picture this you're 22 years old in the prime of your life with a pregnant and devoted wife you haven't been married to for very long and then everything changes one night when a man is murdered in the street you are accused of the murder with the evidence being that it was your face a witness saw running from the scene of the crime that evidence is weak to say the least and seeing as you know very well you didn't do it you're confident you'll get off but that's not the case and you will spend many years behind bars a trial judge will say you're likely innocent some 20 after the crime was committed and you still won't get out how could this happen let's start from the beginning the man we're talking about is named Benjamin Spencer and he was convicted along with another man of committing a murder on a quiet street in west Dallas over 30 years ago on March 22nd in the year of 1987 a 33-year-old named Jeffrey Young who was doing well for himself at a clothing company was attacked after walking out of his company office around 9:30 p.m. the police report says he was then manhandled into his BMW by two men and drove over to West Dallas and it's there his body was dumped down a dark alley police thought they had gotten lucky when Witnesses came forward and said that they saw what happened there were three of those Witnesses and they identified two men one was Spencer and the other was named Robert Mitchell but as the district attorney of Dallas now says something might have been a Miss because all the witnesses all knew Spencer these people were not strangers Spencer was by no means an angel he'd spent some time Behind Bars before for driving on a suspended license and had also been put on probation for 6 years for driving a car that had been stolen by a friend nonetheless as we said his new wife was pregnant and he was turning over a new Leaf after he was picked up 4 days after the crime he wasn't very worried it was just a mistake a case of mistaken identity but that wasn't the case at all Spencer had an alibi too which was the testimony of a young woman friend of his who said she'd been hanging out with him when the murder and robbery took place on top of that there was no physical evidence linking Spencer to the crime just those witness testimonies during the robbery of a watch had been stolen as well as a wedding ring a small portable TV and a briefcase none of these things were found at Spencer's house police didn't have any fingerprint evidence nor was there a murder weapon found many years later Spencer would say in an interview I began to think well I didn't commit this offense the truth is going to come out but a few months down the line Spencer was sentenced to 35 years in prison with the evidence being the witness's testimony as well as a jailhouse informance testimony it was a nightmare come true Spencer's heart sank his life was ruined the father to be had become a condemned man and the state had failed to do its job in his eyes but not long into his sentence Spencer got a break it turned out that the star witness in his case had lied she not told the truth about whether she had received a reward for coming forward in giving evidence a new trial was set but Spencer was then offered a plea deal by the state he could probably get out in 5 years if he accepted this but wasn't this 5 years too much and why would an innocent man taint His Name by admitting he killed someone one when he hadn't in his mind he'd been wronged and accepting a plea deal was just another wrong in the Topsy Turvy world of American Justice nonetheless his attorney told him to take it years later Spencer would tell NBR he was saying if you take it to trial they're going to give you a life sentence and they're likely to get it and I'm like I'm not going to plead guilty to something I didn't do who in their right mind would and so he didn't accept the deal during his second trial the state prosecuted Spencer for aggravated robbery and asked for a life sentence the evidence again was a witness testimony with the star witness Being A 42-year-old Woman Who Lived close to the alley where the victim was dumped it was her testimony that got Spencer convicted again and as you'll soon find out her testimony was hardly concrete but she stood her ground and according to reports was very convincing when she described what she had seen on the night of the crime this was Spencer and Mitchell dumping the body Mitchell was also convicted again and unfortunately he would not live much longer anyway so now Spencer is back in prison again in looking down a long road of 30s something years living life behind bars as an innocent man his life now would be dedicated to proving his innocence and this would be a long process Spencer got in touch with organizations that helped wrongly convicted men who were serving time one such organization was named Centurion Ministries and the people there knew that the state had sent down an innocent man they built a case interviewed over 100 people and then asked for a hearing the petition ended up on the desk of a criminal court judge in Dallas named to Rick Magnus he said he wasn't sure at first whether to have a hearing mostly because the exoneration wasn't based on any kind of new DNA evidence this is often what gets innocent people freed but he later said in interviews that the more he read about the case he realized there had been a lot of wrongs in Spencer's conviction 20 years after the crime Magnus granted an evidentiary hearing the witnesses came forward again and this time two of them backed down but that woman who lived across from the alley didn't she stood firm again she said she had definitely seen Spencer as we said there was a big problem with her testimony that's because all those years later a forensic visual scientist was asked to watch a reenactment of the body being dumped what that was was people in the dark pretending to be the pair that dumped the body after this there was no doubt that this woman could have seen anything other than a silhouette no way she could have clearly seen a face as she said she had done that forensic scientist said with the conditions as they were a person could not have made out a face any farther than 25 ft away but as it stood the wi claiming to have seen the man who was standing closest to the crime scene was 93 ft away again just no way could any of those Witnesses have gotten a clear ID with this new evidence judge Magnus said okay enough is enough and he ordered a retrial on the grounds of something called actual innocence as for Spencer he said he was over the moon when he heard the news Not only would he get out but he would clear his name too in an interview he said I was very hopeful I thought that this is it I'm going home that didn't happen though Spencer said at first he was hopeful that his retrial would take place within a few weeks they passed so then he thought maybe a few months and they passed in fact years passed in the only Authority capable of granting a new trial the Court of Criminal Appeals it seems did nothing at all then in 2011 Spencer got some bad news there would be no retrial while a judge said that indeed if the New Evidence had been presented at the first trial it would have been unlikely that Spencer would have been convicted but that same judge said because Spencer hadn't come up with any incontrovertible new evidence proving he wasn't there that night such as CCTV footage or DNA that had never been tested there would be no trial the judge admitted that Spencer was likely Innocent but it didn't matter he didn't have the evidence to get that new trial his attorney now says that she needs to start again she needs to find this new evidence proving her client's innocence the problem of course is how do you find new evidence 28 years after the fact the woman across from the alley now won't talk openly about the case another witness died and another now says that she didn't get a clear look at Spencer the witness now says he felt pressured by the police to say it was Spencer so that's it the only thing saying Spencer is guilty is the testimony of a witness who it's been proven couldn't have possibly seen Spencer that night everyone seems to know the case stinks but the fact is the justice system doesn't seem to provide any solutions to get Spencer out but there's more there was another witness but this witness was never called she now says that she is 1,000% sure that the people she saw didn't include Spencer what about that jailhouse informant well he now says that Spencer never told him he had committed the crime records also show something very fishy the informant said in court that he had not received any benefit from giving that statement but this guy was looking at a 25e sentence for aggravated robbery guess what happened after he spoke to the police and gave his testimony he walked out of prison after just more than a year another person has come forward saying he knows who killed the man that night because it was a friend of his who did it he admitted it to him this man did not come forward at the time because he didn't want to rat on one of his friends the man whose name was put forward is currently serving time for robbery and assault investigators now say that police weren't going after Spencer but they just had a case of what's called tunnel vision they had a theory and they looked only at the evidence that fit that theory anything else was ignored Spencer now sits in his cell a man in his 50s wearing glasses waiting and hoping but he doesn't have too much hope left in an interview he said I'm just at a point where I'm still hopeful but at the same time it's like I'm stuck in a system his story has been written about extensively in the American Media but it seems this man really is stuck in the system he's been denied parole on each occasion he was up for it and from what we can see still waits in his cell to this day Waiting in Vain for something to help him get him out of the web of American Justice if you've already seen the 2008 movie Bronson about Britain's so-called most notorious prisoner don't worry that rather theatrical piece of Cinema didn't tell you much about the man so there's so much more to see today you might be thinking that it's coincidental that a man with such a reputation has the same name as a former Hollywood tough guy but he wasn't called that at Birth the name was acquired during his bare knuckle boxing days he was actually born Michael Gordon Peterson yep that doesn't sound quite as fearful there's a lot of controversy about this man regarding whether he should have been in prisoned for so long or if prison is to blame for his often crazy behavior we discuss this and more in this episode epis of the infographic show Britain's most notorious prisoner Charles Bronson as you know he was born with the name Michael his birthday was December 6 1952 he spent his first few years in Wales and then moved to Luton which isn't too far away from the capital London it doesn't seem that he came from a rough and tumbled background given that his father ran a conservative club for a while and his aunt and uncle were a mayor and mayoress his aunt actually once said this about him as a boy he was a lovely lad he was obviously bright and always good with children he was gentle and Mild mannered never a bully he would defend the weak he might have defended the weak but it seems his penion for violence and crime started early in life after he moved up north at the age of 13 it seems that that's when trouble started at that age he was charged as a juvenile for stealing and it said he was part of a gang he didn't much enjoy school and soon left to start working at an early age his first job came when he moved back down to Luton this was a very short 2E stint working in Tesco Supermarket apparently he was fine fired for attacking his manager after this it seems crime became second nature to young Michael he got in trouble for criminal damage but got off with a fine in some probation he had lots of jobs mostly related to labor or factory work and we're told he enjoyed nothing more than a good night out on the town drinking gallons of beer and getting into fist fights with the locals easy to do in some areas of the UK he likely wasn't short of foes on the Mean Streets of Luton one of his jobs we're told was a circus strongman so he was likely a hard man to fight he got in trouble again after crashing a stolen Lorry or a truck into another car but again got off with just a fine as no one was seriously hurt at this point he is still in his teens yet again he got into trouble and at this time aged 19 when he was involved in a smash and grab which is basically smashing a car into a shop front and getting as much as you can again he got off with just a fine and a suspended sentence age 20 perhaps he got his chance to join what is sometimes called the straight and narrow as he met a girl and got married but apparently she quite liked his tough guy persona his tailored suits and the fact that he spoke in a cockney accent they had a child and called him Michael Jonathan Peterson according to the British press the son is very private and has never spoken publicly about his notorious Dad so we can't tell you much about him moving on now 22 Michael was arrested for armed robbery and at this time the judge came down hard he got 7 years but prison wasn't exactly a place he liked being it seemed during his first stint in prison in Liverpool he attacked two two other prisoners and we're told he wasn't provoked that got him time in solitary something he would see much more of later he was then transferred to prison in Hall and again had issues with guards and prisoners they gave him sedatives to calm him down which apparently made him very ill he also spent more time in isolation he was said to be a very difficult prisoner on one occasion he was out of solitary he attacked a prisoner with a glass jug and he was convicted of unlawful wounding yet again he was moved this time to the tough armley jail in leads a forboding looking place if you've ever seen one so there he was now serving time in what looks like a medieval castle even in 2018 the place is said to be the place with the highest rate of people taking their own lives and in the Press right now it said it's still very much an unsafe place for both prisoners and staff back in the 70s it can't have been holiday but it seems he was too much for armley and he kept moving between a number of Prisons sometimes chained to the floor of the Vans he traveled in it said if not in solitary he would attack prisoners and guards it's also said he incurred numerous vicious beatings from the guards after an attack you might have seen that in the movie which depicts these guards having to tackle him in numbers during one time in solitary while recovering from a beating he got divorced we imagin this might have been a low point but it said that one thing that kept him going was his solitary workout routine keeping him healthy and fearsome his book solitary Fitness which he wrote after many years inside has sold millions of copies reviews are actually very positive although people talk about how strange the book can get at times profits from the book says the media go to Children's Charities the British press tells us that his strength was quite unbelievable he once bent the cell bars with his own hands and it said he holds six world records for strength and fitness another unofficial record he has set is the most prison rooftop protests by any British inmates but right now we're still in the 70s and a long way from fame or infamy while in prison in London he tried to poison an inmate and it seemed that was the straw that broke the camel's back enough with prison he was transferred to a psychiatric facility but guess who he met there two of Britain's most ruthless gangsters the cray twins he called them the best two guys I ever met that friendship didn't last long though as he was moved back to prison What followed was more solitary Escape attempts attacks on prisoners that ended with lifelong scars more attacks and finally when the authorities were sick and tired he was suctioned under the mental health act he was no longer just a criminal but mentally ill in 1978 he was again in another special facility but it seems he didn't much like being forced to take medication and wasn't keen on the fact that he was surrounded by some of Britain's most Disturbed people men who would never leave the facility because they had done things to people we will not talk about yep he didn't like some of these terrible men and at one point was said to be about 5 seconds away from killing a fellow patient or prisoner who had taken the life of an innocent child in his own words describing the people around him as at the facility I witnessed them running into walls using their heads as Rams I've seen them fall unconscious doing this there was one who just kept trying to eat himself biting his arms legs and feet he tried to kill another prisoner and then in 1982 when still in the notorious Broadmore he led a rooftop protest that lasted 3 days and cost around $300,000 worth of damage now you can see why this guy became well known as a hardto deal with prisoner but there was a lot more to come he hadn't even started Ed he led two more rooftop protests and also went on a hunger strike but in some ways he found solace in writing poems sketching and creating cartoon strips he even won awards for his work it didn't stop him being violent though just settled him down from time to time psychiatrists couldn't figure him out and even though he was in a mental facility he was never properly diagnosed he once said asylums are crazy places with crazy rules if you're not mad when you arrive you are when you leave again he was moved from from facility to prison stabbing inmates hitting others more rooftop protests more isolation more beatings from the guards more medicine and perhaps his peace their resistance he once strangled a prison Governor after that he was not allowed out of isolation until he finished his sentence he got out of prison in 1987 and almost immediately turned to Crime although his first offense was quite comical he bought a water pistol and modified it a bit after which he forced a man at water pistol point to drive him to Luton his favorite spot there he started bare knuckle fighting and earned the nickname Charles Bronson he actually legally changed his name to this was this the start of a life on the outside not a chance it's written that he would fight anyone and even challenge the king of bare knuckle fighting Lenny mccan it seems Lenny wanted no part of him or at least when he agreed to fight it was too late as Bronson was back in prison in another fight he was challenged to go against a large Rottweiler he killed it and said later in life that he really regretted that it was cash in hand though he was only out of prison months and was back inside again for armed robbery we won't go into details but he fought again attacked prisoners guards and had more time in solitary was moved and moved and moved and occasionally tried to start riots in 1989 he was attacked himself stabbed in the back several times but he recovered he wouldn't tell the police anything about his attackers in 1992 he got out for the grand total of 53 days he was jailed but got off then he was arrested again for having a shotgun and conspiracy to rob it gets crazy here because while on the remand he took a librarian as a hostage while negotiating with police he had three demands an inflatable doll a helicopter and a cup of tea yep you heard that right he was given 8 years despite saying the gun was to blow off his own head it wasn't the first time he had contemplated taking his own life he was difficult again transferred from prisons and at times was left naked for many days on end in dark isolation at one point he was put in the wor wor spot in any prison in the UK something called the Hannibal cage that had been created for another prisoner who had once killed inmates and was said to have spooned out one person's brain and eaten it even though at one point he attacked a governor it said he got much better after being allowed to interact with handicapped children he also kept up his cartoon sketching these were the quiet times they didn't last long he endured more solitary more moves and then in one prison he took two Iraqi hijackers as hostage in his cell it's said he was going crazy after losing his father it's also said that he told the guards if they came close he would snap off the heads of his hostages he made his hostages tickle his feet and demanded they sing songs to him to them he was known as the general he demanded a plane machine guns ammunition and a cheese and pickle sandwich it seems later he just kept asking for ice cream in the end he let the hostages go and another 7 years were added to his sentence while in great physical shape it's said that all the time in darkness and solitary had negative effects on his eyes and his social skills and lawyers now started to get on his side it's a Pity then that he took one of them hostage he let him go quickly though but after one civilian worker criticized his drawings he took him hostage too and then started ripping up parts of the prison hm what else well after the Millennium he got married again converted to Islam changed his name and took another hostage wrote a book sketched a lot and then changed his name to Charles Arthur Charlie Salvador out of respect for his favorite artist the movie came out and he became a household name until then not many people knew about him thousands of people around the world started to support him saying even though he had been a bad boy his incarceration had just gone on too long but he couldn't stop messing up in 2014 he attacked another Governor that same year his artwork went up for auction and his 200 pieces often dark in nature fetched around £30,000 Bronson donated a large part of this to the brain tumor charity and ke hospice Lutton Bronson said the old him was now dead and he was born again as the artist Salvador he created more works too donating to other Charities and onetime Oxford's homeless he also got married to an actress in 2017 and she's hoping to see him out soon in total out of the 44 plus years he served 36 of them have been in solitary confinement sometimes without light in 2018 it was said that he is an open prison but will have his case reviewed in 2 years and could get out that might not happen though as he's got a life sentence for one of his kidnappings that was a teacher in 1999 that he held for 2 days the British media reports that he allegedly smothered himself in butter age 65 and challenged the guards to a fight we'll leave you with something he once said I'm a nice guy but sometimes I lose all my senses and become nasty that doesn't make me evil just confused believe it or not there's a fairly long list of people who have survived their executions we might look at the case of William Dell a 17-year-old English boy who was hanged in 1740 in London and then came back to life as he was about to be dissected he was later exiled to North America then you had John babom Lee another Englishman nicknamed the man they couldn't hang after surviving three executions more recently you have the case of Romel broom an American man sentenced to death by lethal injection he survived that ended up writing a book called Survivor on death row but it seems he spoke too early as he scheduled for another execution in 2020 but today we'll talk about one of the best known Survivor stories in this episode of the infographic show death row inmate who survived his own execution as we've said a handful of people have survived their executions you can read quite recent cases too such as American inmate Doyle leham who was said to have experienced torturous and traumatic hours in the execution chamber before staff admitted that they had failed the US media reported in 2017 that a man called Alva Campbell became the third man to survive an execution in the country in recent decades and that was just a matter of the execution team not being able to find a vein in which to inject the lethal drugs but perhaps the tale we're about to tell you now is the most moving as the person that survived was only 17 years old it's also the first case of someone surviving the electric chair in the USA if you've seen our show on Old Sparky you'll know that executions in the early days could certainly be horrific to watch but eventually the inmates succumb to the shock that was not the case for 17-year-old Willie Francis let's have a look at what events led to him ending up in the chair Francis was a young poor African-American in 1946 and at the time of his lucky Escape many people believed that the hand of God had interrupted this maob spectacle of official murder for one thing he was just so young and a lot of people decreed the execution of a boy not yet a man and another thing was the fact that the American justice system at the time could have been said to be harsh for certain people of certain races and certain social standing he lived in a place called St Martinville located in Southwestern Louisiana you could read articles about this place in the' 40s with one saying that the town had two sections one for the white people and the other for the colored the white tended to their own business and the color tend to theirs yes this was a time when racism was pervasive in some parts of the US and despite the backwards attitudes of some people there was a lot of support for young Willie when he was condemned to death after the botched execution attempt Francis wrote from his prison cell a lot of people write me to ask me to tell them something about what I did when I was young I'm only 18 now so I guess they when I was very young but what had he done one of 13 children Francis said life was hard as a kid but he wrote he had fond memories of the Hard Knock Life playing baseball with a broomstick handle and going out with friends causing Mischief when he got older he was given a job by a man called Andrew Thomas Thomas owned the local drugstore hiring Francis to do errands and keep the store tidy they apparently got along and Francis was called a nice boy and Cooperative by folks who visited the store he was however called illiterate by some or at least close to that other said he was slow but later when Francis was writing from his prison cell it was proven that he could not just write but Express himself in a deep and meaningful way we're telling you this because this case was very controversial and at the time and for years after people tried to understand why this seemingly nice kid committed a murder that murder was of the drugstore owner Thomas when her son was convicted of slaying his boss the mother told the Press there wasn't no bad in him I just don't understand quite a few people thought that this young boy perhaps somewhat mentally challenged had had admitted guilt to something he didn't do the murder of Andrew Thomas described as a handsome educated Bachelor with his own successful business he was killed at his home during that night of November 7th 1944 his body was discovered the next day sped on the floor near the house steps two witnesses Alvin and Ida van brocklin had said that they heard gunshots in the night they didn't see who did the firing though it was later said that Thomas had been dining with friends and Upon returning home had been met by a gunman who unloaded five bullets in him two hit him in the back two in his left left side and one went right through his eye it said his pockets had been emptied prompting police to say the reason for the murder was robbery rumors spread around town it said he was quite the Ladies Man and many speculated he had been killed by one of those Ladi husbands or lovers for months people believed this to be the case sometime later police were looking for a drug dealer and it said that Willie Francis just happened to see the police he wasn't dealing drugs but it said that when he saw the two white police officers running his way he just took off out of fright that was a mistake as running made the police think that he was guilty of something later Francis was interviewed by cops at the police station they said he seemed frightened and he stuttered a lot but it turned out that Francis had stuttered his whole life the cops didn't think that they had captured a drug dealer that they had been looking for but guess what they found on Francis they found Andrew Thomas's wallet and identification card that's what they said anyway it said that within 3 to 5 minutes the police got a full confession for the murder of Thomas they also managed to get a confession for an unrelated assault and robbery in another town the facts cops did this in a few minutes and the fact that the boy was said to be somewhat slow would compel people to ask if the interrogation and subsequent confessions were perhaps a part of a setup Francis was questioned without a lawyer without any advice without any family member or friend being present the confession read I Willie Francis now 16 years old I stole the gun from Mr oasy at St Martinville Louisiana and killed Andrew Thomas November 9th 1944 or about that time at