Most Brutal Prisoner Punishments Given by Prison Guards

"It’s terrifying, it happens, welcome to a world of pain."

- The Infographics Show

Most Brutal Prisoner Punishments Given by Prison Guards is a video on the Infographics Show listing ten horrifying incidences of prison guard brutality towards prisoners, including prisons from all over the world; with brutality ranging from extreme lengths of solitary confinement to immense torture and death.

Synopsis
Prison guards definitely have one of the hardest jobs out there. Dealing with deadly and dangerous inmates on a day to day basis means keeping your guard up at all times. But sometimes the Prison guards get a little too power-hungry and it's the prisoners who really suffer. Today's video contains graphic imagery and is shocking. Be warned.

Transcript
An inmate in one prison has had his knees smashed by batons and has been forced to sit in a vat of steaming human excrement. A prisoner someplace else talks to cockroaches in a solitary cell he’s been in for most of his life while he runs his finger over large scars inflicted by ferocious guards. In a very different type of prison, a man is forced to sit for days on end on his knees and not move an inch, while at the same time on the other side of the world a guy is being dragged around naked and made to bark like a dog as the female officer pulling him explodes in a paroxysm of wicked laughter. It’s terrifying, it happens, welcome to a world of pain.

10. The Worst Case of Solitary Confinement

We are going to talk a lot about severe beatings in this video, but we feel we have to mention what you could call mind-wrecking solitary confinement. As one former prisoner once said, if you want to know how it might feel, just lock yourself in your bathroom for a day. Now imagine spending 44 years in your bathroom. That could be the US record and it was served by a man named Albert Woodfox. He got out of prison on his 69th birthday. He was locked down 23 hours a day.

For much of his sentence, he wasn’t allowed books, magazines, radios, phone calls, and for many years, he wasn’t allowed any outside exercise. It was basically life between four walls because there was nothing to do. In his own words, he said, “The only way you can survive in these cells is by adapting to the painfulness. The pressure of the cell changed most men.” He has also always maintained his innocence.

Now you are going to see how horrific a stay in a Japanese solitary cell is. It comes with violence, lots of violence.

9. Big in Japan

This is a story of a man that was locked up in Japan’s Niigata Prison. We don’t know his full name, with Amnesty International only calling him M. M told the organization about the utter brutality he suffered in Japan’s notoriously strict prison system. The date was the 11th of October 1994 and M had gotten into a fight with another cellmate over an issue with tidiness. Ok, so that’s obviously a transgression, but what happened to him you could say was over the top. M was dragged out of his cell by four guards and taken to a room where he was restrained in leather straps and metal handcuffs.

It was there he made the mistake of making eye contact with a guard, which was verboten in that Japanese prison as it can be in many of Japan’s prisons. For that, he was punched six times in the face. Bleeding and swollen, he was taken to a protection cell, or  “hogobo” in Japanese. The cell had no furniture, and M was kept in handcuffs the entire time. He was also being watched 24 hours a day. The handcuffs remained on even when he ate and slept. Amnesty International wrote this about these cells: “During this time they are monitored continuously and forced to eat food from a plastic bowl like an animal. They are also expected to use the toilet in full view of the video camera and are unable to clean themselves properly due to the tightness of the handcuffs.”

M was kept like that for four days and then for the next 40 days he was put into what is called “minor solitary confinement (keiheikin).” You would not equate the word minor with these cells. In there, M had to sit on his knees, or cross-legged if the guards were nice, from 7 am to 5 pm every single day for the 40 days. He was not allowed to make any kind of movement and speaking was absolutely out of the question. If he did move or speak, he would meet with more brutality. At the time, M said he was suffering from headaches from his beatings. We are not sure if it happened to M, but sometimes the guards will make the prisoner look all day at one particular place in the cell. Often that place is a poster with the word “reflect” written on it.

You are not allowed to turn away from that poster. Foreign prisoners that have been through this have also said in winter it is freezing, but since you can’t move, you must put up with it. If that wasn’t bad enough, once M got out of solitary, he got in trouble again. This time he made a small criticism to another inmate about food portions. 15 guards attacked him, beating him so bad that after numerous kicks he vomited. Amnesty said he suffered severe bleeding which stained his underwear. He was taken to a protection cell again, this time for eight days. All the time he could not open his eyes due to the swelling.

M actually tried to fight back, telling a lawyer about the abuse he experienced. He said he suffered a loss of feeling in some of his body parts because of the beatings, and now his jaw twitched all the time. He also said he had permanent scars and had lost some amount of movement in his shoulders and neck. All that for having a beef about cleanliness and stating that food portions weren’t always the same. In Japan, they break you.

Now let’s go to the USA and see how guards have done something different, but equally as terrifying.

