10 – Pelican Bay State,

• Located in the North-western point of California, Crescent City, Pelican Bay is notorious for its solitary confinement conditions
• Though other prisons might have bars on the door so they can see out of it, Pelican Bay offers no more than a tiny pinky-finger sized hole to see the outside world for 23 hours a day
• The other hour you’re locked in the exercise yard, basically a cement box with 20 foot walls offering a brief, bar-filled view of the sky
• It’s so bad that many prisoners have gone on hunger strikes to protest the conditions

9 – Alcatraz Island,

• Also known as “The Rock”, or “Devil’s Island”, a prison fortress built on an island designed to be escape-proof and the strongest prison in all of America
• It housed many famous prisoners such as Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly, with violent escape attempts numerous and attacks aplenty, such as the “Battle of Alcatraz in 1946 in which inmates captured the weapons room and recreation yard keys
• It shut down after only 29 years, and ever since it’s been a museum, one of San Francisco’s major tourist attractions

8 – Camp 1391,

• An Israel prison undiscovered until 2003, when a historian was going over old maps and realised someone had airbrushed the facilities location out of existence
• Prisoners describe it as a 2m x 2m cell with no natural light, sexual and physical abuse from the guards, not told where they are, no visitors or lawyers allowed – a prison that does not exist
• An Israeli human rights organisation attempted to close the facility with a petition, but nobody would listen to them
• It’s believed the prison continues to operate to this day

7 – Gitarama Central Prison,

• A literal hell on Earth, described by the LA Times as “no space in hell where people live, sleep, eat, rot and die squeezed together four men per square yard in a roofless brick box”
• Although the prison was originally designed to hold 400, following the events of the Rwandan genocide, that number rose to 7,000 – to the point that they’ve basically been left for dead, some resorting to the consumption of recently deceased flesh just to stay alive
• The prisoners lives have been compared to a wall of standing people, a single organism under the sun, choking on smoke and cold, disease and gangrene everywhere

6 – Guantanamo Bay,

• A prison in Cuba still operational today – it first opened in 2002 with the Secretary of Defence claiming it was built to detain incredibly dangerous criminals and interrogate them in the optimal setting
• Some of the prisoners set free claimed there was forced drugging, sexual degradation, barbed wire assaults, broken glass and cigarette burns
• Amnesty International called for it to shutdown in 2005, but the U.S government rejected their proposal, and though Obama attempted to shut down Guantanamo Bay, he was outvoted

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