Prisons are institutions for the confinement of persons detained by a judicial authority or who have been deprived of their liberty following conviction for a crime. Thus, a person found guilty of a crime or misdemeanor may be required to serve a prison sentence and, if unlucky, may be sent to one of the worst prisons in the world.
Thus, in most of these places some prisoners do not live to complete their sentence due to brutality and rivalry between inmates.
Generally, in these prisons there is a social hierarchy within each facility, and those at the bottom are most vulnerable, so to speak. There are murders, rapes and attacks on prisoners as well as guards, and the corrupt compliance of some authorities also ensures that the process goes unchecked.
On the other hand, there are normal prisons, but with some more desolate and desperate incarceration facilities that are a real hell. Check out the worst prisons in the world below.
10 worst prisons in the world
1. ADX Florence, USA
This facility is considered a maximum security prison with extreme controls for dangerous prisoners. As a result, prisoners have to spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, resulting in high rates of force-feeding and suicide incidents. According to international human rights organizations, this type of treatment leads to serious physical and psychological problems for inmates.
2. Penal Ciudad Barrios – Prison in El Salvador
The ultra-violent MS 13 gang lives side by side with the equally dangerous Barrio 18 gang, in conditions you can't even imagine. Thus, episodes of violence between most of these gang members are frequent, which leaves several people dead, including armed prison guards.
3. Bang Kwang Prison, Bangkok
This penitentiary is home to prisoners considered dangerous to the country's society. As a result, inmates in this prison are only given one bowl of rice soup a day. Also, those on death row have irons welded around their ankles.
4. Gitarama Central Prison, Rwanda
This prison is another example of a place where violence and chaos prevail due to its overcrowding. Intended for 600 people, the place houses 6.000 inmates and for this reason is considered “hell on earth”. The prison herds inmates almost like animals in the limited facilities and in extreme and inhumane conditions. Indeed, there danger and disease increase and make the environment even more hostile.
5. Black Dolphin Prison, Russia
This prison in Russia houses the worst and most dangerous inmates, usually murderers, rapists, pedophiles and even cannibals. Due to the nature of convicts, jailers are just as brutal. For this reason, prisoners are not allowed to sit or rest from the time they wake up until they go to sleep, and they are also blindfolded and held in stress positions while being transported.
6. Petak Island Prison, Russia
This dark prison is specially adapted to contain the country's most dangerous criminals. Thus, they use a system of physical and mental stress techniques to inhibit the violence of their prisoners. Prisoners are in their tiny cells 22 hours a day, do not have access to books and are entitled to two short visits per year. The bathrooms are also terrible and torture there is common.
7. Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, Kenya
In addition to the appalling conditions such as extreme overcrowding, heat and water shortages, the prison is also known for its violence. Both fights between prisoners and beatings by jailers are serious, and the problem of rape is also an alarming factor there.
8. Tadmor Prison, Syria
Tadmor has a reputation for being one of the worst prisons in the world. The abuse, torture and inhumane treatment inflicted within the walls of this prison left a notorious legacy hard to forget. Thus, gruesome accounts of this prison tell of tortured prisoners being dragged to death or chopped to pieces by an axe. On June 27, 1980, defense forces massacred around 1000 prisoners in a single sweep.
9. La Sabaneta Prison, Venezuela
This prison, in addition to being overcrowded, is a place where violence and rape are common. Thus, the most famous incident occurred in 1995 where 200 prisoners were killed. Furthermore, in its facilities inmates carry a makeshift knife, denoting that this prison is more about survival than rehabilitation.
10. Unit 1391, Israel
This top secret detention center has been dubbed the 'Israeli Guantanamo'. So there are dangerous political prisoners and other enemies of the state there, and their treatment is disgusting, to say the least. Incidentally, this prison is unknown to most authorities, even the Minister of Justice was unaware of its existence, as the area had been excluded from modern maps. As a result, torture and human rights abuse are common there.
Most Brutal Prisons in History Currently Unavailable
Carandiru Penitentiary, Brazil
This prison was built in São Paulo in the 1920s and was specifically designed to meet new regulations in Brazil's penal code. However, it was not officially opened until 1956. At its height, Carandiru held around 8.000 prisoners with only 1.000 jailers. Conditions inside the prison were really horrible, as the gangs controlled the environment, while diseases were poorly treated and malnutrition was normal.
The São Paulo prison is unfortunately best remembered for the Carandiru massacre in 1992. The incident was triggered by the inmates' revolt and the police made little or no effort to negotiate with the inmates. The military police were eventually sent to the scene, as the jailers were unable to control the situation. As a result, records show that 111 prisoners died that day, 102 of whom were shot by police, with the remaining nine victims murdered from stab wounds allegedly inflicted by other prisoners before police arrived.
Hoa Lo Prison, Vietnam
Also known as the 'Hanoi Hilton' or the 'Hell Hole', Hoa Lo Prison was built by the French in the late 600th century. Indeed, Hoa Lo's population swelled rapidly within a few years, and there were 1913 prisoners by the year 1954. The numbers continued to grow so much so that by 2.000, there were over XNUMX prisoners and overcrowding was an obvious problem.
With the Vietnam War, things got worse as the North Vietnamese Army used the prison as one of their main places to interrogate and torture captured soldiers. They expected American POWs to reveal important military secrets. Consequently, torture methods such as prolonged solitary confinement, beatings, irons and ropes were used, in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949, which defined norms relating to international humanitarian law.
Camp Sumter Military Prison in Andersonville, USA
This military prison at Camp Sumter is better known as Andersonville and was the largest Confederate prison during the Civil War. The jail was built in February 1864 specifically for the purpose of housing Union soldiers. Of the 45.000 people trapped there during the war, up to 13.000 died from malnutrition, poor sanitation, disease and overcrowding.
Pitesti Prison, Romania
Pitesti Prison was a penal center in communist Romania that was built in the late 1930s. Thus, the first political prisoners entered the place in 1942, and it quickly developed a reputation for bizarre methods of torture. Pitesti earned its place in history as a brutal prison due to the re-education experiments conducted there from December 1949 to September 1951. The aim of the experiments was to brainwash prisoners into abandoning their religious and political beliefs and altering their personalities to ensure complete obedience.
Urga, Mongolia
Finally, curiously, in this prison the detainees were effectively trapped in coffins. To clarify, they were stuffed into narrow, small wooden boxes kept in Urga's dark dungeons. The prison was surrounded by rafters and prisoners were fed through a six-inch hole in the box. Furthermore, the rations they received were meager, to say the least, and their human waste was washed away only every 15 or 3 weeks.
