Forget about Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, or the fictitious penitentiaries in Prison Break. There are real life prisons where worse things than those in the movies happen. Some of these prisons are found in dictatorial regimes where dissidents are taught one or two things.
Some of them were built to house drug dealers. They are the most blood-chilling jails you can imagine of. One, located in Czech Republic, does not even have an official name.
Number 10) Camp 22 (North Korea)
If you want a clue as to how far prison brutality can be, just go to North Korea. The autocratic regime in North Korea is famed for rounding up all the people who do not show love to the country’s leader and sending them to prison camps.
Camp 22 is the most famous of these prisons, and has a population of 50,000 prisoners. Surprisingly, the government of North Korea denies that this facility even exists, although satellite images show otherwise.
Inside reports paint scary stories of medical experiments conducted on unsuspecting prisoners. There are cases of inmates being forced to eat poisoned cabbages at gunpoint.
Number 9) Petak Island Prison (Russia)
The nastiest criminal elements in Russia are carted to Petak Island, an outcropping of rock found in the White Lake. Not a single person has ever escaped from Petak Island prison, and this speaks volume about the facility.
It is not the uncontrolled chaos which make this prison among the most dangerous, but rather, strictly regimented and soul-crushing order. There are two inmates in every cell.
They stay in these cells for 22 and half hours. The remaining time is spent in wire cages. There are no bathrooms and no libraries. Only two visits are permitted in one year.
Number 8) La Sante Penitentiary (France)
It is not just in brutal dictatorships where arrests lead to vile prisons. This prison is located in Paris, and it is famed for the highest rates of suicides in the entire Western World.
The number of people who take their own lives in this prison every year is more than the total prison population in California. At one point, rats infested the prison, forcing inmates to strip and stuff clothes into walls and cracks to avoid being attacked by the vermin while asleep.
Number 7) 0WK Prison (Czech Republic)
Getting any verifiable information about this prison is not easy. The possible explanation for this is that nobody makes it alive from the prison.
It is located nearly underground, and each prisoner is housed in a stone cell roughly 4×6 feet. In most cases, prisoners here stay naked. Nobody even knows its official name. The 0WK is how CIA refers to it.
Number 6) Bang Kwang Prison (Thailand)
Bang Kwang prison, known also as Bankok Hilton, houses the nastiest criminal elements from the South East Asia. No inmate here has less than 25 years, meaning that all the prisoners are here for some time.
Upon being admitted, your feet will be shackled by leg irons which you will be forced to put on for months. It gets even worse for death row inmates because the leg irons are just welded into their feet.
Number 5) Carandiru Penitentiary (Brazil)
Given the high rate of crime in Brazil, this list would not have been complete without a representative from the South American country. Carandiru is found in Sao Paolo, and was mainly used to jail drug dealers.
It is rightly dubbed the “the most brutal house of correction”. Prisoners who were carted to this prison had to contend with substandard foods with no medical conditions. One out of 5 inmates had AIDS. In 1992, prisoners rioted and there was an armed response from the police who killed over 100 inmates.
Number 4) Tadmor Prison (Syria)
If there is anywhere you don’t want to find yourself as a prisoner, then it is in Middle East.
The Tadmor prison in Syria is remembered best for 1980 massacre when Defense Brigades members stormed the prison and murdered inmates in retaliation for an unsuccessful assassination attempt. Though the final number of people killed has never been revealed, it is believed it was just over 1000.
Number 3) Gitarama Prison (Rwanda)
One way of telling a truly horrifying prison is by the way it is overcrowded. At the Gitarama prison in Rwanda, 7000 inmates are made to fit in a house that was originally supposed to only house 400 people.
After the 1994 genocide that rocked the country, there were so many prisoners that it was literally packed to the rafters. Thousands of inmates died as a result of disease and suffocation. Since there wasn’t sufficient food to feed the prisoners, some of the inmates turned to cannibalism.
Number 2) Black Beach (Equatorial Guinea)
Black Beach is Equatorial Guinea’s most terrifying prison. It is known for the incredibly despicable living conditions to which inmates are subjected to.
Situated on the island, it is not without a good reason that this prison is cut off from other of civilizations. It derives its name from the constant flow of human excrement that normally darkens the ocean that surrounds the prison.
Prisoners were beaten and tortured at will by the guards. They were made to fight amongst themselves, with the losers being killed. Even winners were also killed.
Number 1) Diyarbarkir Prison (Turkey)
Diyarbarkir prison is situated in south eastern part of Turkey, and was built way back in 1980. Its building coincided with a coup d’etat that was to overthrow the government. At the time of building, it was designed to be a martial-law military jail for the state’s enemies. Being a home for the enemies of state, prisoners who found themselves here were treated very badly.
Torture was not uncommon, and, many times, prisoners were stripped naked before being beaten. The prison warder owned a German shepherd that he expected inmates to salute to. Failure to comply would see the dog bite them on the genitals. New prisoners had the harshest of treatments. Upon arriving, a dozen guards beat them before submerging them in a bathtub filled not with water but human excrement.
These are actual prisons where human prisoners not some movie scripts. If you doubt them, you jut commit a crime worth landing there and you will witness it first-hand. These are real life prisons where real humans are imprisoned.