St Martinville Louisiana it was a secret about me and him I took a black purse with card 12882 in it $4 in it he wrote a second confession the next day this one contained more details about how many shots had been fired and where the body was found as for the trial it said francis's lawyers were inept one writer says they never questioned for indictment nor did they make a motion for change of venue despite the widespread publicity about the murder of a beloved white member of a small community by a black youth the 12 white jurors found him guilty and he was to be executed Francis lawyers never challenged the The Verdict by the way Francis has pleaded not guilty the jury never heard any argument pertaining to the possibility of a forced confession or that evidence could have been planted the confession itself was good enough for him to be convicted many people in the town thought that something smelled funny as did many others across the US the local press wrote quote throughout the trial the Negro was uninterested and showed very little emotion unquote Francis wrote that he was concerned that he might act like a crybaby on the day of his execution but was relieved to hear that the actual execution would only tickle on May 3rd 1946 he had his head shaved and prepared to have 2500 volts of electricity flow through him on his cell wall it was discovered that he had written the words of course I am not a killer police never did have a motive for the murder nor any substantial evidence other than the confession of a slow 16-year-old boy he was taken to Louisiana State penitentiary in Angola to be put in the chair nicknamed gruesome Gertie the lever was pulled and this is how Francis later described the feeling I couldn't stop the jumping if that was tickling it sure was a funny kind I thought for a minute I was going to knock the chair over then I was all right I thought I was dead other reports state that he shouted take it off take it off as the executioners tried to give him a second round of shocks it said that after the failed attempt he wasn't even injured but he said he felt kind of dizzy some people said this was a miracle and a righteous one as they didn't believe that he was guilty nor had had a fair trial Louisiana's governor James Davis then said in 6 days they would send him to the chair again that didn't happen and much of America got behind the young man he once wrote I felt just like a movie star I didn't have any idea I had so many friends he also later described how his execution felt and something he called the chair he wrote you feel like you got a mouthful of cold peanut butter and you see little blue and pink and green Speckles the kind that shines in a rooster's taale what ensued were many months of legal arguments not only did some people believe he wasn't even but lawyers now argued that to subject a person to a second execution was cruel and unusual punishment prosecution lawyers argued against that stating the first attempt had not worked at all and he had not been hurt but the evidence supporting this in hindsight seems pretty weak the court also heard that The Botch was just an accident and such accidents happened for which no man is to blame that meant no one was at fault and there should be another execution we might also note that later the state was petitioned with lawyers stating this about the botched execution the scene was a disgraceful and inhuman exhibition that as soon as the switch controlling the current was taken off the drunken executioner cursed Francis and told him he would be back to finish electrocuting him and if the electricity did not kill him he would kill him with a rock the drunken men in charge that night were accused of being sadistic not giving Francis the full shock because they wanted to torture him he was then returned to the chair on May 9th 1947 and this time he didn't survive he was just 18 years old if anything positive came out of all of this it's the fact that the justice system was exposed for not supporting Francis in the first place this poor black boy may or may not have killed his boss but he certainly wasn't protected as he should have been by the American justice system many Americans of all colors saw and criticized what had happened the thought of prison is enough to keep them on the straight and narrow but for others prison is merely a consequence of their chosen lifestyle and for a select few prison is nothing more than a challenge a puzzle begging to be solved today we'll look at some of the more creative Escapes in this episode of the infographic show the greatest prison Escapes in history we're starting off with a classic fictionalized by Hollywood into the film The Great Escape starring Steven a queen though the real story is fraught with Far More Drama than what could fit on the Silver Screen in World War II the prisoner of war camp known as Stalag Luft III was thought to be the most secure p camp in Europe hundreds of miles Southeast of Berlin it was located deep in enemy territory and featured a host of security features meant to make it difficult to escape from along with barbed wire fences the Germans had sunk microphones 9 ft deep into the soil all along the perimeter in order to detect the sound of digging the prisoners Huts were all built on stilts raised up above the ground so any tunnel would be immediately visible lastly the sandy soil made it nearly impossible to dig through threatening collapse at any moment yet none of these things stopped a band of British Canadian Australian French and American Airmen from attempting an escape anyways the plan was to build three tunnels codenamed Tom Dick and Harry using only metal silverware and milk tin cans the prisoners painstakingly chipped away at the the building support Columns of three different Huts in order to avoid being seen working underneath them they accessed their below floor workspace via a secret trapo over which they kept a heating stove permanently lit in order to discourage any Nazi guards from getting too close in order to solve the microphone problem the escapes dug their tunnels a whopping 30 ft deep Excavating and astonishing 100 tons of sand all by hand to avoid raising suspicion the excavated sand was concealed in stuffed socks which they would sprinkle discreetly on garden soil being raped by other prisoners to shore up their tunnel walls the prisoners stripped 4,000 wooden bed boards and then lined each tunnel with 1,700 blankets to muffle the sounds of digging they converted discarded milk tins into lamps with Wicks made from pajama cords and burned in mutton fat the prisoners skimmed off the greasy soup they were served stealing a few hundred fet of electrical wire the prisoners even managed to Fashion their own work lights which they plugged directly into the Camp's electrical supply and if that's not enough on genuity the prisoners also created an air pump using hockey sticks and other discarded bits of trash and even built an underground Trolley system to transport the excavated sand on March 24th 1944 the prisoners finally made their escape forced to move one by one through the cramped tunnels barely a dozen managed to make it out per hour and at one point a 1-hour blackout during an air raid further slowed the escape attempt at around 5:00 a.m. however the disaster struck with a Nazi guard on patrol nearly falling into the exit shaft of one of the three tunnels and discovering the plot a massive Manhunt was mobilized and eventually the Germans recovered 73 of the 76 escapes three however would make it to safety two Norwegians who stowed away on a freighter to Sweden and a Dutchman who made his way to jalter by Rail and foot a furious Hitler ordered the execution of 50 of the escapes violating the Geneva Convention years after the war a military trib found 18 Nazi soldiers guilty of war crimes for shooting the recaptured PS and 13 of them were executed as one of the largest manhunts in American history the prison escape of the Texas 7 in December of 2000 made headlines around the world on December 13th 2000 the seven inmates convinced a maintenance supervisor to let them skip lunch so they could wax the floors of the maintenance room distracting the supervisor one of the inmates knocked him unconscious with a blow to the back of a head then undressed him tied him up and locked him in an electrical room during this time three other inmates four prison guards and nine supervisors wandered into the room and Incredibly all were subdued by the inmates that's when the Texas 7 put their plan into action by impersonating various supervisors over the telephone the inmates got out of 12 headcounts and then making their way to the gate housee incredibly conned their way inside by pretending to be monitor installers once inside the Gat housee the prisoners subdued the lone guard and got his firearm along with a few other weapons from a weapons cache then the prisoners opened the back gate and drove their way out in a stolen pickup truck launching a multi-state Manhunt that would be one of the largest in American history eventually found thanks in part to the television program America's Most Wanted the prisoners even demanded a TV appearance before they would agree to surrender in the end no such appearance would be granted and all of the seven were brought back into custody there's never been a more iconic prison in history than Alcatraz and naturally it is the setting for for our greatest prison escape story a lifelong criminal Frank moris was serving a 10-year stint for bank robbery when he broke out of the Louisiana state penitent only to be recaptured a year later and sent to Alcatraz ranked in the top 2% of the population in intelligence and with an IQ of 133 Mars paid no heed to Alcatraz his reputation as an inescapable prison and quickly went to work developing an Escape Plan partnering with Brothers John and Clarence angland and car thief Allan West the four prisoners discovered an unguarded utility Corridor that ran just behind their cells which housed a ventilation shaft to the roof utilizing scavenged saw blades spoons stolen from the commissary and even a homebuilt drill made from the motor of a broken vacuum cleaner the four gradually widened the ventilation duct opening in each of their cells the holes were concealed using cardboard and paint and Mars's accordion provided cover for the sound of their work once inside the utility corrier the four climbed to the roof of their cell block and set up a small Workshop there using stolen and donated materials the four made makeshift life preservers using 50 raincoats from a design they had seen in an issue of Popular Mechanics they also used the raincoats to create a 6X 14t rubber raft and used a small accordion-like concertina they stole from another inmate as a Bellow to inflate the raft their paddles were made from scrapwood and stolen screws on the night of June 11th 1962 the men began their escape of the four though West was unable to leave his cell having used cement to shore up the crumbling concrete around the vent opening in his cell which threatened to give him away once dried the cement narrowed the Escape hole and fixed the steel grill in place and by the time he had rewined his hole and removed the grill the others had already left without him the other three inmates climbed the ventilation shaft to the roof then hauled their homemade life preservers and rafted 5050 ft down a kitchen vent pipe to the ground and then scaled two 12T barbed wire fences somewhere along the northeast Shoreline of Alcatraz where the prison's network of search lights and gun Towers had a blind spot the men inflated their raft and then rode into the dense fog trying to reach Angel Island 2 mil to the north in the ensuing Manhunt police would recover one of the paddles and bits of raft and life reservers but no sign of the men with their stated plan having been to steal clothing in a car and no vehicle or clothing thefts reported in the area after the escape the police finally concluded that in all likelihood the men drowned in the strong currents and frigid Waters of San Francisco Bay you would think that when strapped to a gurnie knowing the life force in you is about to expire you'd want to say something nice to someone or profound or perhaps apologize to the family of the victim that's watching your demise then again if you were an innocent person about to have his veins filled with a lethal cocktail you might not be in the mood to deliver a tender speech you might also be a ruthless and heartless psychopath that wants to fill the Air One last time with your monstrous voice as you'll Now find out that has happened and it might send shivers down your spine hearing what they said first up Richard Aaron Cobb Cobb was executed by lethal injection in 2013 in Texas his crime was walking into a convenience store with an accomplice and robbing it it didn't stop there they took two female employees and one male customer and forced them into a car they took them to a secluded place and shot them execution style and then drove away thinking they were all dead only the man actually died his last words were very strange starting out nihilistic he then finished with something very surprising I hope that someday this absurdity that Humanity has come to will come to an end and then seconds later after he started to pass away wow this is great thank you Warden this next one is slightly more gruesome John Wayne gasy you all know the story of this man and we won't go into detail about what he did he murdered 33 people in the 70s and hid many of the bodies under his house he is one of the USA's worst serial killers his last words show that he had no remorse whatsoever they were kiss my we can't say that last word otherwise the video will get demonetized but we are sure you can guess what it is there's no cursing in this next one but we think you'll agree it's pretty darn dark Peter curton you've never heard of this guy we bet he was a German serial killer at a time where there were few of them about in Germany that was the early 20th century he killed at least nine people and did terrible things with the bodies one other thing was that he drank the blood of his victims and that's why he was sometimes named The Vampire of dorf in 1931 he was beheaded by guillotine and just before that happened he looked at his psychiatrist and said tell me after my head has been chopped off will I still be able to hear at least for a moment the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck that would be the pleasure to end all pleasures before the blade came down the psychiatrist replied no I lean waros this woman you might have seen portrayed in a Hollywood movie called Monster she worked selling her body on the streets and killed six of her male customers she claimed she was defending herself but that didn't hold up in court she's now known as one of America's worst female serial killers she was executed in 2002 and just before that she promised she'd come back to life again she said I'd just like to say I'm sailing with The Rock and I'll be back like Independence Day With Jesus June 6th like the movie Big Mothership And all I'll be back sticking with serial murderers this next Monster fits the bill Carl pans ran this guy was a serial killer in the US at the start of the 20th century he committed murders among many other Despicable things he said he had killed 22 people in all he was sentenced to be hanged in 1930 and just before the Executioner put the cover on his head he spat in his face he was asked if he had any last words this is how he replied yes hurry it up you hooer bastard I could kill a dozen men while you're screwing around in case you're wondering a hooer is someone from the state of Indiana up next is arguably the funniest on this list James French French killed two people in the late 50s and mid-60s in the USA one of those people was his cellmate the two didn't get along very well his actual last words went sitting in the electric chair were there's nothing else to say but the last thing he said to a reporter was this if I were covering my execution do you know what I'd say in the newspaper headline tomorrow the reporter said what he answered french fries yep that was amusing we think this next guy was also attempting to make a joke Jeffrey Matthews Matthews shot and killed his uncle during a robbery and he was executed in 2011 in Oklahoma because of that his last words aren't exactly frightening but his dark sense of humor at the end is perhaps a little bit shocking he said a few things but his very last words were I think that Governor's phoneone has broke he hasn't called yet Robert Charles comr you can say the same about this man at the end he either had a twisted sense of humor or was on another planet mentally speaking in 1987 he killed a man but he had also committed some other serious crimes throughout his life when he asked if he wanted to say something at the end end he said go Raiders that's in reference to an American football team such a statement you might assume encapsulates how little he thought about himself in life and his victims Robert Alton Harris Alton was executed in California in 1992 for multiple murders he'd been a career criminal with a long rap sheet although his killing of two boys is why he got the gas chamber he was incredibly heartless if you read his story but we won't go into it today at the end he became poetic his last words being you can be a king or a street sweeper but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper he's not wrong about that he's not as amusing as the next person though Vincent gutieres this guy was executed in Texas in 2007 after being found guilty of killing a man Gutierrez had been trying to steal the man's car and then shot him in the back he was under the age of 18 when it happened he said a few things for his last words and apologized for what he had done but then he finished it off by saying where's my stunt double when you need one John William Rook Rook believed his difficult childhood was the he committed a murder in 1980 in the US he had 12 hot dogs for his last meal and then just before they took his life away he thanked them and said freedom freedom at last James W Rogers Rogers was sentenced to death after killing a fellow worker at a uranium mine in 1957 the two had fallen out over quite a big issue and that was how a scoop shovel should be properly greased they didn't see eye to eye regarding the grease and Rogers shot the other man he was sentenced to death by firing squad when Rogers was ready to have the firing squad finish his life he was asked if he had any final words his reply was I done told you my last request a bulletproof vest Charlie Livingston in 1983 this man shot and killed a woman in Houston during a robbery he didn't seem to see the point of final words when the time came and he made that point saying you all brought me here to be executed not to make a speech that's it that was simple enough quite different from what's coming up Douglas Roberts this man from Texas was quite the opposite and he had quite a lot to say on the day of his execution by lethal injection in 2005 he'd been found guilty of kidnapping robbery and murder when the time came for his last words he said I've been hanging around this Popsicle stand way too long before I leave I want to tell you all when I die bury me deep lay two speakers at my feet put some headphones on my head and rock and roll me when I'm dead the media later reported that he was upbeat and animated before his execution Frederick wood wood was another Joker albeit with a dark sense of humor he was put to the electric chair in 1963 for the crime of murder when asked what his final words would be he replied jents this is an educational project you're about to witness the damaging effect electricity has on wood the next couple of people you could say are unique on this list Mary Blandy now we're going really back in time and this is the story of an English woman whose father didn't approve of her relationship she looked to poison to deal with this problem she was hanged in 1752 and at the time she was wearing a dress she was worried people might look up the dress even though it wouldn't matter much after she was dead still she told the Executioner for the sake of decency gentlemen don't hang me high Sarah good now we go even farther back to the Salem trials in Massachusetts in 1692 good was in her 30s when she was accused of being a witch and then sentenced to death all 12 jurors agreed that she had to be a witch she was accused of lacking in self-discipline and being a servant of the devil she had only challenged locals regarding their very strict Puritan values but they had said that that made her in League with Satan the Reverend Nichol noise was there at the end and still tried to get her to confess and she of course refused her last words were I'm no more a witch than you are a wizard and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink 25 years later noise had an aneurysm and as The Story Goes he coughed up blood and choked on it we should say this is what's called Popular Legend but as the witch trials were so terrible we imagined many people might hope it happened while these Witch Trials were Madness to the highest degree Mary's husband at least sued the courts for what's happened to her and he one now we go back to the present day and a couple of guys that look death straight in the eye Clarence Ray Allen this man was executed in California for killing three people he was executed in 2006 when he was the rip old age of 76 he was very sick at the time and a lot of people wondered why the death sentence since it seemed he didn't have much time left anyway his last words were hok It's a Good Day to Die Melvin white white had committed the terrible crime of murdering a child and he was executed in Texas in 2005 we w go into the details but what he did shocked a lot of people not many folks felt sorry for this man as he went to the gurnie for his dose of lethal drugs he did say he was sorry for what he did and then said all right Warden let's give them what they want the next couple of people you might say didn't sit too well in their chair of death Tory Twain McNab in 2017 this man was given lethal injection in the state of Alabama he'd been convicted of killing a police officer he and his lawyers had tried to stop it going through by saying the punishment was cruel and unusual but that didn't work he went to the gurnie an angry man and with both his hands he pointed two middle fingers in the air he then said Mom sis look at my eyes I got no tears I'm una afraid to the state of Alabama I hate you I hate you I hate you Thomas J Grasso we have perhaps saved the strangest last words to last and this was the execution of a man that had been convicted of two murders of elderly women he was given lethal injection in the state of Oklahoma in 1995 he wrote a short poem before his death and part of it went like this the warden will read my last Creed and the deadly Brew will flow as the poison drips into my veins and from my body life does strain but his last words were in the form of a very practical complaint we guess he was being ironic those words were I did not get my Spaghetti O I got spaghetti I want the press to know this there seems to be some disagreement as to who has spent the most time in solitary confinement but you can find a handful of people that did over 40 years without much contact with other people the record might well be smashed by the British prisoner called Robert modley aka the brain eater or the real life Hannibal the cannibal who's now done over 40 years in solitary the man we're going to talk about today might be behind in terms of years spent kept away from the other prison population but there's another reason he's called the most isolated prisoner in the world Mr Silverstein who was born in 1952 has been in prison since 1977 back then he was convicted of armed robbery and sent the United States penitentiary in lenworth Kansas to do his time you might be curious why armed robbery with no deaths would warrant such a long sentence but it's what Tommy did inside the prison that made the difference he has been given the epithet America's most dangerous prisoner and while the media is prone to exaggeration at times he certainly has been very dangerous within the confines of US prisons during his time Behind Bars he's been convicted of killing four people although one of those convictions was overturned for that he was later given a specially designed solitary cell and one that he would have to spend 24 hours a day and 7 days a week according to blog posts written not long before we started writing the show Silverstein had some very serious health complications but we're told that the Bureau of Prisons will not release any information as to his condition he was put into intensive care although we're told not even his family were allowed to visit him this is how isolated this prisoner is and we should add that by the time you watch this show there might not even be a Tommy Silverstein but now let's look at how he got into this point in his life we're told that Tommy grew up in Long Beach California while pregnant with him his mother got a divorce though she then married again Silverstein claims that this second man is his real father he wasn't around that long anyway because his mother divorced again and married a Mr Silverstein and this man legally adopted the young Tommy from what we can see he didn't exactly come from the wrong side of the tracks it said he lived a middle class kind of life but was very shy and certainly not a tough kid at the start he was bullied for various reasons but it's written that because of his name the other kids used to pick on him for being Jewish in a neighborhood where there weren't many Jewish people it said he soon toughened up and fought back with silverin saying his mother didn't suffer fools or bullies gladly most biow websites post this comment that Silverstein once made about his childhood that's how my mom was she stood her mud if someone came at you with the bat you got your bat and you both went at it so it seemed seems he was a slightly troubled kid but he didn't get into serious trouble until he was 19 years old that's when he was arrested for armed robbery the first time he was sent to San Quinton and served 4 years not long after getting out he met his father the real one that he says is his biological father and also his uncle the three were eventually arrested for three armed robberies it seemed Silverstein being so young garnered some sympathy with those people saying the young man had been taken in by the older men the judge wasn't buying any of that lack of Parental Guidance stuff though and sentenced Tommy to 15 years he wouldn't get out of prison again and might never if his present sickness gets the better of him even if he survives that it's very unlikely he'll ever get out of prison again it said his release date is officially 2095 so if he makes it to 143 he might feel the wind on his back again while in prison in Kansas he developed a friendship with members of the Aryan Brotherhood in 1980 Tommy now 28 was convicted of killing a inmate The Story Goes that the inmate had turned down an offer he couldn't refuse that was to be a drug mule for the white gang this is what the TV show crime investigation had to say as an inductee of the Aryan Brotherhood terrible Tom happily committed acts of violence which soon escalated to murder he violently killed DC Black's gang member Danny Atwell we should say though that his conviction was overturned with some of the witnesses later charged with lying in court Silverstein was then sent to the United States penitentiary in Maran Illinois which was said to be a very tough prison Silverstein had been given a life sentence for that murder but obviously that had been reversed after the perjury charge but then he was accused of killing another DC blacks member Robert Chappelle Silverstein always denied this and then the Bureau of Prisons did something one could call worthy of redress they moved the Nationwide leader of the DC blacks Raymond Cadillac Smith to Marion while Silverstein was on trial for Chappelle's murder I tried to tell Cadillac that I didn't kill Jael but he didn't believe me and he bragged that he was going to kill me Silverstein would later say he added that no one tried to keep the men apart and it was believed by him and the other prisoners that the guards wanted one of the men to kill the other a more cynical person would say that the system wanted one less violent inmate the one less they eventually got was Cadillac who was stabbed 67 times by Silverstein he did this with another member of the arant Brotherhood called Clayton Fountain crime investigation writes that Silverstein walked up and down the wings with the dead body to show the others what might happen if they decided to try and take him out we're told after this he became one of the top guys in the area in Brotherhood he was also given another life sentence so now we bring in an officer called Merl Eugene Kutz he was supposed to maintain order in the violent wing of the prison but Silverstein has always maintained that Klutz came in with a very heavy hand he