Craziest Prisons Around THE WORLD!

TL;DR

A tour of the world's most extreme prisons, from Norway's resort-like Halden to North Korea's Camp 14 slave labor facility.

Key Points

• 1.Norway's Bastøy and Halden prisons treat inmates like citizens, and it works. Bastøy inmates fish, ride horses, and live in wooden cabins; Halden cost $252M and has flat-screen TVs and unarmed female guards. Norway's reoffending rate is just 20% vs. over 50% in the US.
• 2.Russia's Pyt-Yakh Island Prison is one of the harshest on Earth. Housing only lifers since 1997, its psychologist documented that personality deterioration begins after 3–4 years and psychological destruction is guaranteed after 25; no one has ever escaped.
• 3.ADX Florence, the US's only federal supermax, confines inmates 22–23 hours a day in 7×12-ft concrete cells. Notable inmates include El Chapo, Robert Hanssen, and Richard Reid (the shoe bomber); the facility has 12 gun towers, motion sensors, attack dogs, and anti-helicopter wires.
• 4.Bolivia's San Pedro Prison is a self-governed inmate city of ~3,000 people where guards stay outside the walls. Inmates buy and rent cells ranging from cramped rooms to luxury apartments with hot tubs; 200 children live inside, and it ran tours for $20–$57 until exposed on YouTube.
• 5.North Korea's Camp 14 is essentially slave labor where children are born as inmates under a three-generation punishment rule. An estimated 15,000–43,000 people work in coal mines and farms; the UN found crimes against humanity including extermination, enslavement, and torture occurring there.
• 6.Venezuela's Tocorón Prison was secretly run by a gang boss who operated a transnational criminal empire from inside. When 11,000 soldiers raided it in September 2023, they found a baseball field, swimming pool, nightclub, steak restaurant, mini zoo, sniper rifles, and Bitcoin machines; the gang boss escaped through tunnels and remains at large with a $5M bounty.