Random Most Terrifying Prisons (27 items)

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  (#5) Carandiru Penitentiary, Brazil

  Despite its nearly century-long infamous history, Carandiru Penitentiary in São Paulo, Brazil, is most notorious for the events of a single day. During the Carandiru Massacre on October 2, 1992, police took the lives of over 100 inmates in about 30 minutes. The events unfolded when an argument about a football match between two inmates devolved into a fight between rival gangs, which in turn sparked a prison riot.

  In the overcrowded prison that held more than twice its inmate capacity, the riot raged on for three hours until police entered the complex and began to fire. According to witnesses, police shot inmates at close range behind locked cell doors and unleashed dogs on the wounded. It took 20 years for any of the police involved to be punished for their brutality against the prisoners. 
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  (#26) Pontefract Castle, United Kingdom

  Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire, England, has a long and storied history, and its dungeons do too. Built in the 11th century, Pontefract Castle served as the stage for murders, executions, and affairs for numerous kings and members of the nobility. Beneath the grandiose exterior, a terrifying network of dungeons held hundreds of years' worth of prisoners. Prisoners were thrown into the dungeons and left to wander the immense darkened corridors, many scratching their names into the stone walls. During the War of the Roses, hundreds of them met their demise at Pontefract. 

  The most famous death at the castle, Richard II's murder, was immortalized by Shakespeare himself in the play Richard III: "Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison, fatal and ominous to noble peers! Within the guilty closure of thy walls, Richard the second here was hack'd to death..." 
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  (#20) Solovetsky Monastery, Russia

  Two words justify Solovetsky Monastery's spot as one of the scariest of all time: gulag prototype. The oldest official prison of the Russian state, it was originally built as a monastery in the 16th century. Throughout the centuries, the government also used the island and its buildings as a place to exile political dissidents.

  After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviets switched gears, closing down the monastery and turning many of the buildings into the country's first full-fledged forced labor camp. The brutal treatment and terrible conditions at Solovetsky influenced the procedures and organization of later gulags across the USSR. 
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  (#4) Devil's Island, French Guiana

  Potentially the most feared penal colony in history, Devil's Island saw 60,000 prisoners sail in its direction and only 2,000 make it out alive. An isolated island off the coast of French Army Guiana in the Atlantic ocean, Napoleon III and the French chose the island in 1852 because it was nearly impossible to escape. Guards worked prisoners nearly to death during the day, building unending roads to nowhere and clearing trees. At night, they were shackled and left in the dark to be bitten by vampire bats that waited in the rafters.

  Some prisoners were kept in "bear pits" – holes dug into the ground and covered at the top by iron bars. The island's two most well-known residents were Alfred Dreyfus, a French Captain falsely convicted of treason, and Henri Charrière, an inmate who escaped the island and wrote a memoir about his time there. The book, Papillon, was adapted into a movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. 
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  (#15) Galápagos Islands

  • Island Group

  On the Galapagos Islands, once used as a penal colony by Ecuador, the emotional toll of the work assigned to prisoners far surpassed the physical. The island is notorious as the location of the 65-foot tall "Wall of Tears," a structure that guards forced soldiers to build for absolutely no reason. They spent years stacking rocks to construct a wall that went nowhere and did nothing other than keep them working.

  Active for roughly 20 years in the mid-19th century and again from 1946-1959, it's no wonder that the island claimed the lives of so many prisoners. If the disease, starvation, and workload didn't get you, the overwhelming hopelessness probably did.
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  (#16) Unit 731, China

  Dr. Joseph Mengele and the Nazis weren't the only Axis power during World War II to perform horrific human experiments. Across the globe, Germany's ally Japan conducted terrifying experiments of their own. Unit 731 originally opened in Japan-occupied China in 1938 as a research facility for creating biological weapons. In the market for test subjects, the onset of World War II provided a morbidly unique opportunity for the Japanese. 

  Experiments on POWs and imprisoned Chinese civilians included infecting POWs with anthrax and the plague, placing them in pressure chambers until their bodies exploded, giving them frostbite, and vivisecting subjects without anesthesia. From 1940 through 1945, more than 3,000 people died as a result of these torturous experiments. 

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