was there to especially watch Silverstein and the latter said that he didn't only watch him but regularly tormented him that culminated with the death of Kutz one day in 1983 he and other guards were taking Silverstein to the shower block on the way with the help of another prisoner Silverstein got out of his handcuffs with a homemade key and stabbed the officer with a shank or a homemade weapon that he'd been handed the autopsy report revealed that Silverstein stabbed Kutz around 40 times Silverstein has always said he did this because Klutz had treated him particularly badly even for prison an investigation revealed that wasn't the case but Silverstein said the investigation itself was corrupt he was transferred to a different prison at this time where he murdered another guard What followed was a 23-year lockdown at Maran some say these two incidents were the reason the first supermax prison was built in the US you might guess that this was the beginning of Silverstein's days in solitary it wasn't normal solitary though it was what's called total isolation that means 24 hours a day in the cell and lights are on all the time his security status was no human contact not many prisoners get this with Silverstein and the British Maniac we mentioned at the start of the show being the most notorious Advocates of human rights have said such isolation is not far from a torture technique used by the military and sometimes extremists called whitewashing gradually the Bop started giving Silverstein books and a TV but Skeptics say this only happened because the bureau realized that in order to really punish someone in prison the prisoner can't just have nothing you need to give him something and then take it away this is the torture 101 style we see in the movies such as Silence of the lamps when Dr Lecter has his books taken away we should add that his self-contained cell is a bit bigger than usual cells for one thing it has to have a shower as he can't go to the shower room we've seen plenty of sketches online that Tommy himself Drew of a cell we might also add that Silverstein didn't hate all guards in a now famous case one part of a prison was overtaken by Cuban riers in 1987 Silverstein was let out of his cell and he could go anywhere he liked for a short time the Cubans held guards hostage and so the authorities were concerned that Silverstein would hurt or even kill them one of the guards had known Silverstein for a long time but no bad came to him it said he had always been kind to the prisoner asking him on occasions if his handcuffs were too tight still Silverstein said some of the guards would torment him often in fact you can read a Blog that includes a note written by Silverstein that must have been written just before he fell ill there he talks about deprivation saying dear friends and support as I've noted for decades with each new Warden Administration that they rotate every 3 years or so usually takes away from what we've got instead of gives us more he adds they got to flex their muscles as cowards do with the Hopeless and helpless in the last paragraph he talks about what is solitary confinement is like saying like the monotone bars and walls that in tune me they've Stamped Out the colors of happiness that I enjoy sharing with the outside world enforcing a black and white existence in this colorless hole of Madness other block post written by friends of Silverstein tell us that his writing and art have been confiscated at times and getting anything creative out of prison has been hard we found a lot more of Tommy's thoughts that have been published on blogs he writes another post that unlike even the worst case of confinement he can't even shout across a corridor his isolation is what you might call Extreme Solitude he writes that things have happened to him that have never been reported and he adds that inside the prison walls things go on that seldom make it onto those prison TV shows for him the penal system is unjust the prison system in general is not about Rehabilitation for the most part he believes as for solitary he writes history and studies clearly show that solitary confinement does more harm than good that it reveals the idiocy and sadistic mentality of prison administrators who Embrace this barbaric medieval practice and that it is a crime against humanity the guards didn't see it that way with one prison official once telling an author we can't execute Silverstein so we have no choice but to make his life a hell otherwise inmates will kill guards too there has to be some Supreme punishment we should add that Silverstein does get to visit people now and again but never in close quarters and always with glass and a telephone one visitor recently wrote he was told there were certain things he was not allowed to discuss with me one being the book he's writing Tom talked about his desire to further his education I had no idea there's no longer funding for prisoners to study prison the final frontier for some a place where they end their days others will get to leave but they' wish they'd never steep foot inside here are 50 things nobody tells you about Prison number 50 we'll start with the USA the country that can claim to lock more of its citizens up than any other and by a long way too according to 2020 data there were 2.3 million US citizens behind bars but when we say bars that includes federal and state prisons jails juvenile correctional facilities and immigration detention facilities just so you know these numbers are not exactly stable but close people enter and leave facilities all the time number 49 it works out to around 639 people behind bars for every 100,000 people the US is still number one in per capita terms here are the countries that follow up in the top 10 the number is per 100,000 El Salvador 562 Turkmenistan 552 palao 552 Rwanda 511 Cuba 510 Maldives 449 Virgin Islands UK 447 Thailand 443 the Bahamas 442 let's stick with numbers for now we'll get around to the messed up story soon we promise number 48 according to the prison policy initiative in the US 600,000 people enter prison every year but that's nothing compared to jail around 10.6 million Americans enter jail every year if you're wondering why that number is so high it's because many people get out of jail very quickly once they've got Bail some of them already have been convicted for small crimes so stay there for a while they number around 160,000 people a year one quarter of people who go to jail will be there again after release within a year another reason for staying in jail is the simple fact that many poor people can't afford to make bail in 2019 the Chicago Tribune wrote that of the 5,736 inmates in Cook County Jail 5,390 were waiting for a trial half of them couldn't afford to pay bail or they didn't have a place to stay where they could be electronically monitored that begs the question how many are innocent number 47 it's hard to say because statisticians tell us that a person is nine times more likely to say they are guilty of a misdemeanor crime if they can't make bail they just want to move things on even if they're innocent in fact 95% of cases never go to trial people take plea Bargains sometimes if they're innocent that doesn't mean prisons are teeming with innocent people but quite a few people have been wrongly convicted of a crime the Innocence Project says it's between 2.3% and 5% of prisoners in the US other sources put it as high as 10% but why number 46 the answer is for many reasons some innocent people take a plea especially if they think they have a less than great lawyer and they've been convinced that if the case goes to trial they're looking at a hefty prison sentence in court an innocent person could lose because of prosecutorial misconduct or because a witness lied or even a cop lied maybe during the interrogation the police were somewhat heavy-handed and the victim was overwhelmed let's now look at an extreme case when this happened number 45 we've picked on in the US enough for now so now we'll sail across the pond to the UK in 1974 a 17-year-old Council worker named Steven Downing confessed to murdering a 32-year-old woman named Wendy suell the case would become known as the greatest miscarriage of Justice the UK had ever seen although that's questionable given witches were burned there anyway this young lad first told cops he found the woman at the cemetery where he was working as a groundkeeper he said he moved her body and that's why he got blood on him he was interrogated for nine long hours he also had learning difficulties and there wasn't any lawyer with him during the questioning Guess what at the end of the grueling interrogation he'd said he'd done it he was given a long sentence with the condition that he could meet with a parole board after 10 years inmates believed this guy had hurt a woman so he was beaten badly and he had to change prisons eight times later he was caught in something called the innocent prisoner's dilemma he couldn't be paroled because he refused to say he committed the crime talk about a catch 22 it's actually not that uncommon we won't get too much into it but the the whole case was shambles he should have never been sent to prison the cops knew this one journalist that tried to help Downing told the BBC that the police harassed him he said they made my life absolute hell for five or 6 years I was pulled over for speeding stopped and searched victimized I was very worried for my family Downing got out after 27 years and subsequent investigations found that the police in the past had done some very sketchy work indeed on release he received around $1 million in compensation and became a chef he told the Press I never allowed myself to feel angry or bitter who could I have taken it out on anyway I still refuse to number 44 the vast majority of prisoners in the US are not in for violent offenses we looked at the latest 2021 data from the US Bureau of Prisons and saw that 46.2% of prisoners were in for drug offenses no other crime came close although offenses relating to weapons explosives and arson accounted for 20.2% of prisoners every 25 seconds someone is arrested for drug possession in the US although they don't all end in prison of course number 43 we looked into drug possession offenses and it is a very very contentious issue one reason is that drugs are widely available in prisons in fact there are reports stating that people have gone in for possessing soft drugs and got addicted to hard drugs inside to deal with the mental issues they faced the vast majority of prisoners in for drugs are not trafficking drug kingpins they're merely addicts research shows that importers or highlevel suppliers only amount to 11% of drug offenders doing hard time on top of that there's ample data to suggest that more poor people get stopped by cops and more of them go to prison for drug offenses than middle class or wealthy people as The Marshall Project said Rich drug abusers go to treatment not prison the UK Guardian echoed that saying the wealthy make mistakes the poor go to jail the story said you're much more likely to have a drug problem if you've suffered trauma growing up or grown up poor prison is like a double whammy Pew research said this more imprisonment does not reduce State drug problems few discovered that the deterrent of prison hasn't and doesn't stop people from taking drugs this is why this is one very big hot potato of a subject okay enough of that who served the most time ever number 42 we found a few names Paul gu served 68 years in the US after being convicted of second degree murder in 1911 weird thing is it was looking like a parole board might have released him in 1926 because of his good behavior but then he was found to be illegally insane he could have gotten out after 63 years but by then he was so institutionalized that he chose to stay in another 5 years he died a free man in 1987 age 93 number 41 Francis Clifford Smith served over 71 years in prison for the murder of a night Watchman in 1950 in Connecticut in 2020 he was moved to a nursing home now you'll see how innocent men can spend many years behind bars number 40 in 1972 ag26 Richard Phillips went to prison an innocent man he was released 46 years later he wrote this poem a few years into his incarceration ain't it a crime when you don't have a dime to buy back the freedom you've lost ain't it odd that when you pray to God your prayers don't seem to be heard Ain it's sad when you've never had the freedom of a soaring bird he was finally exonerated in 2018 and later told he received $1.5 million in compensation he told the media I just want to keep a low profile travel and enjoy life that's what I've wanted to do in the first place number 39 in a paper titled proceedings of the national Academy of Sciences it was said that 4% of people in the US on death row are probably innocent in the past and right now number 38 18 people in the US have gotten off death row after DNA testing proved that they were innocent they had collectively served 229 years sometimes innocent people get executed too as you'll now see number 37 a US man named Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 and later his innocence was proved after the case was said to have been heavily flawed his last words were the only statement I want to make is that I An Innocent Man convicted of a crime I did not commit this is what an investigator later said the whole case was based on the purest form of junk science Johnny Garrett was executed in the US in 1992 and later DNA evidence proved he was innocent it said he didn't want to share any last words although some sources say he said I'd like to thank my family for loving me and taking care of me the rest of the world can kiss my we omitted one word when innocent Florida man Jesse defer was executed in 1990 old Sparky malfunction and Witnesses said what they saw was pure horror the south Florida Sun Sentinel wrote flames and smoke erupted from his head now you'll see that executions of innocent people don't only happen in the USA number 36 in Russia in 1983 a man named Alexander kenko was executed for murder turns out that the killer was none other than the Butcher of rostoff Andre chikatilo in 1950 a man named George Kelly was hanged in the UK for murder there had been unbelievable police corruption in the case the cops basically set him up in fact police had the confession of another man but since they'd made a mess of the case they held that information back in 1989 a man named Tang Xing xong was executed in China for the murder of a woman that woman later turned up to the surprise of everyone jingshan had committed no crime at all number 35 prisoners get drunk while locked up on alcohol they make themselves it's sometimes called Hooch or Pruno or prison wine the best Brewers can earn okay money from selling it one former prisoner said you can sell half a gallon of wine for 25 bucks each pant leg makes 2 and 1/2 gallon so you do the math it's a good hustle he said he cut pant legs and sewed the bottoms and lined them with plastic bags then he filled them with water after that he threw in 5 lbs of sugar a loaded diced tomatoes and tomato paste he then let that all ferment other prisoners have used bread for yeast as for the sweetness any kind of fruit works but you can also add candy it's important to burp the bag we saw a guy in a podcast who said he'd forgotten to do that and he got covered in the stuff when it exploded number 34 another thing prisoners will pay good money for is mobile phones it's not easy getting them in sometimes an officer can be tempted with cash or even threatened other times the phones are plugged in the rear which you can imagine can be quite uncomfortable for a run-of-the-mill phone you might be able to charge a th000 bucks us inside Prison number 33 in 2015 Brazilian prison officers discovered a unique way prisoners were getting phones inside they used cats one cat that frequently went in and out of the prison was found with four mobile phones four Chargers and seven cards attached to it number 32 just how much a man can plug is anyone's guess but we saw a documentary where an officer showed how a prisoner had plugged a foldable knife the British prime minister was recently given a lesson on such acts when he learned some British prisoners were hiding Kinder Eggs in themselves filled with drugs number 31 why would people go to such an effort you might ask the answer is the markup drugs in prison are way more expensive than on the outside so much so officers might sometimes get in on the dealing it's a license to print money and there's no shortage of prisoners wanting something to take the monotony away in fact because opiates can't be detected in urine around 2 to 3 days later some prisoners get into them even though they just wanted to smoke weed weed can be detected up to 21 days after ingestion one podcast we watched said he took opiates in prison but every so often he got caught out he said then he went back to the first floor where he had no prison VES he'd slowly go back to the Upper Floor where he'd do more opiates then he got caught again and was sent back down he called it the merrygoround number 30 even tobacco is expensive inside one prisoner said he was getting stuff brought in and then he charged $2 or $3 for just one small rolled cigarette that meant that one pouch cheap outside a prison was worth a lot of money in 2020 in an Irish prison officers discovered one Hall that included mobile phones 800 G of weed 2 G of cocaine and 10,000 pills to give you an idea of how how much that's worth we'll go to another news story that said in the UK in just 2017 15,000 phones and a massive 189 kilos of drugs were confiscated a phone in a UK prison might go for $300 to $1,300 and those are lowquality devices the same article said synthetic drug called spice can cost over 30 times more in prison than on the outside cocaine depending on the quality might cost 100 bucks on the outside for a gram that might go for a th000 on the inside the markup was even higher for a gram of heroin this is why some people put eggs in their behind number 29 another way to get stuff in is when violent cons groom officers that happened to a man named Lee Davies in England he was on incredibly low pay for such a stressful job and then he helped some gang members get phones and drugs inside his money problems were over he was told to wait in a car park someplace then a car would pull up and throw something into his car he then smuggled the package inside and he kept doing that for months he was eventually caught he said later there's no excuse for what I did but I have deep sympathy for people working in that environment he believes he was partly groomed by the prisoners number 28 he started on 20,000 a year or $27,000 that's a very low wage but the job has got to be one of the hardest you could do according to job websites a starting prison officers wage might be $31,250 a year in the US overstressed and underpaid is what you hear from most officers they're dealing with violence and outrage and sometimes severe mental issues almost on a daily basis number 27 then there's What's called the prison industrial complex mass incarceration has become a business one that is booming in the US the American civil liberties union says mandatory minimum sentences helped create the US's bursting prisons and on top of that there was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act this led to more mass incarceration and massive profits for the private prison industry there are many kinds of businesses that make money not just private prisons you have the Food Services handcuff makers clothes services and the ones earning from cheap prison labor and much more this is how one person put it the prison industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and institutions it's a state of mind the lure of big money is corrupting the nation's Criminal Justice System replacing Notions of safety and public service with a drive for higher profits number 26 these are some companies benefiting or that benefited from cheap prison labor in the US McDonald's Walmart Microsoft IBM Target Intel Victoria Secret yeah they make lingerie Honda Starbucks Nike Nintendo number 25 if you want to know how much the prisoners make NPR interviewed a guy that worked at Omaha Correctional Center after getting 8 to 16 years for theft and forgery he was paid $2.25 a day for a 12-hour shift but he also said one phone call cost him five bucks and a bag of chips also cost him five bucks number 24 for some regular prison work in some prisons you get nothing just getting out of your cell is payment prison policy said in Florida if you're laboring for state-owned Industries you can earn between 20 cents and 55 cents an hour that seems to be about the going wage now for some more prison violence number 23 not surprisingly prisoners get killed in prison gang violence is usually to blame or at times people are killed for a certain crime they committed on the outside or someone just gets killed over an argument in 2008 there were only 40 homicides in US prisons that number pretty much increased every year in 2020 the last data we could find the number was 120 as you'll now see violence inside the prison is much worse in other countries number 22 we looked at prisons and jails in Ecuador and what's been going on in 2021 in February the BBC reported that 79 people were murdered in four different Ecuadorian jails although they were related to the same gang swabbles in April the BBC reported five men were murdered and 16 injured in just one Ecuadorian prison again Gang Related in July aler wrote that 22 men were murdered and many others were injured in two prisons in that country gang rivalry was to blame but overcrowding in bad conditions was also mentioned after that Ecuador's president declared a state of emergency number 21 okay so you've all seen the movies that suggest in some US prisons you have to join a gang or you'll either get beaten or exploited really do convicted accountant end up putting in work for the serenos it's actually a complex question but we guess the best people to answer it are folks who've done a lot of prison time there's no shortage of those people who now have their own YouTube channel people say it depends on where you're doing your time but it might not mean you have to get involved with a gang most prisoners give the advice just keep your head down and do your time they usually agree on one thing though and that is you will likely at least need alliances a British stock broker agreed he had the bad idea of starting an ecstasy Empire after moving to the US after being locked up in Arizona he said the first thing that happened scared the hell out of him gang members came into his cell and asked for his papers he didn't know what that meant they actually wanted to see what he'd been convicted of to make sure he hadn't hurt society's most vulnerable in some prisons that could mean Kos or kill on site it's why some prisoners are housed in protective custody after he was deemed okay he said he didn't join a gang but he also said he made some friends that made his life much much easier one former prisoner in the US said this the commonly held belief that joining a gang is the only way to survive prison is one that I sincerely wish would forever go the way of the dodo I honestly think it's the gangs themselves that try their hardest to propagate this false notion another guy agreed but he said Hanging with your own race in some prisons is a must he also said this in the yard all the races hang with their own with the gangs and shot cers they may take advantage of the weaker ones making them pay rent and such but once you stand up for yourself they'll usually stop and often ask you to join the gang if you say no they usually accept it so no you won't have to join a gang but as you'll now see you also won't be completely independent number 20 there's the dining room or chow hall if you don't get told where to sit by officers you'll sit with your own race this is where it helps to have made friends you certainly have to show respect so just plonking your behind down without thinking about it will lead to you getting a bust head one prisoner said at his prison there was what he called short bus tables these were the tables where anyone could sit but he said they were reserved for the less respected prisoners most former prisoners agree on one thing it's in the chow hall where you see alliances even if you're a fiercely independent person some former prisoners say going in alone is not recommended number 19 in the UK race doesn't matter all that much you usually hook up with friends and if you're a longtime criminal you'll likely have some if there are gang rivalries it's not about the color of your skin but where you come from in London or Liverpool there have been what the media called postcode Wars in some podcasts former British prisoners from the south said they didn't like getting sent to the northern part of the country and vice versa number 18 if you do get attacked in prison it's sometimes with a homemade knife or ship sometimes it's just with a razor blade other times the instrument will have a few razor blades attached close to each other this is so the wound is almost impossible to stitch the British media has reported a lot on this apparently the wound leaves a really big scar that's bad but this is worse number 17 one of the most horrendous things prisoners do and it seems it's not all that uncommon is throw boiling water in someone's face they'll usually fill the water with sugar because that makes the water caramelized and sticky in the past in the UK this has been referred to as Napal after that you need some good advice number number 16 prisoners often talk about the prison code which to be frank sounds hypocritical and nonsensical a lot of the time still there are some dos and don'ts the prisoners talk about do keep your head down be polite and respectful as much as possible if you're picked on or attacked fight back even if you're the lamest fighter in the world develop an exercise routine study the lay of the land educate yourself when something is available choose your friends carefully maintain good personal hygiene don't act tough now you're nobody Gamble take drugs borrow stuff even if someone seems really kind judge people steal stare talk to everyone about your crime fart if you can help it snitch number 15 sometimes inmates locked in their cells create what are called biological projectile weapons these are to spray officers with urine feces or even bile just in California at three prisons there were 111 gassing attacks in 2017 in that state you get 5 years in segregation for gassing an officer number 14 prison ERS sometimes use coded letters to get messages to each other which might look innocuous but if you can decode the message something darker lurks between the words in 2018 a letter sent from a prisoner to the outside that didn't sake anything out of the ordinary was an order to kill a staff member in the Atlanta jail you just had to read between the lines other times prisoners create their own ciphers with symbols designating a letter of the alphabet a gang expert who specializes in Breaking codes said about this not knowing what a code says can give us nightmares we need to know what these gang code say but sometimes we need to know what they don't say even more number 13 perhaps one of the strangest things to happen in a woman's prison is someone gets pregnant when they have never had a conjugal visit like a private visit with a lover or spouse that happened in 2019 a woman had been behind bars for a year and a half waiting to be sentenced for capital murder when she had a baby she'd been charged with being the getaway driver when an elderly man was shot and killed it later transpired that she'd somehow conspired to get pregnant by Sleeping with a male inmate working at the prison news reports said she hoped to having a new child would sway the judge to Grant her some leniency this next one is heartbreaking number 12 the youngest prisoner ever to sit on death row was George Julius stinny Jr this African-American boy was arrested in June 1944 charged with killing two people in June he was executed in the electric chair and he was so small that a Bible had to be propped under him on the chair the investigation was an absolute travesty of justice and the jury that sentenced St was all white the grave he was buried in was unmarked in 2014 the Civil Rights and restorative justice project said this there is compelling evidence that George stiny was innocent of the crimes for which he was executed in 1944 there wasn't any substantial evidence to support his guilt and his defense lawyer was less than useless in fact he had no support at all it was a kid against the racist cops and indeed the racist justice system the real murderer of Betty June bencker and Mary Emma Tims got away his conviction was overturned in 2014 number 11 the oldest person executed was Walter Moody he died by lethal injection in Alabama in 2018 he'd been convicted of killing a judge with a mailbomb in 1989 number 10 prison is supposed to rehabilitate that's why it's there but often those that go in go in again officers sometimes call