Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons

Hi everyone and welcome to my insurance post.  Due to unforeseen apathy on my part, I’ve not managed to finish watching anything new in time to uncover a sexy boxset this week.  I’ve had lots of recommendations, and am halfway through a few things myself, but since riding high as an early adopter of Industry (you’re welcome) I’m having to raid my annals (not a euphemism) for something I consumed a while back and didn’t deem worthy of a post at the time.  Christmas might be on the way (or cancelled) but this week we’re swerving the single-use festivities in favour of going Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons.  Will loyal fans of the blog dismiss this as a show too obscure to warrant reading about, or will it turn out, as I suspect from this Netflix documentary’s appearance in the UK top ten when new episodes appeared earlier this year, that I’ll have a post worthy of rivalling some of my most-read musings (the top three in order: Love Island, Naked Attraction, Bo’ Selecta!)?

By now we’re familiar with my theory that prisons offer great narrative tension to any drama.  It elevated all the nonsensically earnest dialogue of Prison Break.  It created a sample population of wronged women among whom the lady fluff of Orange Is The New Black deftly metamorphosed into acerbic social commentary.  It even gave some much-needed edge to Archie Andrews in Riverdale.  But what of real-life prisons, I hear you ask.  And what about prisons abroad, I also hear you follow up with in order to help me segue effortlessly into our focus this week.  Well, Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons tells you all about them.  We’ve all seen headlines bemoaning the UK’s soft-touch criminal justice system, and of course Brexit will now allow those clamouring hardliners to enjoy sufficient sovereignty to purge individuals from society in whatever manner they see fit.  We have also heard tell of the horrors of third-world jails where many a Westerner has come a cropper for accidentally stumbling over a border after losing little packets of drugs up their bottoms.  How long must we wait to look inside them (the prisons, not the bottoms)?!

Finally, then, in 2016, Channel 5 were brave enough to send a film crew to four such hellholes, pushing ahead of them as a shield plucky journalist Paul Connolly who, under the documentary’s premise, would actually become an inmate at these institutions in order to get behind the bars and under the skin of what’s really going on.  From continent to continent, the findings are disturbingly similar: overcrowding, drug addiction, corruption, unsanitary conditions and violence.  A natural response is to swear off a life a crime, but luckily I hadn’t been planning one.  Two years later, Netflix launched a second series, bringing in the energy of Raphael Rowe for hosting duties, whizzing him round the world on a punishing sequence of gap years across a total of three further seasons.  Maybe Connolly didn’t fancy any more toughness, but it didn’t matter as Rowe outqualified him, having spent a decade imprisoned for crimes he didn’t commit.  Don’t worry if you don’t remember this bit as he’ll remind you at the start of every episode.

Bringing in real prison toughness, Rowe is all too eager to get among things.  Like his predecessor, he commits to the process of becoming a prisoner, undergoing humiliating strip searches on arrival.  As series progress, you start to twig that the guards aren’t that bothered about this and it’s in fact the production team insisting on a naked cavity search.  Rowe can’t pop his trousers off quick enough.  Once inside, we can have a proper look around.  It’s an extreme version of poverty porn.  In Paraguay, men rifle through rubbish or inject drugs in the open air.  In Belize, they trade in performative Christian faith against privileges.  In Papua New Guinea, the constant threat of violence is palpable.  But it’s not all doom and gloom, as we’re also granted access to some of the world’s least tough prisons and although this makes a lie of the show’s titles, it’s just as interesting to see how Germany focuses on therapy or Norway on preparation for normal life in order to prevent recidivism.

Whether Rowe really gets locked in overnight doesn’t really matter.  He absorbs enough exposure to draw conclusions that recognise the complexity of punishing criminal behaviour.  As a classic Brit abroad, his refusal ever to learn the native language (even a few more words of Spanish would help him in his South and Central American jaunts that dominate his schedule) poses no threat to his discussions with helpful inmates.  His questions are asked with childlike wonder, as if a slightly babyish voice and naïve frown can transcend Quechua.  Hats, and trousers, off to him though: he’s rarely fazed.  His greatest moment of worry seems to come in Lesotho where inmates suggest they might make a prison wife of him.  While it’s unlikely any wicked ways would have been had while the camera crew and production team watch on, Rowe has never moved as fast as he does when evading their friendly clutches.

Having had our nosey around, we feel safe in the knowledge we’ll never have to be confined to any of these places in real life.  It’s hard to feel optimistic about the UK as it self-destructs out of the EU, but at least there’s probably central heating in most of our prisons.  For now.  This show’s strength, therefore, comes from its ability to make our own lives seem less appalling, if only by comparison.  As we trip in and out of lockdowns, spending more time indoors than we ever thought possible, we may count our blessings that this isn’t in fact a day made up of 23 hours of isolation, but a great time to catch up on all sorts of Netflix documentaries.