Solitary confinement in Gitarama prison means a room measuring one square meter. No ceiling. No bed. Just walls and however long they decide to leave you there.
The general population is worse. Inmates are packed in so tightly that nobody can guarantee your safety, and with food supplies running out, some prisoners have turned to cannibalism.
Sleep lightly in there, because the people around you are hungry.
This is what happens after the jury finds you guilty and the judge sends you somewhere the rules of the outside world stop applying. Whether it is one of the dozens of camps in North Korea or an overcrowded facility in Rwanda, your days become a matter of avoiding gangs and fighting off starvation.
And you have nothing but time.
The moment the gate closes, your fight or flight instinct takes over. Backed into a corner by other inmates, do you fight back? You are about to spend two decades among some of the most dangerous people who have ever lived, and taking it one day at a time might be the only way you leave alive.
Your body reacts before your mind does. Stress drives production of hormones like cortisol, which suppresses appetite. Given what is on the menu here, that may be a mercy.
Those same chemicals can push you into a panic attack or a fistfight, so choose carefully who you provoke. This is not a schoolyard brawl. Inside, every relationship you build or destroy carries consequences.
At Gitarama in Rwanda, your fellow inmates would include war criminals, sex offenders, and cannibals. Gangs run life within those walls, and surviving means having someone watching your back.
If you spent your sentence in solitary instead, you would likely emerge with anxiety and paranoia. Stay in the general population with a gang and you might at least build a reputation.
At the defunct Carandiru Penitentiary in Brazil, that reputation could have carried you through riots and malnutrition. Hoarding food and medical supplies helps too, since professional medical help is not coming. Doctors avoid entering facilities like this whenever possible.
Which raises the obvious question. How do you get out?
Relationships pay in different ways here. Befriend guards or staff and you might earn someone’s trust, and knowing intimate details about their lives gives you leverage. Blackmail or a romantic entanglement may be the only viable exits.
Unless you would rather dig. Three prisoners tunneled out of Alcatraz in the United States, and it took them six months. Get caught trying it and you find out exactly how much longer this place can hold you.
Give up on escaping and there is still work. Prison factories pay around 1.15 dollars an hour, and that money buys commissary food in places like San Quentin in California, which means you no longer have to eat whatever the alternative is.
Do not relax in the yard, though. San Quentin has housed some of the worst serial killers in history.
Even the harshest prisons offer educational programs and time to exercise, so you can spend those years improving your mind and body for the world waiting outside.
Assuming you make it that far, and assuming you never come back.