the prison Gates a revolving door it's hard to compare recidivism rates worldwide because you have to choose certain years to conduct the study and there's a lot of data from all over the world the US National Institute of Health did a study but the data was from different years regarding different countries nonetheless it found that the percentage of released prisoners that were arrested for another crime within 2 years in England and Wales was 48% in France it was 40% in Finland it was 36% in Norway it was 20% in Australia it was 53% and in the US it was 60% number nine the US Supreme Court in 2011 called California's recidivism rates stratospherically high it was said then that he swapping 70% of released prisoners in that state were back behind bars within 3 years the state's prisons were accused of not rehabilitating but producing additional criminal Behavior that's why prisons are sometimes called crime school it's hard to fully understand why people end up back in prison but parle violations and habitual drug use as well as falling back into poverty and hopelessness count for something critics have said Us and other countries prisons focus a lot more on punishment rather than rehab which is the opposite of the Norwegian model as you know that country has very low recidivism rates okay we think you need to hear some good news well it's kind of positive number eight a British guy named Steven akabo Kowski was locked up in England in 2002 while serving his 16-year sentence for drugs offenses he earned a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees he had zero qualifications when he went in and started with his GCS and a levels that's equivalent to Junior and senior high school he worked in the kitchens all day and studied on the toilet at night where he said it was quiet he told the Guardians sometimes I wondered how I did it the idea that you can study in an environment designed for punishment is ridiculous he said it wasn't easy studying in what he described as a hellish place I still have nightmares 10 years after leaving it's a really damaging environment he said he's now a lecturer and a regional manager and spends a lot of time going back into prisons to help prisoners while he did well locked up he's still very critical of British Justice he doesn't believe prison acts as a deterrent to Crime he said people aren't being deterred the number of people in prison has in increased by 69% over the last 30 years they're not being rehabilitated number seven Anthony Ray Hinton spent close to three decades in isolation on death row in Alabama he was exonerated in 2015 he's since written an award-winning book the sun does shine how I found life and freedom on death row and was awarded an honorary degree now you'll hear about a man who's more locked up than anyone else number six the British man who spent the longest time in prison is Robert Malley he's been locked away since 1974 but for the last 25 years he's been in the worst prison cell in the whole of England he killed three men while in prison and one of those murders earned him the name the British Hannibal to cannibal it was a brutal murder but not as bad as those British tads made it out to be now he's in a special cell which is underneath the prison it has thick doors with bulletproof glass even when you open the doors he's actually in a cage within the cell he's allowed no contact at all with other prisoners he gets out once a day for an hour but has to have six guards around him at all times s they try not to make eye contact with him or speak to him he once said I am left to stagnate vegetate and to regress left to confront my solitary head on with people who have eyes but don't see and who have ears but don't hear who have mouths but don't speak many people have called this inhuman they know history and feel sorry for him given his childhood and the nature of the offenses of the people he killed we won't go into detail but we think you can work it out he's possibly the most locked up man in the world he once said I feel like I'm buried alive the prison wouldn't even allow him to have a pet budgie number five the polar opposite of this is Bolivia San Pedro prison it's more like a village than a prison there are cells to rent markets to shop in and even tourists can visit prisoners make cash by selling cocaine paste to them wives and children can live with a prisoner there's also a prison Hotel a soccer pitch a few churches and a hospital officers work there but the prisoners themselves ensure bad things don't happen inside if a prisoner does commit a crime they are disciplined in let's say a very Stern way if they commit a very serious violent crime they're likely dead soon after number four we think the biggest prison in the world has to be turkey's civy prison it spans over 250 acres and is home to more than 10,000 prisoners are Turkish prisons bad maybe they were in the 70s when hundreds of US citizens occupied them mostly for smuggling that quality hashish they so loved when Billy Hayes was a student he was sent to want he wrote a book on his release and it became the heroing movie Midnight Express he actually escaped in the end he actually said the movie exaggerated a fair few things the next country's prisons are bad and no one denies it number three one prison with lots of westerners serving hard time within its walls as bangkok's clung Prim prison many Smugglers have lived there and felt what it's like to sleep with 60 odd men in a Cell packed like sardines one man actually holds a record there to this day he's a British guy named David McMillan a former big-time drug Smuggler with a rather Posh accent he's the only Westerner ever to have escaped the prison in prison such as this if you have money you can live well there's a kind of Anarchy in there and the guards take a piece of everything McMillan had a personal cook someone to do his laundry and he had a cell with few people in it that had a TV he even had a little office area but when he heard he would be transferred to bang kuang Central Prison aka the Bangkok Hilton he made a plan to escape the ties call this prison the big tiger because it eats men many that go in die there McMillan successfully escaped but the funny part is that once he got to the street he opened an umbrella he'd taken with him when asked why he did that he said escaping prisoners don't carry umbrellas number two one of the worst prison disasters we could find happened in the US at Ohio State Prison in 1930 there was a huge fire except the guards wouldn't open the cell doors one person described it like this there was nothing to do but scream for God to open the doors and when the doors didn't open all that was left was to stand still and let the fire burn the meat off and hope it wouldn't be too long about it some prisoners managed to overpower the guards but outside those cells they were given orders to shoot and kill one prisoner later said naturally all of those men were in there and hollering and screaming for help and some of the men were praying and some of them was cussing and some of them were raving it was a question to do what you could do to help them 322 inmates died from the fire or smoke inhalation and another 230 had to be hospitalized okay let's finish on a positive note number one there's a prison in Finland called suan Lina prison the prison walls are actually just a small fence in the past it has had problems with prisoners not trying to break out but people trying to sneak in the cells are like nice dorm rooms and the shared kitchens all have the modern appliances you can ask for some prisoners are in there for the most serious offenses but they go to this prison when their term is close to an end it's kind of like finishing school the halfway house before prisoners enter Society at large still they do their last few years there even though they could easily just walk out why might you wonder a prison official said this the main idea here is to prepare the inmates for release into the community doesn't make sense for an inmate to be in a closed prison for say 6 years and to suddenly enter civilian life we also offer Rehabilitation for people who have had problems related to alcohol drugs or mental illness imagine a man trapped in a room that's 2 Paces across and 4 Paces long his bed is a concrete slab with a small rubber mattress and a thin blanket his desk has only a concrete stool and no matter where in this tiny room he lingers his toilet is never further than a few feet away he hasn't seen the sun in weeks and when he's allowed outside he is quickly shuttled to a caged in area that is just 4 Paces across and 8 Paces long inside is a deflated soccer ball and nothing more this man is only allowed to write to or receive mail from a very restricted list of individuals and any outgoing letters undergo intense scrutiny and censorship taking up to 3 months to be delivered a reply letter under go the same process and if not rejected outright will take another 3 months before the man can read it you're just imagining this cruelty but for many it's a daily reality that they have lived in for years welcome to hunit at Colorado's Federal supermax prison otherwise known as hell on Earth isolation solitary or special housing units have been a punitive measure employed by prisons for centuries while in the past a prisoner may have been thrown into solitary on a whim today in our modern prison system it's supposed to be used only as a punishment for prison offenders or for the safety of individuals who may be at risk within the general population though solitary is meant to punish bad behavior and ostensibly to correct it psychological studies dating back over the last 150 years have consistently shown that solitary confinement is extremely psychologically harmful individuals kept in solitary for long amounts of time can develop a form of PTSD and can become extremely averse to loud noises or bright lights they exhibit extreme antisocial behaviors which can be counterintuitive when the goal of the incarceration is to correct bad behavior instead of teaching an inmat a lesson solitary confinement can in fact make an inmate even more dangerous and aggressive in one famous case an inmate released straight from isolation into parole at the end of his sentence murdered Colorado Department of Corrections executive director Tom Clemens the inmate had spent years in solitary confinement getting only an hour of exercise a day if the staff allowed it which they often did not in an outdoors cage where he remained you guessed it alone then one day he was a free man and promptly took revenge for his treatment solitary had turned a dangerous man even more dangerous and had clearly failed its intended purpose crime must be punished that's a basic tenant of any nation which operates under the rule of law but where is the line drawn between punishment and torture many Americans today on both the left and right of the political Spectrum agree that solitary confinement for extreme lengths of time is inhumane and the data clearly shows that it's counterproductive to rehab itation yet it remains a popular punishment at many modern prisons think back to the man at the start of the show he lives in a cell that is 2 Paces across and four Paces long sleeps on a concrete slab has only a concrete stool to sit on and lives and eats with his openface toilet always within Arms Reach he hasn't been allowed to send or receive mail in months and on average might look forward to two letters a year maximum the longest conversations he holds are with the guards that bring him his food and these are over in seconds he's lived in the same tiny cell for years and with a life sentence he will most likely remain there until the day he dies for most people that scenario sounds nightmarish and some part of their Humanity still cries out for at least some basic compassion for someone sentenced to life in prison keep them locked up by all means but is it really necessary to keep them imprisoned in such a tiny cell for the rest of their lives now we want you to think about that man again and ask yourself what if that man was a terrorist would your feelings on his basic rights and treatment change at all the hypothetical scenario we've been having you think about is not hypothetical at all but rather a reality for dozens of inmates held at H unit in Colorado's Federal supermax prison these inmates range from drug lords to Major gang leaders and terrorists and include domestic Christian as well as Muslim radicals al- Qaeda operatives live next door to White supremacists who have planned massive acts of violence against minority communities and been caught the same as their Islamic terrorist counterpart known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies this is where the federal government sends the most dangerous men in America for these men they live life inside a prison that is itself within a prison forbidden from contact with the general population they instead spend 23 hours a day locked up in their tiny cells described by a former Warden as a clean version of Hell civil rights attorneys have argued that it was more accurately a dirty version of hell that's because for years the federal government also kept its most psychotic prisoners locked up here where they mutilated themselves talked to ghosts and lived in feces smeared isolation cells for months at a time even for the non psychotic prisoners though H unit is Hell on Earth these individuals are subject to what are known as special administrative measures or Sams measures which govern the rights of prisoners who are deemed to pose a serious ongoing threat to Public Safety and National Security on top of their extreme isolation Sam prisoners are not allowed any contact with the outside world whatsoever ever aside from a very carefully selected and screened number of contacts that typically only include close family members and their attorneys this is because of the fear that a prisoner May communicate via code to criminal or terrorist organizations around the world in fact one such case happened in 2005 when three prisoners wrote letters to suspected terrorists in Europe exhorting Jihad the prisoners denied that their letters were anything more than generic personal Communications but the FBI considered the incident a serious security lapse now the people a prisoner under Sam restrictions are allowed to contact is severely limited and the individual on the receiving end of a letter has to be vetted by federal law enforcement officials before being approved for contact that makes for a rather short list of people that a Sam prisoner may be able to communicate with and even then their letters are thoroughly screened and censored a process which can take months replies are also screened just as thoroughly adding months on the way back as one prisoner noted he simply gave up writing letters to his mother as it would take 3 months for her to receive it and 3 months for him to receive a reply these prisoners are afforded very limited phone calls and the ones they are allowed to place are extremely restricted and very closely monitored by FBI and Bureau of Prisons who listen to every word even then phone privileges are very few and far between which makes keeping up with the lives of loved ones practically impossible until only recently Sam prisoners were not allowed to watch news broadcasts at all for fear that modern-day events might inflame some radical thoughts and behavior of what limited television time a prisoner may have which is afforded only to Sam inmates who have earned tier three privileges after years of good behavior channels are often simply blacked out things such as newspapers and magazines are on a 30-day delay and political articles are ripped out of the magazines before being given to prisoners day-to-day life involves their tiny 75t cell where they stay for 23 hours a day while they're supposed to be allowed 1 hour of outside Recreation per day often this doesn't happen if the short-handed staff is too busy or if they simply don't feel like allowing the prisoner out when they do get to experience their 1 hour of wreck they must do so in a metal cage that is approximately 4 Paces wide and 8 Paces long or about twice the size of their cell often prisoners can enjoy a basketball hoop and a deflated soccer or basketball still for men who have spent a decade or more being locked up alone in a tiny cell just being outdoors again is a reward enough hunit prisoners do not have their own shower as most solitary units do and instead they are escorted to a shower several days each week however this too can be disrupted by lockdowns or staffing issues one prisoner Umar Faruk Abdul mutab otherwise known as the failed underwear bomber explained what his life inside hunit was like recently he claimed that prison staff harassed him for his religion and did their best to disrupt his practice of it he says that he was given no access to a Halal diet and Corrections officers would often mock him and desecrate both his Quran and prayer rug he also says that he was subjected to humiliating strip searches in front of female staff something deeply offensive for devout Muslims if the list of abuses sounds familiar it's because many of these same abuses were being regularly carried out on prisoners in the infamous Abu gra prison by US service members Abdul mutab was also forbidden from praying with others in his religion's mandatory group prayers and he had little if any access to the contract a mom while he used to be housed in a regular super Maximum Security Prison once he was moved to H unit contact with many of his friends and relatives with which he'd been allowed to correspond for years was cut off including with his own sister books he ordered from Amazon to help him pass the time were also rejected without reason curiously one such rejected book was the life-changing magic of tidying up the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing Abdul mut's treatment is hardly unique and a recent complaint filed in federal court rep states that Mr Abdul mutab experiences life in hunit at adx as a struggle to avoid becoming mentally ill the stories of other prisoners brought to life by the federal complaint paint a picture of Life at H unit as a slow journey into Oblivion A Relentless whittling away of Family Ties memories Hopes And even a sense of self nidal aad another inmate says that if he had heard some of the stories of what happens inside hunit 5 years ago he would have thought that they were crazy but now he tells a prisoners so deeply disturbed by their years of isolation that they warn him to turn off his cell's light because it emits harmful radiation these prisoners live inside Dark Cells day and night and some even claim that hot water is poisonous and harmful clearly the mental stress of living in isolation has created a host of psychological problems for these individuals it can be easy to disregard these complaints and simply write off H units inmates as nothing more than the scum of humanity who deserve exactly what they're getting and with some of the world's most dangerous drug lords gang leaders and terrorists locked up inside it's tempting to agree with the sentiment yet the conditions inside hunit speak loudly about our own values but we shouldn't let the hatred and violence of others compromise our own values and the nation we strive to be Justice must be served and evil must be punished but how we do these things speaks more about who we really are as a society than our laws do all I saw before me were Acres of skin it was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time if you saw part one of the show you'll have heard those words they were spoken by a doctor who entered a prison in the USA loaded with chemicals to test on humans imagine that you've been punished our serving time and then you're punished again because someone has been given the green light to use your skin as a testing surface much of the time when such prisoners are used in testing they agree to do it but often in the past what they weren't told is exactly what was being tested and the possible dangers involved let's now have a look at how this was done it's ancient history we're going to start with a man that's sometimes called the father of anatomy that's a compliment of course but his ways could have been said to have been rather unethical we're talking about a Greek physician called herophilus of caldon we're told that this physician did occasionally use dead people for his work in understanding the human anatomy but that didn't always happen the website research gate tells us that in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt looking under the hood of dead folks was plain taboo but this physician did do it and educated Greece on Anatomy like no one had done before but he also performed what are called live Viva sections which basically means opening up a person while they're well and truly aware of it a Greek encyclopedist known as celsus wrote in a 2 Century medical book that herophilus used around 600 live prisoners for his research his work was groundbreaking as we said and he was a gift to Medical Science but as one scientific paper asks was he a butcher or an innovator in this paper celsus is quoted as saying herophilus and iratus did this in the best way by far when they laid Open men whilst alive criminals received out of prison from the Kings and whilst these were still breathing observed Parts which beforehand nature had concealed according to that thesis this was a kind of execution but still one that many people at the time thought was very cruel no kidding radiation experience ments if you read the book The plutonium files you can find many many examples of when the USA tested dangerous levels of plutonium on American citizens the Us and other countries were trying to develop the atomic bomb and no one was exactly sure what high levels of radiation would do to a person some of these people were patients in hospitals and some were prisoners sometimes they were just sick children and on one occasion pregnant women were chosen in Massachusetts it's said that 57 kids many who were mentally were given oatmeal Poisoned With radioactive tracers and that was conducted by MIT and sponsored by the Quaker Oats company this was well after the development of the atomic bomb and it was all about proving the nutrients in the oatmeal it sounds like fake news but it's not the Smithsonian wrote that these boys were already maltreated and so seen as kids that didn't matter adding as part of the study the boys were fed oatmeal and milk laced with radioactive iron and calcium in another experiment scientists directly injected the boys with radioactive calcium these kids weren't exactly prisoners but they were in the care of the authorities and didn't have any say in the matter that same article mentions a few instances when mentally handicapped kids kids in institutions minorities were tested on and given all kinds of ailments back to radiation in all you can read about hundreds maybe thousands of people that were made very sick as American scientists trying to figure out how the body dealt with radiation all these experiments remained top secret until the 90s when President Bill Clinton said it's time we talked about radiation experiment coverups the plague in the Philippines during the second world war the Japanese were trying to figure out how to drop diseases on the USA but before this time the US was trying to figure out how to treat major diseases it said that while in the Philippines the US Army along with Scientists purposely gave five Prisoners the Bubonic plague and caused something called Barry Berry and another 29 prisoners four of these people died according to the the book when doctors kill who why and how they did this not to try and spread disease but just to better understand it that book also says that one particular Harvard professor over there gave other Filipino Prisoners chera the book says all became very sick and 13 people died thankfully these experiments were investigated and they were called highly unethical in the book it's also written that during the nurmberg trials Nazi doctors who had done a lot of awful stuff themselves tried to justify their work by using using the American scientists in the Philippines as an example of similar malpractice torture we should say here that we haven't purposefully picked out the USA and no doubt awful experiments have been done elsewhere it's just that there's a lot of literature available on what the USA has done we can take torture for example and as you probably know many prisoners in the US have been given mind altering drugs that has had very negative consequences one of the most famous experiments was at holmesburg prison and it took place with 320 inmates from 1964 to 1968 this is the same prison where that doctor talked about Acres of skin prisoners there were also subjects for radiation experiments but the torture experiment we're talking about involved incredibly powerful hallucinogens the scientists wanted to know how much they could give a person so they were completely useless they tested hundreds of people one person later said of this prison that had become well known for human guinea pigs he had a dozen or two experiments going on at one time he turned holmesburg into the Kmart of human experimentation it was a real industry he was talking about the head doctor there the doctor later told the press that he did everything according to what was asked of him and followed protocol even before the place became a giant lab it was terrible in 1938 a bunch of prisoners on Hunger Strike were sent to what were called bake ovens for punishment it said four prisoners roasted to death but you don't have to go that far back to see how prisoners have been used so the CIA can figure out the effect effects of torture when the CIA just a few years back had prisoners hold up at black sites it wasn't just torturing people to get information according to a paper written by The Physicians for human rights waterboarding and sleep deprivation and all manner of other tortures were merely tested on prisoners to see how they might best work how else would they know they needed living breathing subjects and human rights didn't seem to be an issue companies were brought into to what the report says was to calibrate the level of pain experienced by detain e during interrogation the CIA denied this and the government didn't investigate the matter then in 2010 the authorities wanted to know just how effective its active denial system was this is a powerful laser that can hit a person's body say people in a riot or a protest and heat them up it was first made though for war it was decided that prisoners at pitches Detention Center in Los Angeles could be the guinea pigs for the laser the ray is said to cause intense heat and pain but when taken off the body everything goes back to normal it's also said though that there's potential for death and there might even be some terrible long-term effects such as eye damage if it gets you there or even more of a chance of developing cancer we should add that while this prison took the laser as an experimental trial it did that to use on people only if they got out of hand mutants welcome Dr Carl heler this man's experiments were said by one person to have a bit of the book involved touch meaning they were not unlike some of the Nazi experiments on humans in concentration camps but this happened in the US according to Gizmodo he did the experiments on behalf of the atomic energy commission he basically radiated the prisoners but to the extreme yeah that's right and he told these prisoners from Oregon and Washington that he had to sterilize them after the radiation so they would not contaminate the world with kids but what he really said was that he was preventing them from passing on what he called radiation induced mutants he did in fact sterilize them but a few of those guys later sued the government the experiments went on from 196 3 to 1973 and each got around $5 for losing the ability to make children and also got blasted with radiation there were other similar experiments performed on mostly poor black people but they were often people suffering from cancer so not prisoners what would happen is they would sign up for a trial in which doctors said they were testing radiation and it might cure them of their cancer this was a lie what was actually happening is the US government was trying to see what happens to the body when hit by extremely high levels of radiation far higher than anyone would receive now from radiation therapy cow blood the rejection of the blood was catastrophic this is what one scientific paper says about this particular study in which 64 Massachusetts prisoners were injected with cow blood in 1942 after the US Navy had asked for it why oh why you might be thinking right now well all in the name of science the same as when 400 inmates at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois were injected with malaria and the same year 200 female prisoners were given viral hepatitis or prisoners injected with cancer cells without their consent in the ' 50s by the renowned oncologist Chester Milton southam or as one