Poor thing

Maybe he'd like to be in an American prison on death row, or some prison in a third-world country. He was given the maximum number of years in prison, 21, when sentenced in Norway, which is very forward-thinking in many respects but was not really prepared for the crimes committed in this case, in my opinion. Now he's complaining about cold coffee and not enough butter for his bread in a 26-page whinge against the system. This is a man who quite deliberately shot and killed 77 people, many of them teenagers. Oh, just cry me a river.

Norwegian killer Breivik complains of his 'inhumane' conditions

Excellent article about how ageing and dementia in prisons

The Vanishing Mind: Life, With Dementia

Dementia in prison is an underreported but fast-growing phenomenon, one that many prisons are desperately unprepared to handle. It is an unforeseen consequence of get-tough-on-crime policies — long sentences that have created a large population of aging prisoners. About 10 percent of the 1.6 million inmates in America’s prisons are serving life sentences; another 11 percent are serving over 20 years.

And more older people are being sent to prison. In 2010, 9,560 people 55 and older were sentenced, more than twice as many as in 1995. In that same period, inmates 55 and older almost quadrupled, to nearly 125,000, a Human Rights Watch report found.

While no one has counted cognitively impaired inmates, experts say that prisoners appear more prone to dementia than the general population because they often have more risk factors: limited education, hypertension, diabetes, smoking, depression, substance abuse, even head injuries from fights and other violence.

Many states consider over-50 prisoners elderly, saying they age up to 15 years faster.

I think in this case, this is a good thing

Murderer pardoned for saving hundreds in deadly Honduras prison fire

Marco Antonio Bonilla had just a few months left of his sentence to serve when the deadly fire broke out in a Honduras prison. A prison nurse who had more freedom to move through the prison than most, he got some of the keys to cells and saved perhaps hundreds of lives, and in one case used a bench to bash open a lock.

At least 360 of the 852 prisoners died in the fire. In once cell block of 105 prisoners, only four survived.

For his actions, the president of Honduras said he would give Antonio Bonilla a pardon for his conviction. While I certainly don't condone murder, this man served his debt to society and at great risk to himself saved many men who might otherwise have died horribly.

Horrific

Blaze at Prison Kills Hundreds in Honduras

The bodies of the inmates, shirtless and blackened by soot, lay on the ground in neat rows, belying the chaos from which they emerged.

Outside the fence, hundreds of relatives rushed the gates of the burned-out prison, anguished and anxious for any word, clashing with soldiers and the police when they could not get in. As a prison officer stood on a balcony, reading out a roll call of the dead and survivors from a handwritten list, faces in the crowd turned away in tears.

It was one of the worst prison fires in recent years in Latin America, with a death toll surpassing 300, most of the victims choking to death in their cells awaiting a rescue that never came. Guards with the keys were nowhere to be found, rescuers said. Some inmates bashed their way through the roof to escape, and kept running. They are now fugitives.

Granted, yes, these were criminals of all sorts. But to die trapped while smoke and fire spread throughout the area is an awful thing, a horrible death sentence. Over 300 are presumed dead of the 900 or so prisoners, with the death count likely to rise. Many of the bodies are burned beyond recognition.

Three men lost decades of their lives--and one died in prison an innocent man

Miss. judge frees 2 men wrongly jailed 30 years

A judge on Thursday freed two men who spent three decades in prison before DNA evidence showed they didn't rape a woman and cut her throat in a grisly 1979 attack.

A crowded courtroom erupted in applause after Forrest County Circuit Judge Robert Helfrich's ruled to set aside the men's guilty pleas, ending what some described as a 30-year ordeal for the imprisoned men.

One of the men had been released for medical reasons last month. He has lung cancer and a brain tumor. A third man jailed for the crime died in prison in 2002.

The only witness to the murder, the victim's then 4-year-old son, has always maintained that there was one attacker. DNA evidence not only absolved the man, it matched someone who is already imprisoned for a rape in 1981.

Discovering history

Undisturbed artifacts will detail lives of Civil War prisoners

Nearly 150 years after it was left behind at a Civil War prison camp, the 3-inch clay pipestem still shows a Union soldier's teeth marks.

The pipe, whose stem features the name of its manufacturer, proves the resourcefulness of a prisoner who really wanted his tobacco. He fashioned the bowl from lead, possibly by melting rifle bullets.

No one knows what became of the unknown soldier at Camp Lawton, which during its short existence in south Georgia was the Confederacy's largest prison camp.

"His name his been lost to history but his story has not," said Kevin Chapman, who led a group of college students that found the exact location of the camp's slave-built stockade and, in the soil beneath tall pine trees, nearly 200 artifacts.

Those are the first of what is expected to be a treasure of artifacts that will bear witness to the lives of prisoners and the horrors they endured.

The site is remote and is on federal land, jutting into a state park as well, so it is largely undisturbed. It provides a wonderful opportunity to see into the lives of the people involved.

That's one scary individual on the loose

Shake-up eyed after inmate in wheelchair escapes on foot

The prisoner had supposedly suffered paralysis from a stroke and was being transferred to another facility so he could be treated. Guards failed to pat him down before shackling him, and he apparently pulled a gun and fled on foot after taking one guard's uniform and both guards' guns, no small feat for a man supposedly shackled.

His record?

Comeaux's criminal record dates back more than three decades. In 1979, he received three 10-year sentences for rape of a child, aggravated rape of a child and burglary of a building with the intent to commit theft, all in Harris County.

He was released on mandatory supervision in 1983, but he was returned to prison in 1984 after being convicted of indecency with a child and sentenced to 20 years.

In June 1991, he was released on mandatory supervision but returned as a violator four months later. Paroled in December 1993, he was returned as a parole violator a year later. In February 1996, he was again paroled but was returned to prison in June 1998 with a life sentence for aggravated sexual assault.

Though he had been in prison ever since, his criminal record didn't end. In July 1999, he used his wheelchair to pin his wife against a wall during a contact visit and stabbed her 17 times with a homemade knife, Moriarty said. He also stabbed another prison visitor who tried to intervene; both victims survived.

So he's a sexual predator of children who's got the guards' guns and is on the loose, plus he's sneaky enough to hoodwink the prison system in pretending to be paralysed and in obtaining a gun whilst in prison. I so hope they catch him soon. Being Texas, I presume they will. They tend to take crime very seriously there.

Troubling

Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison

My own commonwealth tops the list for growth of prison population.

The largest percentage increase — 12 percent — was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state's crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state's inmate population has increased by 600 percent.

The rate of increase in the money on prisoners is six times that spent on higher education. In fact, four states--Vermont is the top one--spend more on prisons than colleges. On average, states spend more to house one prisoner than I make in a year. Heavier incarceration failed to affect recidivism or crime rates. Many states are looking to decrease costs by concentrating on imprisoning violent offenders and finding other ways of dealing with non-violent or relatively minor offences.

One in 30 men ages 20-34 are in prison, but for Black men of the same age it's 1 in 9.

The United States is number one in terms of numbers imprisoned, even outstripping China, which has a much greater population. It also is sixth in the world in capital punishment.

Okay, this is stupid and wrong

Religious books taken off prison library shelves:
Federal directive is intended to prevent inmates from reading radical materials.

Thanks to YKWIA for the link