basic rights reversed. So, instead of being provided with health care, visits and access to cultural and sports facilities, these rights are taken away and prisoners are held in abeyance. The Turkish government hopes to banish this kind of cruel treatment, but so far everything seems stuck in a “waiting period.”
Location: Benin
Benin is a small country in West Africa next to Togo and Nigeria. Cotonou’s facility has about 2,400 men, women, and children living in an area built to hold no more than 400. It is so overcrowded, some prisoners sleep in shifts, and others have died from suffocation while sleeping. Over 90 percent of the prisoners are awaiting trial, a process that takes several years because of backlog in the judicial system. Conditions at the prison are not intentional, the republic has limited funds to care for the inmates. Despite international assistance, many prisoners still die from preventable diseases.
Location: Syrian
Syrian poet, and five-year inmate, Faraj Beraqdar, described Tadmor military prison as: “The kingdom of death and madness.” Tadmor is known for its outrageous use of torture, its executions and for one of the biggest prison massacres in world history. On June 27, 1980, commando forces from the defense brigades savagely murdered an estimated 500 prisoners. One day, after a failed assassination attempt on Damascus President Hafez al-Asad, the commandos arrived at the jail via helicopter and proceeded to kill the inmates in their dormitories.
The worst part: In a word, torture. The methods used are medieval in nature: Some inmates were killed by the sharp end of an ax and cut into parts, others were roped and dragged to death and still others were brutally beaten by metal pipes. These torture victims consisted of both the guilty and the innocent, and were often randomly selected.2. GITARAMA CENTRAL PRISON
Location: Rwanda
We’ll cut to the chase: Gitarama Prison is Hell on Earth. It is home to approximately 6,000 prisoners, which would be terrible even if the capacity weren’t 500. Prisoners have to feed each other to survive, and the jail is so horrendously overpopulated that prisoners often stand upright to the point that their feet begin to rot. It doesn’t help that they’re standing in feces, which leads to disgusting episodes of gangrene. The inmates who aren’t fortunate enough to have their limbs simply fall off are forced to brave amputation procedures that, under these conditions, are a gamble at best. Most of the prisoners at Gitarama have been incarcerated due to the genocide committed against Rwanda.
Location: North Korea
Those who have lived to tell us about Camp 22, located in the bleak northeastern tip of North Korea, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and all of them are former guards or staff. Of all of North Korea’s numerous labor camps and detention facilities, large and small, Camp 22 is one of the largest, and almost certainly the most terrible, if only for the inhuman experiments witnesses say were done to the men, women, children, and even infants sent there. North Korea’s system of spying, thought-control, isolation, and terror may have no equal in human history. That is how Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il kept the secrets of Camp 22 inside its ten-foot wire fences and distinctive blocky guard posts for decades. That changed when satellite photography went public. Since then, Google Earth has revealed the world’s most secret places to armies of amateur “squints.” Satellite photography was available to the human rights researcher David Hawk when he set to work on “The Hidden Gulag,” his ground-breaking study of North Korea’s forced labor camps. Hawk’s interviews with survivors and former guards alone would not have had the same impact had those witnesses not been able to point to those photographs and say.
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