book says the long list of prisoners given potentially fatal diseases in the USA in those days as for the cow's blood we're told that a Harvard University scientist was asked by the Navy to create a powerful biological weapon well one source says this but another says it was to purify the process of extracting album from blood plasma in order to make better drugs it's actually quite hard to find information about this but some sources say the catastrophic events we mentioned ended with the death of 64 prisoners we found another paper that said this two prisoners at the norfol county jail died of serum sickness induced by the infusions of crystalline bovine Albin Harvard medical students were admitted to the Peter B Brigham hospital and bled until they went into shock whatever the case everyone agrees on catastrophic if we extended this show to include more experiments performed on minorities poor kids mentally handicapped kids sick people pregnant women mentally ill people we could have gone on and on day of the Escape he takes a pencil from behind his ear and underlines a passage in his prison issue Bible Genesis 9 5-6 whoever sheds man's blood by man his blood shall be shed he doesn't yet know it but these words are going to come back to haunt him all he's known in his life is violence from being a young victim to adult perpetrator he's killed killed and he'll kill again if anyone tries to get in the way of his Escape he and his accomplice a man no stranger to extreme violence himself will do something that's unheard of in the annals of American incarceration Shashank Redemption has nothing on these guys tomorrow June 6 2015 at 57 a.m. both of these men will be discovered missing from their cells at New York State's Clinton Correctional Facility this is a huge complex of sprawling buildings first opened in the mid 1800s that once served as a notorious insane asylum among the criminal fraternity it's sometimes called little Siberia due to the freezing Winters and the fact it's surrounded by Miles and Miles of rugged Wilderness a good place to get lost if you're a criminal but a harsh place to try to survive the authorities will find a cheeky note left for them a slap in the face if there ever was one down a tunnel another note reads you left me no choice but to grow old and die in here I had to do something on a picture of Tony Soprano that The Escapist painted himself he's written time to go kid 6515 no one was supposed to be able to escape from this maximum security Fortress no one ever has escaped the authorities can't believe what they're seeing they now know that they've underestimated these two uneducated felons cold-hearted Killers as cunning and vengeful as Greek gods millions of dollars will be spent trying to catch them but suffice to say they ain't intending to live behind bars again they're armed and dangerous and they're heading to the Border their names are David sweat and Richard Matt and this is the story of their truly outstanding escape this is how it all starts day one Matt sweat have just started working together in one of the prison tailor workshops around 400 guys in Clinton make inmate clothes and other tailored stuff such as lab coats and sweatshirts they get 25 to 50 cents an hour it's not much but the job passes the time Matt is known throughout the prison as hacksaw he's both respected and feared feared because of the fact that he got his nickname from dismembering a man respected because he'd do it again but warn you first weeks 1 through six outside of crime these two men have another skill the art of flirtation and as luck would have it the object of their flirtation is a civilian female supervisor who loves the attention of the men she supervises her name is Joyce Tilly Mitchell she isn't exactly easy on the eye and she knows it which makes her vulnerable to all the guys she's supposed to watch over on top of this her relationship with her husband lacks any sort of passion he's ly and he's a bright star in the story of lies and deception he's a good person in a tale full of bad people he'll get a hit put on his head from a place that he least expects when sweat and Matt flirt with Mitchell she can't help but Giggle and blush the first to really go after her is sweat who occasionally flashes naughty winks and smiles at her as he's sewing his clothes together on his machine it should be said that Mitchell has been accused before of improper conduct with inmates including sweat but as you'll see she's really good at getting away with things this is why she's fine with flirting with sweat again only this time she'll take things much further sweat has the instructor's job and Matt a regular machinist's job good friends their machines are side by side all day say they plan and conspire and stare over at Mitchell both these guys have been designated as a central monitoring case meaning great care should be taken to watch them sweat falls into this category just because of the sheer brutality of his crime the reason Matt is monitored is that he's an escape risk as well as a brute he's escaped from another prison in the past a document relating to him reads all necessary precautions should be taken whenever it's required to move the inmate outside the facility regardless of the reason so despite having some very sketchy backgrounds and not having great prison records they are allowed to work in the tailor shop lately they've had quite a good run in terms of staying out of trouble so both have a sell on What's called the honor block here there are 180 prisoners and 174 cells security is just the same here or should be but the inmates are at least allowed to wear some civilian clothes have much more time to hang out with other inmates in the recreational areas as well as getting a bunch of other privileges this will all help sweat and mat sweats described by another inmate as being very very self-sufficient in all ways he's clever and he's resourceful he's even a bit of a survivalist Matt is the chatty one described as sociable and gregarious he's also tough and can back up his Fierce reputation if need be he's a Survivor but far from being a survivalist he's in his late 40s and sweats in his early 30s it's Matt who introduces sweat to one of the wonders of painting a hobby they'll both employ as a means to escape and one in which Matt shows considerable Talent weeks 12 through 17 it's now plain to see for the other inmates in the workshop that sweat and Mitchell have got something going on it becomes more obvious when after a while she starts going to the stock room with him Mitchell comes out looking all flustered and red in the cheeks the inmates know exactly what's going on but one of the guards in the workshop's more interested in reading his book than watching out for inmate supervisor relationships weeks 18 to 25 she gets reported for treating the inmates like friends and being way too close to some of them Mitchell fires back complaining that she feels she's being harassed for no reason she then files a grievance and to be honest the prison doesn't want the hassle so she keeps up for job let's now introduce another main character to the story he's correction officer Eugene Palmer a man who's been at Clinton for 27 years he's the go-to guard for inmates when they have a problem and he and Matt are described as being two peas in a pot they've been close too close for years now if sweats working on Mitchell during the day then Matt has Palmer in the palm of his hand on the honor Block it's ideal for the pair it makes life easy but at the start they don't realize it also provides a means to escape Matt often gives his paintings to Palmer who's impressed with the artwork he's especially impressed when Matt gives him paintings and sketches of his own family and house which he does on a few occasions over the years and he works really hard at completing them the better the work the more favors come Matt's way when Palmer starts dating Clinton correctional officer Mary Lamar he even commission Matt to do a bunch of paintings of Lamar's family one day she starts crying outside Matt cell when he gives her the finished piece she can't believe how amazing it is Palmer is made up he's made this woman happy and he owes Matt Big Time Matt also informs Palmer when violence is about to happen one day they both walk into a quiet corner and Matt warns you're going to lose your prison it's a powder cake it's about to explode my informant tells me that when it goes they're going to show no mercy for this both Matt and sweat enjoy the best conditions in the block receiving TVs from Palmer and as many painting supplies as they want in spite of the fact that a paintbrush can be used for all kinds of wicked purposes but more importantly when Palmer escorts these guys back to the block from the workshop he sometimes takes them away in which they don't have to pass through any metal detectors this is fool hearty to say the least especially when you find out what kinds of things Mitchell is giving them in the workshop weeks 26 through 29 things are about to change the prison authorities receive an anonymous letter it states sweat and the workshop supervisor Mitchell are having inappropriate relations and it's damn obvious to everyone in the store room says the letter the two bang like beavers the complaint even says that Mitchell is always doing favors for the white guys but she's always on the backs of Latinos and blacks further down the letter States it's funny that she goes to the next door with the same guy once or twice a week for 3 to 5 minutes and comes out with nothing I've noticed that since I started working here in the past 5 months in short Mitchell is furious and denies everything but in the end sweat gets 30 days in the punishment block without Privileges and is taken out of the workshop for security concerns that's when he's told he'll be moving into a cell away from his buddy Matt he loses his place on the honor block and now has no way of making money this will play a big part in his wanting to escape Mitchell's outrage and the tsunami of complaints she sends to the ward and go a long way to help keeping her job the prison doesn't dare bring charges against her knowing that she'll kick up a stink about harassing a female but she's more upset about losing the love of her life she even cries in front of some of the other inmates she's lost the man she believes really understands her cares for her and she's also lost the best damn machinist she's ever had suffice to say things go really downhill in the workshop after sweat is gone weeks 30 to 51 Matt asks Palmer to help make him the workshop supervisor and Palmer does it now Mitchell's special little helper is sweating best friend and if any other inmates complain he'll get them thrown out of the workshop she's also quite attracted to Matt who it has to be said has a way with women he makes me feel special Mitchell secretly tells one of her friends he just understands me I still haven't gotten over David but there's just something about Richard I don't know he just listens Matt is by far the better manipulator even if it's sweat that has a high IQ in no time at all Mitchell is Breaking All the Rules for him one time buying him a $9 pair of reading glasses on eBay this is about as big a transgression as you can get but for the time being their relationship is not sexual for her efforts Matt paints her a picture of her son an 11 by 16in work that she's Overjoyed with such a thing isn't easy to pass to someone in prison so Palmer takes it from Matt then drops it off in Mitchell's car since Palmer has all those years behind him no one at the gate asks him what's in the package he now has that he didn't come in with this is how LAX things are week 52 Matt tells Mitchell he really needs a pair of gloves as his hands are hurting when he works out can she buy him some he asks telling her he's only too happy to paint something else for her hm she says can you do dogs sure Matt says dogs aren't a problem week 53 Mitchell Breaks the Rules even more times once calling Matt's daughter for him and passing on a message it's at this point that Matt is thinking this L struck woman will do absolutely anything for him meanwhile even her husband Lyall knows she's been helping Matt and receiving these paintings in return Lyall tells her one night this ain't worth losing your job over darling they're nice paintings but this could get you in serious trouble he can snitch on Palmer if he wants but there's one thing you don't do in prison and that's tell on someone even if you're a guard weeks 54 to 55 Mitchell keeps smuggling stuff in including 70 containers of black and cayenne pepper 10 10 oz packages of Cafe Buell coffee several decks of playing cards and numerous other prohibited items it's at this point that sweat's busy brain gets going still irked about losing his cushy job one day he turns to Matt and says I just want to get out of this place I want to be free I want to go live somewhere away from everybody he then says if Mitchell will get you anything thing why not ask her to bring stuff in we can use to escape he says the gloves and the glasses will already come in handy but they can do even better than that we have the ideal situation right now he tells Matt do you think she'll be up for it Matt laughs and says she's freaking nuts she'll bring us whatever she wants just tell me what you need and I'll get her to bring it in sweat envisions getting through his cell door by exploiting a vulnerability in the Locking System and then walking to the yard where he'll use his new tools to get a rope over the wall he tells Matt he needs a starhead screw bit and some Putty and and later Mitchell doesn't let him down matt tells her these things are for his art and the frames he'll make week 56 through 59 sweat changes his mind and says demand what about getting through the sewer system he says for this they'll have to be in cells next to each other he explains that they'll sof through the wall get into the tunnels he thinks are back there man asks for another favor from Palmer can he help get sweat back into the Taylor shop not necessarily his Taylor shop but any of them if this happens it'll mean sweat gets a cell back in the honor block Palmer does as he's asked and stage one of the plan is complete week 60 sweat is now working in the workshop 8 Matt is working not too far away in another shop Mitchell occasionally now sees sweat as they pass each other in the corridor each time she smiles and surreptitiously gives his hand a little squeeze this mother and wife who's old enough to be his mother is acting like a Love Struck teenager for the time being she had no idea about any escape plan but she's more than willing to bring stuff in for sweat and mat week 61 sweat is now in cell a623 right next to Matt in cell a622 he was assigned another cell on the Block but has paid the guy in a623 $100 worth of smokes and given him some homemade pornography books SWAT says to Matt we need saws hacksaw blades that's what you need Tilly to bring in as many as possible 5 hours later Mitchell is at a Walmart store close to her house handing over $6 for a bunch of Hacksaw blades she uses cash even though she's already used her credit card to buy other items the next day she places them at the side of Matt's workstation back in the cells Matt gives three of them to sweat it's time to do some sawing during the evening they both use the blades to start cutting a 10x 10 in hole through the 3/16 in thick rear steel wall as handles for the blades they use rubber bands wrapped around cloth to prevent any noise when they move the heavy table away from the wall they put tape under the table legs the sound of the song is also obscured much thanks to the general D of a prison and the fact that every evening guys slam dominoes down on tables they've saw their first tiny hole success there are air vents and attached ducks behind the wall which will also have to be swn through in time the little bits of filings will be picked up by magnets the guys have stolen from the workshop weeks 64- 65 they do this every day from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. when most of the other prisoners are in the mess hall or the recreation area the officers are never suspicious swea and mat rarely eat in the mess hall and during the evenings it's quite normal for them to paint in their cells they only ever cut one at a time for 10 to 20 minutes while the other uses a mirror to look down the landing for approaching guards if a guard is seen both men jump into their beds and pretend to be asleep or look like they're painting or listening to music One Day Palmer almost catches them but he's just come by to give them some more prison Hooch of which Matt drinks a ton it takes sweat 3 weeks to cut a hole that's 17 in x 12 1/2 in for Matt an 18 1/2 x 14 1/2 in is complete in four weeks the older bigger man is always lagging behind which in time to come will be a matter of life and death week 66 when sweats able to crawl through his hole he starts leaving a dummy in his bed so if the guards walk past his cell they'll think he's sleeping the dummy is hardly a work of art and if those guards just paid any attention they'd likely see it for what it was a pair of stuffed pants and a prison issue sweatshirt once sweats through a hole he Clips a painting against the outside with magnets he's stolen now he's free to explore week 67 one day when he returns after his Adventure he tells Matt that he feels like a ninja what Freedom he has during these nights but what he doesn't know is the hidden complexities of a giant prison one night sweat manages to descend down three tiers there he finds himself in a place that's littered with objects that have been thrown away over the years cigarette butts Bits of Paper styrofoam cups and plastic bottles after a bit of a walk about he gets to B Block just below the laundry building this is progress to get from B Block to C block he has to crawl through a steel pipe and that pipe is blocked by a steel brace cutting this will not be easy at all even if he can he's not sure if the heavy set mat will be able to squeeze through the pipe luckily for them sweat has found a measuring tape on his nightly walks so he can now measure the pipe and also Matt Matt will be able to get through the pipe but it won't be easy weeks 68 through 70 it takes sweat 2 days to saw through the brace only to become somewhat discouraged not to find the sewer system but some old boards in front of a great big cement wall this is now turning into a mission of intense labor but it's that or getting old in prison he spends the next few nights shuffling around the Subterranean maze of passageways under blocks c d and e but he keeps hitting more cement walls at least he's got tools and a nightlight but he has to be careful he's so close to the catwalk up above he can see the guard guards walking around one night a discarded cigarette butt hits his head and when he looks up he sees a pair of officer shoes just one wrong move and he's done sweat is so tired from these nightly JS that he never gets enough sleep each night after headcount at 11:30 he leaves his cell and he doesn't get back until 5:30 a.m. that's how much work he's doing and he can hardly just sleep during the day he has to work and if he tries to sleep someone will get suspicious he looks so ragged that an officer remarks that sweat's appearance has changed my God what the hell's happened to him the officer tells another officer he looks as if he's been rung through a KN hole he's so frail and exhausted that's true sweat has lost 30 lbs since he started this exploration still he is now fit as a fiddle and this will bode well for him in the near future when he's on the run and has to turn into a veritable Iron Man week 71 sweat now admits to himself that the only way to freedom is to take apart one of those cement walls he starts removing three or four bricks a night out of the wall that is just three layers thick he's basically dismantling a prison from the inside which is why the authorities will be astounded in the time to come as luck will have it one day sweat opens a contractor's Gang Box in a tunnel under eock and inside is a gift from God a sledgehammer this won't be the last time he gets so lucky that he'll start thinking he has angels on his side let's just say here that he doesn't think he deserve to get such a long prison sentence he thinks the sledgehammer is his Good Karma weeks 72 through 74 he has to do the wall smashing ever so delicately only striking the bricks whenever the pipes start to moan and scream with within 2 weeks he's breached the wall this is it now he's close to the outside or at least he thinks he is after winding through yet more tunnels he comes across the biggest obstacle yet that's a 7t thick son of a gun in the shape of a perimeter wall of the entire prison at least he knows this is the last thing he has to get through it's impossible the Wall's a huge block of cement that can only be knocked down with a machine even Matt joins him down there for a couple days when he's just too exhausted to do the work by himself Matt's highly impressed with all the work sweat's done he looks at him and says man I can't believe you've done this I've given up weeks ago Matt's seen everything in his life he's a career criminal who got involved seriously with crime at a young age later in life a cop once described him as being the most vicious evil person I've ever come across in 38 years as a police officer Matt escaped from a Care Home for Children when he was 12 by riding away on a horse he stayed alone in the forest for 2 weeks even with his crazy existence of his he thinks sweat's tunnels are on another level still sweat cannot get through the wall no amount of bashing with the sledgehammer will work now he has another idea there's a steam pipe why not crawl through that it's another tight space at just 24 in and it's hot as hell but sweat thinks it's doable normally you wouldn't be able to crawl through hot steam but it's now may and the prison has just turned off its heating system it'll still be warm in there and it's 20 ft long but it can be done weeks 73 through 75 he struggles with the pipe but after buying an extension cord from the prison commissary and riging up some more lights he knows he can take his time he then returns to that Gang Box of tools and inside is a power drill a hammer an angle grinder battery packs more lights and even some masks for all the dust again he puts this down to Karma and the wrongs of America's justice system he still needs more tools so he tells Matt to tell Mitchell to buy two chisels a steel punch and some bits for the drill stuff they say they need for picture frames and other handiwork this won't be easy to sneak in but then Matt gets the idea for Mitchell to hide the bits in ground beef and then freeze the meat if anyone asks she'll say it's for the guys to make burgers if anyone complains well that's harassment she tells Matt she feels guilty about what she's been doing to her husband Lyle as Lyle's arranging a surprise anniversary gift for her one of Matt's paintings she tries her hardest to stay out of his way she now has a new word for Lyall calling him a glitch in her life week 76 it's at this point that Matt tells her that he and sweat are going to escape that's why they've been asking for so many things sweat will be upset about Matt doing this but Matt knows Mitchell won't breathe a word about it she's attracted to Matt but she hasn't given up unloving sweat now she thinks if these guys leave I've lost everything she won't tell on them but them going is something she doesn't want to think about Matt can sense this and for the first time he starts to get nervous what if she does lose her cool and blabs he talks to sweat about it and they come up with an idea weeks 77 and 78 Matt puts his arm around Mitchell's waist when they're in the store room and he whispers in her ear why don't you come with us he tells her she can finally be rid of that useless husband and he and sweat will take care of her this manipulation goes a step further when Matt and sweat agree that sweat needs to confess his undying love for Mitchell Matt starts passing her letters that sweat is written notes that talk about how much she misses her and signs off with xoxoxo I want to feel myself inside of you he writes while he and Matt laugh out loud and after this she starts bringing in so many tools sweats pipe cutting gets easier in one letter he writes I love you can't wait to get you in my arms and make love to you then at the bottom he writes PS I need some more of those drill bits XOXOXO all these notes are destroyed after reading just as Matt's told her to do week 79 but Matt feels she still needs to be worked on more one day he finds an opportunity to move things along when they're both together in a room next to Taylor shop 9 Matt says he needs a machine part but he doesn't really he grabs her out of the blue and kisses her for a moment she's taken a back but man is this guy strong and he's so attractive still she thinks does he have to be so forceful you can love two people you know Matt says we both love you this is a man with extreme violence toward women in his criminal history his sweet words are tinged with so much Darkness almost immediately it's arranged that she'll be the getaway driver once they're on the outside and she'll have the car and she'll have food and money as she's lying in bed with Lyle ignoring his in treaties to have sex she sees the three of them with a motorbike rental business somewhere on the coast of Mexico the next day she goes out to buy some new underwear sexier than her usual stuff poor Lyall thinks it's for him week 80 the inmates notice that Mitchell starts dressing nicer and suddenly she's losing lot lot of weight and doing her hair differently during her lunch break she reads her new book magicals magic key to Spanish what they don't know is that at home she's taking photos of herself naked and later handing them to Matt so both he and sweat can utilize them while they're alone in their cells she's living a fantasy her photos are burned and certainly not used to facilitate orgasm Matt tells her to buy black cargo pants for the escape on the otor Block you have to wear prison issue pants even though you can have civilian tops he tells her to get a tent some sleeping bags fishing poles and a hatchet oh he says we'll also need one rifle one shotgun and a load of ammunition off she goes to the hardware store and later to the gas station to pick up a map of the local area and Beyond Matt and sweat decide that at first after escaping they'll drive a few hours and rent a cabin up in the mountains in Vermont Matt and Mitchell will pretend to be husband and wife and sweat will be the nephew this plan changes pretty quickly after Matt says he has connections with the Mexican drug cartels so if they get to Mexico they'll have a safe place to hide before they head to the beach and start their new business the plan suits everyone but more so Matt who has a tattoo on his body saying Mexico forever week 81 sweat tells Mitchell via a note handed to Matt that they should go scuba diving together once they're there which almost brings tears to her eyes as much as she's attracted to Matt her future fantasy is with sweat only when that happens sweat will have already changed his name to James Tuttle and Matt will be Tony Goya that's the plan anyway it's about this time that Matt makes a strange request he asks Mitchell to smuggle in a bottle of bicardi 151 and a bottle of wild turkey let's just say that Matt has had alcohol problems in the past and as she'll soon find out booze is going to play a big part in what happens to him she does as is told but draws the line when he asks her for a handgun a micro knife and a cell phone you might now be wondering what about Mitchell's ever faithful husband he adores his wife he would chop off his right hand to keep her safe will she not miss him one bit one day man asks her about him to which she replies with a snarl oh pop my husband he's worth more to me dead than is alive she means it too she tells the guys that on the night they leave they should go to her house and shoot her husband Dead with the gun she's bought for them she's done with him he's boring he's a creep and God knows she can't stand sharing a bed with him she looks at Matt in all seriousness as if she's thought about this a lot in the night and says or I'll drug him until he's passed out and then we'll take the car and drive him off a cliff at least that won't look like Murder She says even Matt with his dark past is thinking this woman is cold Matt agrees and sweat also agrees but they're both playing her still Matt goes to the prison hospital and gets some pain medication for a nerve pain he has he later passes them on to Mitchell and tells him to keep him in her purse until the big night week 82 it's almost time and sweat is just about done with the steam pipe it's thick and it breaks a lot of blades but 2 lbs of hamburger meat stuffed with blades saves the day again Mitchell does the stuffing but Palmer is the one who takes it out of the freezer and walks it to the block without going through the metal detectors he has no idea