8. Treated Like a Dog

This story comes from a state prison in Alaska and the event took place in 2013. This was just one event, but you can be sure it wasn’t the first time it happened. A report stated that inmates were first asked to strip naked, which is nothing out of the ordinary in prisons. But, this time the guys had to get naked in front of female officers. They were then tied to a dog leash and paraded around as they walked on all fours. This is what you call punishment by way of total humiliation. When the dog walking was finished, the men were thrown into filthy cells. They were still naked and it was freezing.

As for what they’d done wrong, the report stated that the 11 inmates that had been punished this way were just dragged from their normal cells and not even told what they’d done. It also said that while the female officers walked them naked, male officers stood around laughing at them. The prisoner that first made the complaint said when he was thrown into the isolation cell there was blood and human feces on the walls and floor. He had to stay there for hours, too. An official later said, “The allegations are so shocking that they are almost unbelievable.” Maybe not that unbelievable seeing as very similar things and worse happened at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Talking about Abu Ghraib, things went down there that defy belief.

Listen to this slice  of real-life American horror:

7. Treated Worse than a Dog

Suspected terrorists at this prison in Iraq were just that: suspects. Many of them were innocent and have since described how US military personnel abused them in the worst possible ways. Prisoners were paraded around naked on leashes and told to bark like dogs. Some were told to stand with human feces smeared all over their face, neck, chest, and arms. One man had a flashlight and a broomstick inserted into his anus, and while he screamed, guards took photos and laughed. He was only a teenager. They were urinated on, had to make human pyramids while naked, hit with batons, tied to electric cables, tied to ropes and dragged naked over the floor, and some were covered in phosphoric acid.

Sometimes they were ridden like donkeys when they were naked and there are reports of guards using venomous snakes to bite inmates. Two of them died as a result. A US soldier filmed the dead snake, a sand viper. She said over the video, "Who cares? That's two less for me to worry about.”  She also explained how she got in trouble the other day for stoning prisoners. 36 inmates died due to natural causes and homicide. One survivor later told the media, “Even now I still think about it. I have nightmares where I’m falling into a hole, where I have a bag over my head. It never really left me.” He was released from the prison and its various tortures after 48 days. It turned out that he was telling the truth and was just a journalist, not a terrorist.

As you’ll now see, prisoners die in regular prisons, too. This next story is devastating.

6. A Fatal Search

In the UK This happened in 1995 at a prison in England. Officers went to a 35-year-old man’s cell to perform a search. They took him to another cell while his cell was being searched and told him to strip. That he did, but when officers told him to squat so he could have his anus and genital area searched, the man didn’t comply. He was dragged headfirst out of the cell along to the dining area, all the while complaining that he couldn’t breathe. He was actually being restrained in what a report later said was not an “approved lock.” He died there and then, with blood coming out of his ears and throat. No officers were ever charged with the killing. That is a distressing story, but something that not long ago happened in a Russian prison takes officer abuse to a new level.

5. Torture in Russia

In 2015, three officers at Russia’s Chelyabinsk’s Colony No.2. wanted to punish an inmate named Sultan Israilov. Except they did worse than that. They took him to a punishment cell and proceeded to savagely beat the man. They beat him so bad he almost died, so they decided to hang him from a cell window and let him die slowly. They then faked a suicide note. It turned out that the victim had just been trying to help another inmate who was being beaten by officers. A political activist named Ildar Dadin has since written about abuses that happen at these penal colonies. He wrote in a letter that when he was taken to prison, guards planted two razor blades on him. He said they did this so they could punish him with solitary confinement right from the get-go.

He wrote: “All of my things were taken away, including soap, my toothbrush, toothpaste, and even toilet paper. In protest of these illegal activities, I went on a hunger strike.” He said in September 2016 for no reason at all, three officers went into his cell and just started beating on him. He was beaten like this for four days by ten to twelve officers. After they finished kicking him and punching him the third time, they shoved his head into the toilet bowl. It didn’t end there. On the fourth day, they handcuffed him with his hands tied behind his back and then suspended him by his restrained arms.

He said this caused severe pain. The officers then said, eat something or another man will come into your cell and sexually assault you. He was then taken to the warden’s office where he was told this: “You have been beaten very little. If I give the order, you will be beaten much worse. If you try to complain, they will kill you and bury you under the fence.” This was not an empty threat; cases of men being tortured to death and suicides being faked have gone to court in Russia.

Now let’s return to the USA and look at how animals have recently been used to draw a prisoner’s blood.

4. Release the Hounds

Curtis Garrett, an inmate at Virginia’s Sussex I State Prison, had been in a bit of a scuffle on Christmas Day of 2018. He was just told to go back to his cell and he would later be questioned about the event. Except when officers arrived at his cell they came with a couple of very vicious-looking attack dogs. Garrett turned around thinking he’d be handcuffed, not really knowing why officers had brought the dogs. He wasn’t handcuffed. He was terrified and shocked when the officers let go of the dogs and ordered them to attack.