what's in the meat though the heat is now kill killing sweat as he tries to cut the exit hole in the other end of the pipe he again puts his brilliant mind into action and makes a ventilation system using the fan a bunch of plastic bags and a t-shirt he fastens all the bags together to make a tube and connects them with rubber bands to the fan and hey Presto he can now stay in the pipe for hours at a time week 84 sweat pushes out the last bit of pipe on the other side he walks for a while until he sees a manhole he then cuts the chain it's locked with using his hacka blades and pushes it out it's his first taste of freedom in years looking over the street he sees the local school and boy does he grin a wide grin he knows he's at the intersection of Barker street and box Street and he knows the guards in the towers can't see this area it's 4: in the morning and he thinks right then man I could just go now and have 90 minutes until they do morning roll call but he puts an end to that thought and remembers he must stick to his word and get Matt out too his loyalty might just be his downfall when he gets back to his cell even though he doesn't smoke he lights a cigarette and uses a mirror to show Matt what he's doing Matt Whispers back are you serious ious are you kidding me you made it through sweat takes a drag and replies no dude I made it out twice and I came back they decide they'll go in the night sweat writes one last letter to Mitchell and it says tonight's the night meet us at midnight park your car at the manhole in the intersection of Barker street and Bo Street leave it running but turn off the headlights get out of the car and pretend you're on the phone that way if anyone sees you they won't become suspicious see you soon my love XOXOXO P.S I can already see a swimming with manta rays she doesn't know what a manta ray is but but it sounds exotic the question is can they rely on her sweat doesn't know that she's been stressed of late few days ago there was a big fight in the prison and it looked like there'd be a full lockdown this always gets to people but there was also an incident in the workshop when a new officer turned up and actually did his job meaning he told Mitchell not to get too close to the prisoners especially Matt she huffed and puffed and slammed a few doors and she did wonder if the prison was somehow onto her it got worse when the officer told her to get away from Matt's workstation even though she told him there was no work to do right then this was harassment she shouted at him leave my freaking inmates alone if they don't have any freaking work they can't do no work now can they the officer shot back ma'am I'm security we can't be having this in the shop what a bully she thought how dare he she kept quiet though knowing that any more trouble could get in the way of the guy's escaping she couldn't sleep for a few nights after that week 85 the last time she got to talk with Matt he tells her if you're not there we're dead they're going to kill us you understand they're going to kill us she nods her head like a chastised child June 5th 2015 Hour 1 the day of the escape the inmates on the honor block are surprised when Matt gives away his color TV in the next cell sweat puts all his things together in a guitar case clothes new boots 20 packs of peanuts 40 granola bars and 12 sticks of pepperoni he doesn't know it yet but they're going to need that food in a big way hour 23 the two leave through their holes they follow the tunnels and are on their way sweat leaves the smiley face note and another one with a picture of an alien are you trying me Punk he's written on the picture it's stuck to a metal surface with a stolen magnet another kick in the teeth for the authorities when they arrive at the steam pipe sweat enters and makes it through easily Matt gets stuck so SWAT has to throw a sheet and drag him out when Matt comes out of the other end his pants are down SWAT smiles and says oh Matt I didn't know you cared it's 11:50 a bit too early but they get out through the manhole anyway and wait on the road under his breath sweat says sha shank ain't got nothing on me it's true this is better than any sha shank Escape It's the Great Escape in US Prison history but it's not over yet sweat knows that they don't look too sketchy standing there in the street even if they are wearing prison issue pants they have a guitar case and let's face it who escapes from prison with a guitar they're just two guys who have been out playing with their band hour 24 things then take a turn for the worse Matt sees a car coming down the street and he bolts into someone's Garden sweat just stands there thinking why the hell is he running the driver sees Matt gets out of his car and shouts hey what are you freaking scumbags doing in my yard SWAT replies oh man I'm sorry I apologize we're just cutting through we're on the wrong Street thankfully the guy seems to believe him even though there's a prison just up the street the guitar case must have worked this guy will later tell the cops who escapes with a guitar case but Matt is wired as hell and every time he thinks he hears a car he bolts again this is making sweat very anxious Rick he says just act normal we are normal we're civilians Matt has issues mental health issues and inside the prison that hasn't always been obvious to sweat now that they're on the outside he sees the desperation in Matt he knows he'll strike first and ask questions later if anyone should even look like they're getting in the way 24 hours 50 minutes why does Mitchell fail to turn up and who exactly are these two convicts now free to do what they want on the outside they both curse under their breaths unbelievable she backed out this is what love means to her thinks Matt who's offended even though he's gladly cut her head off with a blunt knife where is she what's happened earlier that day at 3:30 p.m. Mr and Miss Mitchell clock off from work and head home stopping for something to eat on the way in her purse are those pills she's panicking and all through dinner she can't eat a thing Lyall sits opposite as always concerned about her are you okay Tilly he says she ignores him as she always does when they're home she says she feels strange it's a feeling she's never had before she's dizzy her heart is being faster something's wrong what's happening to me she thinks it's a panic attack the first one she's ever had in her life Lyall tells her to sleep it off but when she wakes about 9:00 p.m. it's starting to happen again Lyle then drives her to the ER where the guys are waiting on the street at midnight she's in the hospital at 2: a.m. she tells Lyall you go home I'll be okay here by myself in her mind when he goes home he's going to meet with two men with a History of Violence she believes they're going to kill Lyall because that's the plan they'll then take the car and drive away the next morning she's surprised when Lyall turns up at the hospital and says he's taking her home he gives her a big hug and she looks over his shoulder wondering what the hell is going on now we must explain something two men are on the loose and they will not go back to prison never mind what it takes to stay out you need to know why they're in prison in the first place both of them had had horrid upbringings but matz was arguably worse he was in and out of foster homes as a child and when he did see his family was often in an environment of extreme Violence by the time he was a teenager he was already stealing cars taking drugs and beating people up including women he escaped from the Children's Home and later he escaped from jail one time in jail he agreed to kill another inmate's wife and children for a price of course that inmate turned out to be an informant but if that plan had gone through Matt could have murdered innocent people on December 3rd 1997 Matt and another guy I turned up the house of William rickerson Matt's former employee rickerson ran a food brokerage firm and Matt knew he always kept lots of cash it was a cash business with Hefty takings Matt needed some money wanting to head to Canada where his stripper girlfriend was waiting the guy getting on in age had always liked Matt and tried to help him any way he could it was this trust that helped Matt get into his house he punched his frail body as soon as he walked through the door and then started looking for the cash Matt grew angrier when he couldn't find any tying rickon's hands and feet and beating him around the face they then kidnapped him and shoved him in the trunk of their car they stopped the car on the highway and opened the trunk Matt punched rickerson stabbed him in the leg and demanded to know where the money was the old guy said he had no money he never had a safe or anything like that after 27 hours of intermittent torture Matt started to believe him there was no money but now rickerson would go and tell the cops and Matt would end up back in prison looking at rickerson covered in blood and bruises Matt slammed the trunk the next time he opened it he strangled him he pulled the dead body out of the trunk at the side of the road and covered it with sticks later Matt returned to the scene of the crime with a hacksaw did the dismembering and threw bits into the niagar river he then fled to Mexico where he later stabbed an American engineer while they were both in a bathroom the guy died and Matt got away with only a few bucks the Mexican cops later arrested Matt and in 2007 the Mexican Government extradited him back to the US a report said he'd been a difficult prisoner and had tried to escape getting shot at a few times doing so the Mexicans didn't want him no one wanted to be near him even his own former attorney in the US said Rick Matt was fun but dangerous guy to hang around with in court Matt heard his parole was up in 2032 when if he survived he'd be an old man God he hated prison when a detective who'd known Matt all his life heard that he had escaped from prison he said it's not a good feeling to know he's out there anything's possible with Rick Matt sweat was not anywhere close to Matt in terms of danger but he too had a troubled youth not afraid of using violence he was always known as the brains of the operation when he and others committed burglaries but he also got caught and like Matt did some time in prison early in life then on June 4th 2002 he and two other guys were on their way trying to deliver some Firearms they'd stolen when young sheriff's deputy pulled them over this man had a wife and two young children at home a guy sleeping in his house nearby heard three pops which startled him from his sleep soon after he heard a car screeching he put on some clothes and went to see what was up he found the young cop lying in the park on the tarmac his body horribly Twisted from being run down by a car as he lay on the floor the car had reversed over him and he still wasn't dead though he pleaded for his life and cried out that he had kids at home and then one of the guys fired two bullets into his face sweat later admitted in court that he had fired the first shots at the officer but not the two that hit him in the face he said he only fired back because the officer pulled a gun on him first sweat hit him once but it was just a Nick the court heard that after that the driver reversed over him sweat got out and said I'm sorry I'm sorry only for the other kid to fire those bullets the family of the victim wanted sweat and his friends executed but after a guilty plea he got life Behind Bars he always felt bad about what had happened that night but he also believed he didn't deserve to grow old in prison his friends were crazy not him sweat sentence was life without parole so the thought of escaping never left his mind day two after the Escape Mitchell's Under Suspicion soon after police find the tunnel and talk to prison officers and other inmates sweat and Matt are covering as many miles as possible sticking to the woods everyone's after them the cops the US Marshals the FBI the Border cops and the Rangers a $75,000 reward is on their backs and people are told to approach with great caution I have no idea says Mitchell when the state cops ask her if she knows where Matt and sweat might be they don't know she's involved but they have a good idea she is the prison staff have already talked about all her close relationships with the pair and her habit of taking things in for them she pretends to be as shocked as anyone saying at one point how the hell did they get out of Clinton Correctional because I just I've never heard anybody getting out of here that's why I just I mean how did they even Escape out of here she is as bad an actress as she is a wife the next day she cracks up a little bit saying okay I might have brought some stuff in for them but I never knew what they were up to she certainly doesn't admit to planning to go with them and have her husband killed But as time goes on she folds she admits most of the story but not everything the only ones who know the full story are the ones on the run on June 12th Mitchell is arrested on a felony charge of promoting prison contraband and misdemeanor criminal facilitation little by little over many hours of interview she talks more and more about what really happened days 4 through 10 even with hundreds of people looking for them in Blood Hound scouring the local Forest the pair managed to evade the authorities it's believe they're heading to Canada but it could be Mexico or they could just be staying put no one really knows what is actually happening is there found a cabin in the woods and it looks like it's not been used for a long time there they get some needed rest and some food and they even find a 20 gauge shotgun sweat thinks Again The Angels must be watching over him he's Vindicated in this respect again when he goes to the bathroom and finds a loaded pistol hidden above the door they find something else too but at this sweat is not impressed there's a big stash of booze that Matt soon starts swigging down in enormous quantities sweat's trying to get them to freedom and it's as if Matt doesn't care he's getting wasted like a teenager who's found the key to the family booze cabinet Matt says he needs it they've walked and run around 30 Mi already both have blisters on their feet and cuts and bruises on their bodies when sweat reprimands him the much larger mat gives him a look that says I've killed people for Less know your place little guy but again sweat realizes that Matt is very unstable and he's certainly not the type of man you want to fight he doesn't dare say anything when Matt refuses to stop drinking the next day or even turn off the TV he's always watching day 11 and 12 they can't stay in the cabin forever so they head off now though Matt's Half Baked and he can't keep up when sweat loses his temper again there's a threat of violence Matt still has the shotgun and sweat has the pistol it's around this time that Palmer's charged with a bunch of felony crimes all related to the things he's done for the guys he will resign from his job as spend 6 months in jail and pay $5,000 in fines day 20 they're both waiting at the side of the road when Matt says he's going to hold up a car with the rifle bad idea thinks sweat he pleads with him not to do it it will attract unnecessary attention and he also knows that Matt will not think twice about killing someone that's not what sweat wants nonetheless Matt waits in the woods close to the road with his gun still drunk sweat shakes his head they'll never work he thinks and so he runs and he runs and he runs and he runs they've already covered 50 Mi but sweat has the energy of an athlete after doing what he did under the prison as he's taking off a car has seen Matt and reported him to the cops soon a US border patrol supervisory agent is on the scene Matt won't run and he won't go back to prison he stumbles forward with a gun and takes a bullet from the agent's M4 rifle as the agent walks toward the body he can smell booze from yards away Matt's blood alcohol level is 0.18 a classification that comes with a word mentally impaired in his final moments he might just remember those lines in the Bible whoever sheds man's blood by man his blood shall be shed day 22 sweat has been running for so long he's exhausted but now within 1 and A2 miles of the US Canada Border he can almost taste freedom but then when crossing a hay field his luck finally runs out he's spotted by a State Trooper who just so happens to be a Firearms instructor sweat runs and the officer shouts at him to stop while aiming his gun he doesn't stop and a second later he's lying on the ground having taken bullets to the shoulder and arm from a 45 caliber Glock 37 pistol sweats SC future he will survive and in time he'll end up in special housing units in the maximum security Five Points Correctional Facility this is the place where he'll write up a very cogent Escape Plan and try to trade it with the prison this is how someone can escape he'll tell the warden now I've told you that can I please see my new girlfriend that didn't work out for him and he was moved to another prison in 2022 he went on a hunger strike against the terrible conditions he was kept in a judge ruled that the state could force feed him after being restrained and Drug him if necessary that's what get for embarrassing the powers that be in costing the state $23 million sweat remains in prison today and he'll be fully locked down for years to come years after the escape the love birds lastly what about Mrs Mitchell and her dear husband Lyle she has always denied wanting her husband killed but the evidence shows otherwise an official 142 page report States despite her claims to the contrary Mitchell took steps consistent with plans to murder Lyall Mitchell the report states she admitted she took pills from Matt but in one interview she said she'd forgotten about them and in a separate interview she said she had flushed him down the toilet one time she said she's never even been given any pills that's not what sweat said and it's his version of the vents where we get much of the other story Mr Mitchell has always stood by his wife's side despite the criticism he's taken for it in an interview he said do I still love her yes am I mad yes all I want is for my wife to be coming home she would never have gone through with it that's what she told me and that she really loved me now that's a dedicated husband or an abused one lacking in confidence Mitchell was sentenced to two and a3d to 7 years in state prison the report State she was ordered to pay restitution of $9,844 for some folks and a very bad Gap year for others what happens inside those Prison Walls often stays within those walls but the horrors and harsh facts do creep out from time to time we sent our Intrepid team of researchers to find out the craziest things that have happened and are happening inside prisons and what they came back with blew our minds welcome to the insane world of the penitentiary number 50 it's a fact that anyone who goes to prison has a higher chance of dying than people on the outside a 50% higher chance and think about it for a second aren't there more more ways to die on the outside maybe but prisoners in some lockups face mistreatment by guards and the wrath of other inmates on a daily basis there're also the issues of poor nutrition not great health care packages stress and depression 49 it's well known that the USA locks up more people per capita than any other country but did you know that in 2019 a staggering 2.3 million Americans were doing time over a fifth of the entire world's prison population is in the USA 48 some other countries also seem to enjoy putting a lot of people in prison after the us next on the list for most prisoners per 100,000 is El Salvador after that country comes Turkmenistan 47 an investigation in 2014 found that the portions of food were so small at Gordon County Jail in Calhoun Georgia that some prisoners resorted to eating toothpaste 46 he's a sis to some and a savior to others but one thing's for sure and that's the fact that Sheriff Joe arpo is proud of how little to eat he gives his prisoners in Arizona he gleefully wrote in his biography that his 15 to 40 Cent prisoner meals were the cheapest meals in America 45 we can tell you that this one blew us away and that's the fact that there are more jails in the US than there are colleges 44 in 2013 in California around 10,000 people were released early but not for good behavior they were let out because prisons in the state were overcrowded but here's the punchline some people doing time for violent offenses came out when folks convicted of nonviolent drug offenses went in 43 those people serving time for non-violent drug offenses make up about half of the US's federal prison population those offenses are the reason the prison population has quadrupled since the early 1980s 42 Brazilian prisons were getting so full the country said enough's enough let's come up with a way to reduce the number of people doing time the government introduced the Redemption through Reading Program which meant that prisoners could get up to 48 days off their sentence if they read a book we know what you're thinking that lots of prisoners could just cheat and skin the book well that wasn't possible because each prisoner had to write a comprehensive book report this initiative worked in two ways because the books were giving the prisoners an education as well as an early release date 41 an american guy named Richard Lee McNair escaped prison a whopping three times and he got pretty creative about how he did it in 2006 he actually got into a crate and mailed himself out of prison it didn't end well for this guy since he's now doing time in the maximum security facility adx Florence 40 the Aryan Brotherhood gang in the US is bloodthirsty to say the least at one point they were responsible for something like 18 to 25% of homicides that took place inside federal prisons this gang was founded back in 1964 by a bunch of Irish American bikers and right now there are about 20,000 of them serving time in prisons 39 in 1971 a guy named Joel Kaplan was sitting in cell 10 of the Santa Maria akaa prison in Mexico City when a helicopter noisily landed in the prison yard the guards thought some dignitary from the government had come to visit but Joel knew better some guys came out of the helicopter collect Joel and then flew him out of the prison the story gets much weirder since after Joel made his way back to the USA he claimed that what he had done was entirely legal he said no one got hurt and even the helicopter was paid for and met FAA standards the Mexican authorities might have disagreed with that but they never asked for extradition 38 Oklahoma can be proud of being the prison capital of the world in this state there are 1,79 prisoners for every 100,000 people that might not mean much to you so consider the fact that in the country of Germany there are 78 people locked up in every 100,000 37 here's the very sad story about a man named Jonathan Magby when he was just 4 years old he was hit by a car and after that he was paralyzed from the neck down since he couldn't use his body a nurse had to care for him and she basically was at his side each and every day but get this Jonathan smoked weed now and again because that helped with his condition the cops didn't much like that and when Jonathan was 27 he was jailed for 10 days for marijuana possession if that's not bad enough his carers told officials that this guy needed constant care and he needed a ventilator which he didn't get while he was behind bars the awful end of the story is that Jonathan died on his fourth day in jail by serving and protecting him they killed him yeah we are guessing that you think we haven't found more insane stories than that well you'd be wrong it's going to get worse 36 there's a woman in Thailand who holds the record for being sentenced to the most time for a female criminal her name is chy taso and after being found guilty of ripping off thousands of ties in a pyramid scheme she was handed down 141,000 years huh you might wonder is there any chance this woman could do the time well it turns out that she only ended up serving eight of those years 35 here at the infographic show we'd like nothing more than to tell you stories about the infamous alcatra prison the rock as it was fondly known back in the day when The Rock was the home of the likes of Al Capone and other criminals the US didn't want to escape the prison had a policy to give every prisoner the availability of hot showers wow you might be thinking how humanitarian of the authority well a bleeding heart is not the reason those prisoners got hot steamy showers the reasoning was that if they enjoyed the hot water showers they'd more easily freeze to death if they tried to escape and swam in the cold Waters of San Francisco Bay 34 there once was a man named Troy Leon Greg and he committed the heinous crime of murdering two people he was eventually arrested for that and told that he was going to get the death penalty fast forward to 1980 and death row at Georgia State Prison on a warm July night Troy and some other guys made American history when they escaped from death row the thing is Troy's Freedom didn't last long one of the things he did on his first night was to go to a bar but there he got into a fight with a biker and was beaten to death as for those other escapes they were all eventually caught and sent back to prison 33 in 2019 the Netherlands was having a problem that the US hadn't experienced for a long time that was the fact that the crime rate was so low it had to start closing down lots of its prisons 32 in 1992 there was a riot at karanu penitentiary in Brazil after a fight in a soccer game got out of hand the military police were called because the 15 guards had no chance of controlling the more than 2,000 prisoners what happened next has simply been called a massacre and that's because those cops just started shooting anyone they saw even if the prisoners were surrendering this resulted in the death of 111 prisoners and not even one injury to a cop in 2013 for their actions that day 23 of those cops were sentenced to a total of 156 years 31 this is the story about an esteemed cancer doctor named Chester Milton southam much of Chester's life was concerned with finding a cure for this terrible disease but you could say this man might have skipped some of his ethics classes that's because Old Chester injected cancer cells into prisoners at Ohio penitentiary did he get the prisoner's consent before he did this you might wonder well the short answer is like hell he did don't worry his ethics or lack thereof were later criticized 30 we'll stick with this Ohio prison and tell you that in 1930 a terrible fire raged through the building and you can only imagine the terror of that happening when you're locked in a Cell the guards didn't even unlock the doors those guys were so fearful of what might happen to them there's both a happy and a set ending to the story because even though 322 inmates died in the fire many more escaped after some inmates overpowered the guards and started running around opening doors 29 we just know you're going to think we're making things up now but we can assure you that this is 100% the truth in Canada they have a polar bear jail yeah you heard that right when those great beasts start causing trouble up in Churchill Manitoba they get sent to the polar bear holding facility the Bears do anything from 2 to 30 days behind bars and then get relocated to the wild if you're thinking that no bears actually serve time then think again because lately the 20 cell facility had to add on another eight cells the polar bear crime rate has skyrocketed of late because of what you might call poverty in their natural environment 28 the weisi State Penitentiary has sometimes been called the Alcatraz of the South and even worse the bloodiest prison in America back in the day it was a hell hole and that's no exaggeration at one point one in every 10 prisoners had a stab wound and if a knife didn't get them the harsh work would things got so bad in the 1950s that 31 inmates completely slashed their Achilles tendons just to bring some attention to the injustices they were suffering we'd like to tell you that things got better although just recently the place has been in headlines for its corrupt guards 27 when Hurricane Katrina happened you'd think that prisoners in New Orleans would have been taken from their cells that's what should have happened but in actuality hundreds of prisoners were left up to their necks and water in their cells without food or water the inmates were eventually evacuated after a few days but they let it be known that when things got bad the correctional officers just left the facility 26 in the 1980s a British drug Smuggler David McMillan almost escaped from Melbourne's high security Pentridge prison by helicopter but that plan didn't exactly work out for him you just can't hold a bad man down and years later McMillan would find himself locked up in Thailand's notorious clung Prim Central Prison things were looking bad for The Smuggler and he knew he had to get out but how do you do that when not one person has ever escaped from that place well this guy had one thing on his side and that's the fact that he was very smart he became the first man ever to escape that prison and you know what he credits for his successful Escape an umbrella that's right he said later he walked off with an umbrella simply for the fact that escapes don't carry umbrellas 25 there's a place sometimes called the most notorious medieval prison in the world and that was the clink this English prison was opened in 11:44 and you might say doing time there wasn't a walk in the park some prisoners got 24 hours of day solitary confinement and a diet that consisted of bread and water quite a few of them experienced that and then could look forward to being burned at the stake 24 if you think you've seen some bad overcrowding in prisons then you have to see the leaked security footage that came from a jail in Thailand in 2019 we can't tell you exactly how many guys are in there in that cell but it could be something like 80 or even one 100 the only way you could get more people in that cell would be if you started piling the bodies on top of each other 23 in the 1800s of British men was sent to Australia on a transport ship to serve time on a penal colony there he got the name of Mundy Joe he turned to Crime again committing robberies and then hiding out in the bush and for that the authorities hated him his luck ran out when he was caught and this time the authorities made sure he wasn't going to escape he had to service sentence in a nice pair of leg irons but moony Joe still managed to escape ESC ape his plan now was to walk through that bush land and virtually cross Australia but the cops once again got their man okay so they had him and this time he definitely wasn't going to escape because the warden had built a cell especially for Joe it was basically a concrete box so how could Joe get out of that the local Governor even said to him if you get out again I'll forgive you guess what he got out Joe made a hole in one of the walls and off he went into the sunset after that he tried not to commit any more crimes but after a few years he started robbing again he was captured again of course but the governor was true to his word and had Joe removed from prison 22 you could say that no one on this planet has been as Adept at escaping from prison as Mundy Joe but that's when a Japanese man named Yoshi shiratori steps up and says hold my beer shiratori is famous for four successful prison escapes 21 back in the 1960s one guy whose name you saw a lot was Timothy ly and that's because he became kind of a guru in the hippie counterculture ly believed that psychedelic drugs held powers that could help Mankind and he wanted to prove it he got his chance when he took part in something called the Concord Prison Experiment this involved lery given consenting prisoners doses of psilocybin AKA magic mushrooms the question was would those guys who did the mushrooms quit crime when they got out of prison the answer was that 20% of the guys who took part in the project went back to Crime After prison while 60% of the other American criminals at the time did the same 20 when you're doing time in Iceland's kavia Brea prison you you can enjoy rooms with exceptional views and even get out now and again to do some shopping in the market the rooms all have internet and the guys not the guards have the keys to those rooms you might also be surprised to hear that it's a diverse kind of joint with women men the old and young all mixed together and helping each other do their time 19 in the USA around 75% of prisoners will end up back in prison within 5 years after their release 18 in Norway only around 20% of released criminals will end up back in prison 17 not so many people know this but Senator John McCain actually did time Behind Bars the senator was flying a plane in the Vietnam War and that plane was shot down he ejected out of the thing but doing so he broke both arms and a leg McCain was captured and then sent to Holo prison aka the Hanoi Hilton he was beaten and you can imagine how that felt when he already had some bad injuries he did eventually get some treatment but after a few weeks the poor guy had lost 50 lbs if that wasn't bad enough he later did a 2-year stretch in solitary confinement could it possibly get any worse you might wonder the answer is a resounding yes he was interrogated a few times a week and during those sessions he was bound and savagely beaten the Man spent 5 and 1/2 years as a prisoner of war and because of his injuries until the day he died he still couldn't lift his arms above his head 16 perhaps the worst kind of prison might be one with no doors Yes you heard that right a prison you're just left to die in this is a form of punishment called urement and it basically involves having a cell built around you this happened to a Moroccan serial killer in 1906 he he was walled up and screamed for days on end since he had no water to drink those screams didn't last long 15 if you've ever visited the city of n pen in Cambodia you might have walked down a quiet back street and found a former prison it's now called the tul slang genocide Museum before this place was a prison used by the communist Kemar Rouge during their bloody takeover of the country it was just as school when the soldiers of the uprising got hold of the place they turned it into a torture and execution Center and called it security prison 21 or S21 walking from room to room you see numerous torture devices and photos of all the families that were killed there another room is filled with their skulls tool slang was a prison where people were sent to be tortured and killed women children and of course men they'd been accused of well not being on the right side of politics they were just your average student teacher doctor engineer Soldier sailor we won't talk about the horrific devices they used to torture and ultimately kill them but needless to say imprisonment there was worse than you can imagine our researchers at the infographic show have been to this place and we can assure a visit is absolutely heartbreaking 14 when Alcatraz was up and running as a prison there was a rumor that the waters around the island were full of man-eating sharks that's not exactly the truth but it probably prevented a few men from trying to escape a great white has been spotted there in the past but that was very unusual certain kinds of sharks might swim in that water but not the kind that will munch down on a man we're getting close to the top 10 now so expect to see something special 13 Japanese prisons are well known for being really really strict an American man who was sent there in the 90s said he got 10 days in solitary just because he looked up before eating that was a big no no of course 12 what you're about to hear is possibly one of the most outrageous prison stories ever in 2017 at an Ohio prison an investigation revealed that some very clever inmates had made two computers and hid them in the ceiling a computer by itself wasn't very useful but the guys connected the devices to the State's Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections Network the only reason those guys got caught was because the prison realized that daily internet usage was exceeding the threshold the good news is that those men had obviously learned a lot in their prison Electronics class 11 What's called the most violent prison riot in American history happened in 1980 at the New Mexico State penitentiary in short the prison was taken over by the prisoners and guards and inmates were taken hostage none of the guards were killed but we can't say that for the captured inmates what happened is some of the gangs that were leading the riot took over the prison they rampaged through the cell blocks and if they couldn't get through a door they used a blowtorch to get through it on the other side there were guys who were in protective custody and some of those people ended up being tor tortured hanged dismembered and killed in other terrible ways we hate to tell you this but that blowtorch that they had was used on the faces of men deemed snitches 33 people in the end were killed 10 there was a special dungeon in the Tower of London called little ease and the thing was when you got sent there you got a little ease that's because it was so small a person couldn't lie down it was a tiny little box and must have driven prisoners mad nine in every prison you have a guy that makes Hooch well you have a lot of guys that do that and they make the alcohol drink from juice bread and bits of fruit but might throw in all kinds of things we found one guy who considered himself a hooch Master when he was doing time but one thing he got wrong one time was when he didn't burp the bottle enough that means letting out some gas he didn't do that and things blew up in his face if you ever decide to become a hooch Master then we suggest you get down with burp and your Brew eight after a study that was conducted about a giant Los Angeles jail it was found that 800 people did 200 days in that jail before they were found innocent or guilty seven you might think that there's just no way you'd ever end up in jail but listen how some people got there okay so not paying a parking ticket can land you in jail but it gets much worse than that a few years ago a 19-year-old man in Michigan did 3 days behind bars because he had not paid a fine for catching a fish what you're thinking well we should tell you that he wasn't supposed to catch that kind of fish at that time of year his crime was out of season fishing we found an 82-year-old in Maryland whose beloved chihuaha kept getting out of the house how's an old woman supposed to keep those little things under control she got fined couldn't pay and went straight to jail she served 2 days so don't think that you could never end up in jail six in 2011 death row inmates in Texas no longer had the option to have a last meal before their execution you might wonder why the answer is because a senator in the state got quite upset when one prisoner ordered a massive meal and then ate none of it the guy ordered two chicken fried steaks some fried okra about a pound of barbecue three fajitas a triple meat bacon cheeseburger a meat lover's pizza a cheese omelette with ground beef tomato onions and bell and jalapeno peppers and lastly a pint of ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts all of that came and the Prisoner said he no longer felt hungry that was enough to make some officials angry and last meals became a thing of the past five in 2007 a lady named Lucille Keen was released from a US prison and it made the News That's because she was the oldest female in the country before her release the 93-year-old had served 5 years for shooting her neighbor four in 1926 an Australian man named Bill Wallace shot a guy because that guy started smoking near Wallace smoking indoors was all the norm back then but Bill didn't really like the smell he went to prison and never came out again but guess how old he was when he finally passed away within those walls the answer is 107 And1 months he did a total of 63 years three in 2019 at a prison in Arkansas the officers were a bit embarrassed when a prisoner just seemed to disappear where is the guy they wondered one minute he was there and the next just gone a Manhunt was soon underway and the those red-faced officers took dogs into a nearby rural area knowing the guy couldn't have gotten far they found him in the end but not outside of the prison he was found hiding on the roof two you won't be surprised to hear that life ain't easy for some folks on death row they sit in solitary confinement and just wait and wait until it's time to lay down on that gurnie and take that toxic potion into their veins The Waiting can cause something called Death Row syndrome which basically means they go mad one guy who said death row was like living in a submarine or a cave had his execution delayed because he was was in no fit state to die others might start talking to themselves or even have psychotic delusions you can sure get low on death row and number one it's a rough estimate but it's thought that 46,000 to 230,000 people in US prisons are actually innocent since 1992 20 people in the US have been exonerated from death row because of DNA evidence the records show that there have been 2551 exonerations in America and those guys in total did 22540 years behind bars for something they didn't do now that might be the most insane fact we have for for a long time sometimes posts what McNair says in letters on Twitter one tweet went like this I've been a 10-year resident of adx Florence and I see a new Resident is coming El Chapo I look forward to meeting you and sharing breakout stories if you read that Twitter account you'll also know why McNair always ran so well that's because he worked out every single day when he was behind bars some 70,000 convicts were sent here but very few made it out alive with conditions harsh enough to shatter the spirits of even the most resilient criminals this was truly a land of Torment the final destination for many Unfortunate Souls welcome to Devil's Island the world's most notorious prison to ever be forgotten sounds like a contradiction doesn't it with a treacherous landscape and an ominous past you'd better watch your step because danger lurks in every direction the name Devil's Island was actually coined by the prisoners themselves which should give you some clue about the conditions that they lived in officially it was called B de Cayenne otherwise known as the penal colony of cayenne located about 9 to 10 Mi off the Atlantic coast from Karu a small town in French Guinea on the northeastern coast of South America resides three small rocky Islands these are known as The Salvation Islands also known as the IL Salo in French in this case the term salvation would seem like an oxymoron the smallest of the three islands is Devil's Island a narrow strip of land about 3,900 ft long and roughly 1,320 ft wide don't let the palm trees fool you this was no island paradise today an overgrown jungle is slowly hiding the remnants of what was once a penal or Exile Colony a virtual hell here on Earth established by the Emperor Napoleon thei in 1852 the island was originally used as a leper colony to quarantine people with Leprosy before later being used to incarcerate political prisoners and criminals throughout a long stretch of time consisting of around 100 years many were convicted here including murderers rapists and those deemed as an overall threat to society some men however were sent here despite being innocent of the charges that were staged against them it didn't matter what category of criminal you were listed under if you were unlucky enough to be sent here you endured the same fate as everyone else items on the agenda included squeezing into tight Living Spaces getting covered in dirt and being abused by other inmates whether you were a petty thief or a Savage murderer you could expect to be stripped of your identity and thrown into the mix you were forced to cohabit the the same environment and mingle with those more dangerous than you not surprisingly fights were a regular occurrence amongst the prisoners many of which ended in murders that later went unpunished no one really cared whether people lived or died isolated on a treacherous island with no way out why would anyone bother punishing the prisoners it only required paperwork a guide was quoted saying to Alas obscura during a visit to the island it was easier he explained to let nature take its course and let them die of harsh labor tropical disease or a failed attempt to escapee when the prisoners were punished on rare occasions they were commonly put in isolation for months at a time imagine going a long time in a dark room with no one to talk to some convicts were even placed in deep 12x 12T holes with bars on top instead of a roof so that they'd be subject to all kinds of weather conditions without a shelter to protect them one prisoner was reportedly tied to a tree deep in the jungle as punishment for attempting to attack a guard he was left to endure the elements vulnerable to Nature's wrath the next day he was discovered dead out of 70,000 something men 3/4 of them died from disease hunger and mistreatment many also fell prey to Insects such as ants as well as bats and rats picking at their rotting bodies many conficts even died on the way to the island since even the trip in and of itself was extremely dangerous many inmates were forced to share tiny cramped cells with one another in filthy conditions to put this in perspective these cells were about the same size as the common household bathroom as an exercise if you were trying to squeeze your entire family into one maybe you'd have a better idea of what it might have been like say goodbye to your privacy we wouldn't recommend trying this if you're claustrophobic though after 1885 the population of Devil's Island greatly increased as the French government started sending more prisoners including an influx of more convicts charged with smaller offenses not just hardened criminals the conditions became ever more crowded as a result prisoners were routinely Shackled at night their legs tied to an iron rod with the natural desire to shift and adjust your sleeping position throughout the night it's easy to imagine that this would have been torture during the day prisoners were forced to move around in Chains with starvation being common many resembled walking skeletons a lot of prisoners anticipated death and probably welcomed it when it finally came though there is a graveyard located on the island to this day most of the prisoners were not buried there due to its hazardous rocks and Powerful ocean currents surrounding the island safe access was only possible using a cable car which crossed the 60ft wide Channel between Devil's Island and the main island El Royale though on every prisoner's mind Escape was very difficult to achieve some might even say impossible the rough landscape was its own challenge with sharp rocks and piranha infested rivers and sharks also posed a serious threat these killer monsters circled the island constantly eagerly waiting to Feast on the prisoners they were even said to respond to the Ring of a bell like trained dogs whenever it was time to dispose of the corpses the bodies of the Dead convicts were on the menu loaded into wheelbarrows and dumped into the ocean the Piranhas were basically handed a free meal on a silver platter many who tried to escape also perished in the water one well-known prisoner to be brought to Devil's Island was a man named Captain Alfred dfus born in 1859 this French army officer was the son of a wealthy Jewish Family he was accused of selling military secrets to the Germans in 1894 and was put on trial for treason he was convicted and sentenced life imprisonment and he arrived at Devil's Island on April 13th 1895 his case however initiated a 12-year controversy known as the drus affair which made a lasting impact on the political and social history of the French third Republic during this time the French Press was highly anti-semitic and the evidence that had been used against him was largely fabricated dryfus reportedly Cried Out giving a passionate plea he said I swear that I'm innocent I remain worthy of serving the Army Long Live France long live the Army but it made no difference despite having pled his innocence public opinion welcomed the verdict and wanted him to be sentenced dryfus was used as symbolism for anti-semitic propaganda spreading popular opinion about the supposed disloyalty of French Jews not everyone was convinced however and doubt over df' guilt spread like wildfire the case sparked widespread public attention and split France apart into two opposing groups those who were for his guilty sentence and those who were opposed to it dfus was eventually pardoned and released once it was realized that he was unjustly condemned but not before spending over four long brutal years on Devil's Island considering that more than 40% of prisoners did not survive their first year on the island and few Liv to see their release date drus was very lucky he was released on June 5th 1899 he had written a journal detailing his captivity in more than 1,000 letters so how about those who managed to escape from Devil's Island prison there are very few who succeeded one allegedly being Clement Duval in 1901 he was an anarchist who fled to New York City and wrote a book about his imprisonment called revote another Escape was a man named Renee binois who escaped by helping a film company he earned $100 which he used to bring a Chinese Merchant boat to pick him up when the boat arrived he hid in it and sailed away he spent months recovering with a native tribe off the mainland making his way on foot through South America he walked through Central America up to Mexico before finally entering the United States now that's quite a hike binois published two books called hell on trial and dry Guillotine 15 years among the living dead which spread awareness about what went on in the penal colony there must have been something about the island that drove successful escapees into authorship why else would they want to recount their experiences by writing books about it Renee binois made a mistake by traveling back to his home country of France to argue his case upon his arrival he was immediately captured and returned to the colony to be imprisoned once again he was eventually released though and went on to live a free life in California where he worked as a technical adviser for Warner Brothers during the making of the 1944 film passage to Marsailles he also founded Rene's ranchor in the lucern valley and later obtained legal US citizenship in 1956 perhaps the most popular and Infamous escape from Devil's Island was done by HRI sharier and Silvan born in 1906 hre sharier was framed for murder and transported to the prison in 1930 from France he was otherwise known as papon the French word for butterfly he earned his name due to the butterfly tattoo on his chest during his Escape he leapt from a cliff on the island into the sea with his companion silon using two sacks filled with coconuts as life buoys it took the pair 3 days to drift to the mainland and they somehow managed to avoid being eaten by sharks syon died shortly after reaching the shore supposedly due to getting caught in quicksand it must have been really aggravating for syon to make it all the way across shark infested waters for 3 days just to die that way HRI on the other hand was caught and thrown into another prison the B at Eldorado but was soon released to live a free life in Venezuela from there after his ordeal was over hre wrote a book papon which detailed his experiences French authorities attempted to discredit him denying his claim that he had escaped from Devil's Island they even went so far as to say HRI was never sentenced there to begin with critics go on to say that hre should have admitted that this book was based on fiction we'd be curious to know whether you believe papon is based on fabricated accounts of events or if French authorities were just trying to cover it up it seems pretty suspicious to say the least especially since many aspects of the story bear more than a few similarities to a memoir by another Devil's Island prisoner called dry Guillotine which had been written 30 years before papon nevertheless onr's Papo name continued to live on in infamy upon his death in 1973 to this today the name papon can be found carved in the Floor of cell 47 on Devil's Island there were even movie adaptations made from the story if you're looking for something to watch tonight there are two different versions of the film to choose from we went ahead and did the research for you to make your life a little easier the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes given 83% for the 1973 version of the movie papon starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman a poorer score of 52% was given for the recent 2017 version of the film you're welcome though the transportation of prisoners to the French penal colony was abolished in 1938 the last of the prisoners continued to remain on Devil's Island for much longer than that the closure of the facility was delayed upon the outbreak of World War II starting in 1946 French penal colonies everywhere were gradually being terminated one by one Devil's Island however was the last to shut its doors in 1953 for the most part it was largely forgotten by the rest of the world today however Devil's Island is a popular tourist destination because because of its dark past and the fame it acquired from the books and film adaptations of papon's story there's a sort of Twisted irony in the fact that so many prisoners could not flee the island in the past but now you can't get on the island even if you wanted to this is because it's closed to the public though you cannot actually step foot on the island itself however you can view it offshore from a charter boat many also take helicopters over it just to sneak an aerial Peak at the ruins the other two islands in the group The Three salvation islands are open for access to the public and contain some of the original buildings restored as museums so what's the appeal of visiting exactly this may be in large part due to the movies or perhaps some people have a ghoulish sense of curiosity for the atrocities that went on there who knows like with any story involving a place with a dark past there are some who claim Devil's Island is haunted visitors have said they've seen ghosts of prisoners everywhere in the crumbling ruins if we could ask our question for the ghosts would be if you died wanting to escape the island in Life why spend all your time there after death perhaps it's a form of purgatory for those lost spirits who still can't find their way to Freedom Guantanamo Bay naval station is located on southeastern Cuba a small 45 squ M American Military station on lease from Cuba since 1903 in the past it's been an important Naval Station ensuring US military forces remain close to the Caribbean and it's many vitally important trade routes however in 2002 the US began construction of a detention camp where it would house suspected terrorists that had ens snared in its global war on terror but just how secure is this facility hello and welcome to another episode of the infographic show today we're asking is it possible to Escape from Guantanamo Bay the Guantanamo Bay detention camp or GMO as it's commonly known is a prism facility located on the US's Guantanamo Bay Naval Station at the start of the US's war on terror a need for a secure housing facility for Dangerous suspected terrorists and insurgents was immediately identified by the US government and thus construction began on what would be known as Camp x-ray which would later be shut down as Camp Delta a 62 unit Detention Center came online Camp Delta now houses camps 1 through six as well as Camp Eko where detainees are in processed upon arrival for 3 years the CIA also operated a small site known as Penny Lane which house special Prisoners the agency tried to recruit his spies while the rest of the facility featured pretty sparse living quarters Penny Lane had private kitchen showers televisions and beds with mattresses all in a bid to encourage prisoners to cooperate nearly from the start of operations allegations of abuse and torture leaked to the Press condemned by the United Nations the US argued that detainees at gito were not guaranteed Geneva Convention rights and protections because they had specifically chosen not to fight as regular soldiers or operate under a clear chain of command terrorists and Guerilla Fighters the US argued were not protected by Geneva conventions in place to protect uniform prisoners of War war men whose Nations chose to abide by international law should be the only ones protected by that law if allegations of torture weren't enough however soon it was revealed to the public that most of the detainees couldn't be verified to have any actual links to Terror organizations and instead had simply been combatants arrested by NATO troops others had their links to Terror networks greatly exaggerated though a few were indeed some of the most dangerous men in the world because Guantanamo host some of the world's most dangerous terrorists specific information about its security features are almost impossible to ascertain however we asked the security expert with 6 years experience securing priority level one resources for the US government how a prisoner May in fact Escape our expert which asked to remain anonymous said that escape was likely impossible but every security has key vulnerabilities that can be defeated the trick is being able to defeat all of a security systems vulnerabilities one after the other in the limited amount of time you have for an escape attempt something which is simply not likely first off you're going to have to deal with the security Personnel themselves what is known about internal security at GMO is that military police Personnel conduct constant rounds making visual inspections of their prisoners every 3 minutes through a window on the cell door then there's the locking