The dogs started biting into his arms and legs, while all the time the officers punched and kicked him. A lawsuit later read that Garrett suffered “permanent physical injuries and a mental breakdown requiring psychiatric hospitalization.” A lawyer working with Rights Behind Bars wrote in a letter: “Guards have often used attack canines to terrorize incarcerated people, mauling them and leaving them mentally and physically broken. This widespread practice is not only barbaric — an abject act of dehumanization — but illegal, and cannot be tolerated in a just society.”

Now you’re going to hear about such terrible brutality it caused a massive riot.

3. Why Prisoners Riot

In 2015, a riot broke out in a private  prison in Arizona. A lot of prison property was broken and over two days five officers were injured. To stop the riot a SWAT-style team of men was brought in and around 1,000 prisoners were transferred to other facilities. The strange thing is, the prisoners didn’t hurt each other and only focused on damaging the prison itself. Why? Because this was the prison from hell. A report that came after said that the prisoners were rioting against the terrible conditions they had to endure and the severe punishments that officers metered out. In the report, it stated that some inmates after they had been restrained were still sprayed with tear gas and shot with rubber bullets.

This was when they were already in handcuffs and posed absolutely no danger to the officers or anyone else. This is what one inmate wrote about the prison’s conditions: “The guy next to me didn’t speak any English and when they came to his cell and told him to get up off the ground and he didn’t respond they kicked him in the head and shot him twice and screamed at him again and again to get up. I yelled that he doesn’t speak any English and they kicked him again and shot him 4 more times.” Officers then allegedly slammed his head against a wall so hard that it required staples to fix. The man now has a four-inch scar. All that for not touching up on your English.

Now for a story that involves a superhero from the dark side. You wouldn’t believe this kind of thing existed in the US.

2. Captain America

Ok, so if you try and escape from prison you are always going to be punished in some way. But there is formal punishment and there is informal punishment. Officers at Clinton Correctional Facility in New York chose the latter in 2015. Some prisoners tried to escape from this facility, but they failed. Once they were back in their cells, their punishment was just beginning. Officers appeared at their doors, but they would not reveal what their names were and would not show any ID. They then beat on the prisoners.

According to a report by the New York Times, they were being beaten as retribution for their failed escape. This was not official work. One prisoner was told by a mysterious officer that he was going to be waterboarded. Another inmate had a plastic bag tied around his head and pulled so tight that he passed out. Others involved in the escape attempt were taken to special places where there were no cameras and assaulted by a bunch of officers. But who were the officers doing this?

Prisoners didn’t know, but they let it be known that one of them had an unmissable American flag tattooed on his arm. As a nickname, they called him Captain America. An investigation revealed that this man was a gang intelligence expert and had been sued three times in the past for alleged assault and harassment of prisoners. In one of those lawsuits, it is said that Captain America got hold of a naked prisoner and “utilized his hand to aggressively rub plaintiff’s rectum like a credit card swipe and then attempted to jam his fingertips into plaintiff’s rectum.” As research has shown, sometimes sadists and psychos are drawn to positions of power.

With that in mind, we have gotten to the last one,  and as usual, it’s the most shocking on the list.

1. Punishment, Thai Style

Thai prisons have long been notorious for how brutal they are, mostly because foreigners have written books about their lengthy stays in them. There are plenty of reports, too, to back up what those people have written. One such report by the International Federation for Human Rights said that in May 2012 at Bang Kwang Prison, aka, The Bangkok Hilton, there was a routine search of an entire unit. Each cell had around twenty prisoners in it. This was rather different from a search you might see in a US prison. While the officers looked for contraband, blue-uniformed men said to be a kind of prison police just walked about beating the men savagely with bats. The report said the attacks appeared to be totally random.

We are not talking about a couple of hits, but a full-on beating. One Thai inmate died as a result and many more were seriously injured, some of them likely disabled for life. According to those books written by westerners, this is common. The beatings lasted for 90 minutes, all the time a guard stood at each cell door shouting “doctor” when an inmate suffered terrible injuries. The report said, “These officers used extreme violence, brutality, and threatening behavior. They repeatedly hit, punched, and kicked passive inmates. Hundreds of inmates required hospital treatment after the cowardly assaults.”

It also said that the next day the prison governor announced to the entire prison that what happened will stay inside the prison... or else. This is a dark story, but at least it was stated that some warders urged inmates to tell their relatives on visits and get the word out. Still, in the past, if an inmate was caught squealing to relatives, he might not just get a severe beating but could have to stand all day in a vat up to his neck in baking human sewage.