mechanism on the door itself which is typically behind a/2 in of Steel and impossible to access simply put you're not going to get out of your cell unless a guard lets you out so your best chance for escape is to get friendly with with a guard if you're a particularly handsome man trying to woo one of the female guards approximately 20% of Guantanamo Bay's prison staff is female you're going to be hardpressed to get through all the anti-terrorist indoctrination but hey stranger things have happened if that's not possible though and you somehow managed to compromise the locking mechanism on your door our source wouldn't comment on how to do this then you're going to have to deal with that pesky constantly patrolling guard checking in on you every 3 minutes luckily for you though our source states that the greatest vulnerability of any security system is always the human element guards become complacent and while at the start of a shift those 3-minute checks may come so punctually you could set your watch by them but as the hours Creep by especially at night 3-minute checks are going to turn into 4minute checks than five or 6 Minute checks eventually they may become even just hourly bigger security lapses have happened at facilities more sensitive than GMO complacency and time is your friend once you figured out how to get out of your cell simply wait be a model inmate don't rile up the guards and lull them into a false sense of complacency wait for a popular holiday such as Thanksgiving or Christmas when guards will have more on their minds than just simply making some boring repetitive rounds that they've made for months on end that's when you make your Escape there are however bound to be additional security features inside the prison facil housing units than just the door on the cell and it's unlikely that you'll be able to defeat these without raising the Alarm One Source tells us that because of its small size GMO enjoys the benefits of smaller prison centers better engineering and construction which eliminates many of the pitfalls of larger complexes such as the large access shafts that pierce through the heart of alcatra plus the small size of the prison complex lets the guards enjoy a much better guard to prisoner ratio which means more eyes on you than in a place with a larger population assuming you make it outside however you are almost certainly going to have to deal with several layers of security fencing in most government facilities video cameras ring the entire perimeter and are set up so each camera covers another's blind spot a central Alarm Monitoring Center will typically have one or two operators responsible for monitoring all interior and exterior alarms and be able to instantly bring up any alarm sector of the fence line on camera for a visual inspection a persistent alarm or if the camera is mysteriously down for some reason will'll prompt them to send an armored Patrol to make a physical sweep of the area so how can you defeat multiple layers of alarmed fence line well much the same way as you defeat the interior security prey on human fallibility most secure facilities have three different types of sensors along their fences the first is a raycon microwave sensor that detects movement between the fence lines the second is a tout wire sensor which runs the length of the fence line and detects climbing or cutting and the third is buried in the ground and designed to detect vibrations that's three security features to overcome in the span of just a few minutes how could you do it though the physical security system itself is formidable it will always have one significant weakness the human operators most security Personnel will spend their entire career with 99.99% of every alarm in incident being a false alarm this breeds a deep sense of complacency when training and professionalism dips amongst the security Force some of the worst offenders though can be alarm operators themselves whom typically spend countless hours pulling up alarms along the perimeter which end up being nothing more than just a rabbit or Mouse scurrying about add to that inclement weather with winds pushing along debris and blowing on the fence line an alarm operator's board can light up like a Christmas tree inevitably leading them to ignoring the majority of alarm calls for the duration of the storm or simply accessing them and telling security Personnel to conduct regular patrols through the area your task therefore is going to be to encourage an alarm operator to ignore the alarms he'll soon be setting off this can be easily achieved but will require greater patience and will require the help of someone on the outside your secret colle laborator will report to the planned Escape Route 2 weeks before your big escape and camp out all night long outside the piece of fence line You'll Be penetrating while making sure they stay hidden from any security patrols for two entire weeks your compatriot will be tasked with setting off at least two of the three alarm systems on that piece of fence line over and over again for hours on end every single night this can be achieved relatively easily you can do things like attach a thin fishing line to a piece of debris such as a small stick and hurl it over the fences to the other side then tug against the fences or drag it along the ground this will set off the alarms but when an alarm operator pulls up the video feed they'll only see a piece of random debris alternatively you can also use the same tactic used by American infiltrators during the Cold War against the Soviet secure facilities purchase a large amount of mice or other rodents and every night release several into the fence line one at a time over the course of hours seeing nothing but animals in the cameras after several days of this alarm the operator will be inclined to Simply begin ignoring new alarm from that sector repeat the procedure enough times and chances are that the alarm operator will get sick of hearing the same alarm dozens of times night after night and simply access it silencing it and ignoring it complacency is your greatest Ally escaping from Guantanamo Bay is likely impossible though due to the physical security located inside the prison itself though ironically the secure fencing is certainly the weakest element to overcome yet even if you manage to make it to the outside of the prison you'll still be amidst a US Naval St and any Escape will have to take into consideration the US Navy sea and air resources to include Patrol craft and helicopters so you end up behind bars you the reasonable man the cool operator a person who doesn't need to solve problems with his fists you're an intelligent being not an animal you're a lover not a thug but here's your prison predicament Mr moderate your penitentiary problem your confinement Catch 22 you have to fight in this place if you let people push you around you're going to get picked on you might end up a punk don't fight you'll have problems and fight you'll have problems too you can't win that's prison this is what you tell the staff after you hit a guy back they didn't care about this prison Paradox you got time in solitary after the next time you defended yourself you lost your prison job and after the next scuffle you were charged with assault welcome to the Vicious Cycle of the American prison system let's face it in the end everyone in prison is a loser a punk to the system you can try and beat that system but it will break you in the end a lot of people doing hard time at some point realize this and they try to settle down do the time not let the time do them but if you've seen the podcasts read the books watched the documentaries you'll know that even the most intelligent and calmest types will tell you that in prison you might have to let that homo sapien rage show at some point inside those Prison Walls that reptilian part of the brain might have to override your fleshy reasoning machine now and again we're not saying you can't do your time and stay out of trouble we're not saying that you will definitely have to fight but we are saying that it's a very real possibility and as we said if you don't fight back other Predators will see this as a weakness they might later try and exploit you that's why you'll hear a lot of former prisoners saying just hit back and lose your mind a bit show them that even if they beat the hell out of you they'll have to work for it and get hurt doing so those Predators will think twice about trying to take advantage of you after that you don't have to be a jiujitsu black belt or a trained boxer to smack smack someone in the face to gouge their eyes we all have some of that violent DNA before we were social animals we were warriors each and every one of us ask any neander oh you can't we killed them all with early humans it was fight or die in some respects the prison system brings out the early human people the tribal Thug the atavistic apan fight or die like the bad old days you can choose to be separated from other prisoners but the isolation will hurt after a while you can choose not to fight back as we said and you'll get exploited for your weakness just like the weak member of a tribe the prison system will make an animal out of you don't you ever forget that the best thing to do is to not be there in the first place but hey some folks have ended up on the inside for not paying parking tickets or deciding to eat a psychedelic mushroom and be at one with nature as we said once inside those walls you might be presented with the prison catch22 fight and get in trouble or don't fight and get in trouble even if you didn't start it you can't tell the prison staff the truth because prisoners take a dim view of informers rats or snitches are about as popular as chomos you keep quiet and you get time in solitary or at least receive some kind of punishment such as not being able to get things from the prison store the commissary as we said fight again and get in more trouble even if it wasn't you that started it really hurt a guy that might even want to kill you and find your small sentence turning into a big one the philosopher Jean Paul satra wrote a play called No Exit with the Comon catch Ras from that being hell is other people and prison is about as close to this as possible in this world you can go inside a good man and end up metamorphosizing into a person you never knew existed the authorities know you're stuck in this Paradox when you're told to be good and behave yet the system itself denies you the possibility of doing this but they either don't care or can't do anything about it rules are rules even when they make no sense prison is irrational those words should be written above every prison entrance so there you are this is what you can expect inside we don't want to sound hyperbolic and say prison will present you with fights every day some people do indeed manage to keep their head down some prisons are less violent than others but in the USA and many other countries violence is a part of prison life okay so let's now take you through a fight here's the scene you've not been inside long and some guy pushes you out of the queue in the canteen you push yourself back in you need to eat he then just lashes out you have to defend this otherwise you'll seriously injured what he doesn't know is that you can box you catch him right on the chin and knock him clean out you get back in the queue but the guards are now on to you we should say that in some US prisons you might just be expected to fight right away to see What You're Made Of you might hear prisoners calling this a heart check so you've gotten into this fight what now if the guards didn't get there or somehow didn't see it the guy might get picked up and be asked if he wants to go again you might even get jumped by his friends you might not have heard the end of it but let's just say you've been seen by by the staff they are likely going to surround you tell the others to stand back tell you to get on your knees and put your hands behind your head usually people don't just get knocked out and so you might have been pounding this guy for like 30 seconds or a minute if you don't do what the prison Officer says you might get pepper spray in your eyes which if you've experienced that you'll know it's rather unpleasant to say the least most prisons too have something called an Emergency Response Unit pepper spray or not you're bleeding and he is in a terrible State you're now going to be escorted to the prison hospital and a nurse is going to clean you up you'll be in restraints of course something one former officer also wrote online is that it's not just the prisoners taking notes on how well you fight how your heart stands up but officers will be watching new officers and prisoners will also be seeing how an officer deals with two powerful or at least enraged men a fight inside means much more than a fight on the outside okay so you've broken prison rules you can't do this and not get punished in some way or at least have to explain yourself we must say here that how you be punished depends on a few things did camera show that you certainly didn't start the fight as you know you shouldn't inform on the other guy so you can't give all the details as senseless as that may be especially given you were defending yourself it's the inmate code that code wasn't written by sensible men something else you must understand is the extent of damage you've caused if you've knocked out three of this guy's teeth headbutted him so hard his nose shattered and punched him with such ferocity you split his cheek and it had to be sewn up well that's a crime on the inside as it is on the outside you can be charged with assault you might get many more gears you're also now a dangerous man with fists like weapons you might need to be separated from the prison population either because you're a danger to others or that dude's buddies are planning to cut your throat the staff are going to weigh all this up some staff in prisons have also been known to purposefully create Gladiator environments either for the entertainment or they want someone dead we don't think this happens often you're going to be in solitary confinement while the prison staff for working out why this violence happened was it premeditated was it a gang attack on you or was it just expressive and unplanned if you've been set on by a gang in a premeditated attack the officers are going to have to make sure it doesn't happen again but let's say it was what it was just a reaction to an action in that queue first of all you might have to fight this guy again behind closed doors prisoners also known blind spots where fights take place but you're still in solitary so you can forget about that for a while if that guy was in a gang which is highly likely he might get punished for getting whooped or you might have to tackle someone else from that gang at some point or join it or do something else at some point soon you'll be told what offense you've committed and maybe a likely outcome in the UK it's written that within 48 hours this happens by the way while you're in solitary that other guy is in the prison hospital you are uninjured let's say you've beaten this man to within an inch of his life that's serious and the prison might be put into lockdown one process you have to go through is called an adjudication or hearing if you've watched the prison shows you'll know this means sitting in front of people and being told what you did and what's going to happen to you you can add to this or just say yes I did that guilty is charged whether guilty or not you are guilty because most of the time you won't claim self-defense and blame it on the other guy remember prisoners don't snitch you can also be sure that no one else saw the fight too even if you've been beaten almost to death physically abused in the worst way some guys that quite like you won't even snitch this is another example of the craziness of prison you can't be good even if you want to be this system ensures you lose every sense of your personal ethics if you want to check if you've been treated fairly and actually broken a rule you can head to the library where you should find a prison discipline manual you've been found guilty and you should be given a written notice about this in the UK the prisoners call this a nicking sheet it should be the same in the USA after you've had a hearing with officials or sometimes the warden you'll be told what you've done and what's going to happen to you it might just be that privileges are taken away from you but you've done some damage so as we said you might be charged with an offense you might have to do time in the hole you might lose that cushy prison job you could have your good behavior time removed or have time added onto your sentence the guards might decide to rans sack your cell making a huge mess and perhaps finding some Contraband you might lose some of your cherished cell items and perhaps the worst you might get transfer to a prison known as a hell hole full of Maniacs all because you defended yourself and all because some more was in a bad mood this is real life no exit it's not easy to get out in one piece just be glad he didn't bang his head when he fell and it killed him then you'd likely be doing life and you only went in for selling your buddy a handful of those mushrooms but let's change this a little and say it ended up being a minor scuffle and no one really got hurt in that case you might just get what's called a shot rather like a blemish on your prison record a little slap on the legs maybe it was a one-off and the staff go easy on you but if you want something in the future a new job more items your shot or shots it will be taken into account so there you go a 101 of prison fighting we might start with a positive not for the authorities of course and look at prison escapes that went marvelously right we might remember one of the greatest escapes of all time and that was because it involved three men breaking out of alcatra prison they went missing in 1962 and still no one knows that they survived or died in the waters of San Francisco Bay then you have the final Escape of enry Shier AKA Pilon which involved sailing away on a makeshift raft or what about the numerous incredibly cunning escapes of the serial killer scoundrel Charles saage a man who we've talked about already at length more recently we saw the Brazen Escape of the gangster Wen Guzman Laura AKA El Chapo but like many escapes he was recaptured let's now look at failed escapes the Hess Hitcher obviously once you've managed to escape from jail or prison you should be careful who you talk to as suspicion from another might land you right back in jail in 2018 the BBC reported that 31-year-old Alan Lewis was being taken from Greenup County Detention Center in Kentucky USA when he told officers that his handcuffs were too tight and were hurting him as an officer tried to help Lewis after a short struggle he made a run for it Freedom At Last but the man was stuck on a highway and needed a ride in desperation he held out his thumb and a kind driver stopped for him except the driver noticed that Lewis was trying to hide what seemed like handcuffs fast into one wrist it turned out that the man driving the car was a police officer himself Lewis got a ride right back to jail the authorities later said he thought he was getting a ride and he did you might call this guy a chancer but we'll get around to some hardcore criminals who orchestrated Amazing Escape attempts an explosive letter writer this is yet another failed prison attempt in 2018 this time it involved a man called Shawn Damon castorina and he was trying to break out of alam County Detention Center in Graham North Carolina in time for first-degree murder casarina wouldn't have been released for quite some time so he tried to figure out how he might get out a bit faster his cing plan to expedite his sentence was to build an explosive and blast his way out well he needed help for that so he wrote a letter to two of his friends with information about how to make a bomb and which prison wall they would blast near to where castorina would be waiting what could possibly go wrong well he sent that letter with bomb making information to the wrong address and it was picked up by a regular sort of person who who subsequently informed the authorities the media later wrote he has now been charged with four counts of felony conspiracy two counts of manufacturer or assemble a weapon of mass destruction and one count of attempted escape from jail reading between the lines be careful what you say when planning a prison escape even if you think your words are coded in 2010 a 67-year-old prisoner at the Isle of White's Parker's prison in the UK thought he would send a message to the outside via a letter in the letter these words were written more heat light it sounds innocuous but guards that were monitoring all the prison mail became suspicious it turned out that this former science teacher had been hatching a plot to escape from what some people have called the British version of Alcatraz seeing that the prisoner had written more heat in one letter the guards heated up some of his correspondents this revealed that he'd been using dried lemon juice to write down his escape plans the heat showed he'd sketched detailed maps of the prison while messages were conveyed using encrypted code and messages hidden in sidoku Puzzles he was also o planning to use a helicopter to pick him up in part of the prison where he could land he was found out later the prison Governor said I'm delighted at the way our security team and Hampshire constabulary have foiled a possible escape attempt he was then moved to another prison but reports state that none of his accomplices were arrested love won't tear us apart this one should be a Hollywood movie if it's not already and we don't know about it it's the story of a woman called Barbara Anne Oswald in 1978 she hijacked a helicopter that she had chartered except she didn't count on the pilot being an ex Vietnam vet she put a gun to his head and told him to head to the United States Penitentiary Maran in Illinois she was trying to help inmates Garrett b trapnel a conman career criminal and air pirate Oswald was the lover of trapnel and the two had planned to get married she didn't get very far as the pilot of the helicopter wrestled the gun from her and shot her in the head that was the end of her and the end of the escape attempt but the plot thickened the daughter of Oswald was convinced that trapnel was her father he wasn't and she very much wanted to get him out she was only 17 years old when she hijacked tww flight 541 just months after her mother had died in the attempt to get trapnel out the brave daughter held the 880s something passengers for hours and flew to another location with about 40 passengers she said she had Dynamite strapped to her chest but the three sticks turned out to be flares she was finally arrested trapnel who had hijacked the flight himself in the past said there was no way that the young Oswald was his daughter he never even met her mother face to face Lord couldn't keep his mouth shut over in Australia three hardened criminals who were all serving long sentences for drug trafficking got the idea to hire an sas Soldier living in the Philippines to get them out of prison in Melbourne except a man called lord Tony monan got in the way don't let the title Lord fool you this man had once run a brothel he had trafficked drugs himself and he later grasped on others to reduce his own time in prison one of the people he grasped on was the Man known as Mr Nice AKA Howard mark the Oxford educated global pot trafficker who later became a celebrity of sorts anyway so our Lord told the authorities that he had learned that three Aussies had hired an sas guy to land on the tennis courts of the prison in a helicopter and break them out he also said once they were dropped off they would be taken in a van to Sydney and they would board a yacht and sail into the sunset none of that happened as the cops just waited for the men to wait on the tennis court and then arrested them during the escape attempt again this could be a movie and one of the guys who tried to escape had been featured in books his name was David McMillan another welltoo Brit who speaks the queen's English but trafficed drugs for a living he not only became one of the world's biggest Smugglers but he is the only man ever to have escaped from Thailand's notorious Kung Prim Central Prison he wrote a book about this called Escape saying because conditions were so brutal in Thai prisons and the fact that he'd get death likely reduced to life he had no choice but to get out early The Human Stain okay back to criminals we might not label with the epithet master in recent years you can see that quite a few prisoners in Brazil have successfully escaped from prison by crawling into and out of the sewers this can be a messy business of course but one can imagine the smell of feces can be put up with when the sweet smell of freedom is just around the corner but back in 2016 things didn't go as planned for one fella you can find a video of him online being pulled back out of a clogged sewer in what the media only said was a Sal Pao prison the video shows the captured man later standing in his cell his skin painted brown a coding the Telegraph newspaper called human filth current status on the run all of you out there know very well that if you were ever to successfully break out of jail or prison then the next best thing is to probably keep your head down right we mean you wouldn't post a photo on Facebook of your free face no way and you certainly wouldn't post a picture of your free head and not do anything about that Globe icon that ensures anyone can see this picture well CBS News in 2010 reported that a man called Chris grego did just that and he was warned by police this one is perhaps a bit of a cheat as grego managed to evade cops before he was actually sentenced for assault so it's more of an escape from law than a prison break we just like the story while grego was out he kept updating his Facebook page and so the cops didn't have to try and very hard to find him grego had even shown off posting his own wanted poster on his page one of the arresting officers told the Press if it wasn't for criminals like him our job would be a lot harder almost perfect 9 out of 10 sometimes we can be brilliant and occasionally we just fall at the last hurdle that's fine at least we got to that hurdle but in this case you might wonder if the guy could have pushed himself just a little bit further his name was Robert emry and he was locked up at Oregon state prison in 2010 The Oregonian newspaper tells us that this hardworking man broke Windows drilled out a door lock broke into metal tool cages bashed a hole in the laundry well lugged bags of tools dug under one fence and climbed over another he'd also left a dummy in his cell something we often see in movies the med media reports that he had spent time making this figure so it would look just like a real Sleeping person it had been a physically demanding night and the News tells us that Emory wasn't just tired but he was bleeding too Emory then 50 and serving time for robbery kidnapping and assault after being hurt on the razor wire fence and then just decided to catch a few Z's got under a blanket and went to sleep in the yard some reports perhaps bordering on clickbait stady fell asleep as he was just so tired more responsible media however say he actually gave up as he could not scale the Razer wire fence watch your weight while you could argue that it isn't the worst prison in history of the world the Tower of London evokes nightmarish pictures of bodies being torn apart on the rack of hellish screams coming from dark chambers of cruel leaders leaving anyone they disliked there irrespective of any crime being committed but people escaped and as late as the 20th century when a man picked a lock with a spoon in the early 18th century the Earl of nithsdale dressed up as a woman and managed to get past guards for that trickery he saved his own head in the 16th century Jesuits John Gerard and John Arden performed the tried and tested rope over the wall thing and managed to lower themselves down to Freedom it's said that they did this with mangled hands a punishment or durve before they were really hurt but this is not a show about success and we must tell you about griffi apelan the son of a Welsh King back in the 12th and 13th centuries he was imprisoned in the Tower of London after some a disagreement with the King of England with the latter not keeping his end of the bargain it said the king put Griffith up as a guest in the tower but the Welshman wasn't keen on the idea in 1244 he made a rope out of cloth and bits of sheets and he tried to lower himself out of a window his makeshift rope snapped we're told he was a portly man and he fell to his death and that's all we have for you can you add to this list which one is your favorite tell us in the comments also be sure to check out our other show man so violent even other prisoners fear him thanks for watching and as always don't forget to like share and subscribe see you next time
