World’s Toughest Maximum Security Prisons – Big Bigger Biggest (Part 1)

abroad just over 200 kilometers from Washington DC, behind a ring of lethal barbed wire lies one of the most secure

prisons

in the

world

, hundreds of cameras, bulletproof cells that lock without keys and an arsenal of weapons to contain the prisoners. Step Up, this is North Branch Correctional Institution a masterpiece of prison design North Branch owes its existence to a series of iconic

prisons

at the heart of each of which is a breakthrough in prison design, but made each prison It would be more difficult to escape than the previous one, traveling one by one on the scale we know.

We will reveal the incredible stories behind these structures and the inventions that have allowed prisons to evolve. Four ingenious advances that have made prisons safer, stronger and

bigger

. North Branch Correctional Institution is a

maximum

security

prison and has to hold more than 900 of its 1400. The inmates are convicted murderers to keep them locked up and safe from each other. North Branch is shuffling technology, foot-mounted body scanning machines, unbreakable cells and powerful non-lethal weapons, all designed to give officers the upper hand in the daily cat-and-mouse game with prisoners, if you worked in prisons as long as Yo, you never say never, there are simple little things you don't think about, you let your guard down, you're going to get hit, how can North Branch keep so many violent criminals under control?

With lock and key, we need to travel back in time to 12th century England. The king wants to build a fortress that will not only keep his enemies away from him, but also keep his prisoners safely locked inside. When William the Conqueror invades England in 1066, he builds A Mighty One. Fortress in the center of London, the great tower, is the largest building in the capital, designed to keep the king safe and show the English who is boss, the tower was really built to owe all Londoners and impress them Williams' power, but it was also used as a prison like many castles.

Over the ages, the tower has housed some of the most famous prisoners in history and Sir Walter in Berlin and princes in the tower, but as formidable as the tower appears today, it was not always that way in the 20th century. XI. There is only the great tower in the center to contain the prisoners surrounded by the enormous walls of the Roman city and the ditch behind a wooden wall called the palisade. In 1100 the great tower receives its first prisoner, Ranol Flambard, arrested for extortion. , but he doesn't plan to do so. he stayed for a long time Flambard was the bishop bishop and we know that he was brought here in September 1100, but by February of the following year he planned the Escape from him.

Flambard's plan is to outwit his guards. The conditions of the prisoners, as far as we know, Flambod will be. Pretty cool because

part

of his escape plan is the fact that he can host an entire banquet for his guards. It seems that he drank them at the table when they were drunk and snoring, as the chronicle says, then he went to the wine barrel that had a rope hidden inside, took out the rope and tied it to the window bar and climbed down the outside the Tower and escaped as soon as Flambard overcomes the walls of the great tower, only a low wooden wall stands between him and a life of freedom.

The leak exposes a major weakness in the tower's

security

. There was only one layer of defense at that point. In reality, there was only one kind of ditch that would have been filled with water and a wooden palisade, so he didn't have to go through many layers. exit the tower remains like this for many years until King Richard the Lionheart decides to reinforce its defenses, places the wooden palisade with a powerful stone wall around it, digs a moat and floods it with water from the River Thames, but the Thames has tides . the pit continues to drain it takes another hundred years and the help of a dutchman to solve this plumbing problem once and for all the answer comes from an unexpected place channels we know what list a man named Walter brought from Flanders we know right now that he uses technology to keep it bought in the moat, we know it has gates at each end of the moat, so it's a bit like a lock on a canal, it's designed to hold water back.

I mean, the Thames has an incredible tide, here the king builds. another wall and widened the moat, then his Dutch engineer placed floodgates in the outer wall. When the tide comes in, the porters open the floodgates to fill the moat and then close them again to trap the water inside and this is the moat that still survives. Today it is about 50 meters wide and at that time it would have been about 15 meters deep, so a really serious defense the enormous moat seals the tower's reputation as an impregnable fortress and an inescapable prison, but the powerful walls have maintained thousands of prisoners safely locked up over the centuries until 1941.

Tower's concept of multiple layers of defense still influences prison design today. North Branch takes this idea to the extreme. The prisoners here have all the time in the

world

to contemplate life on the other side of the fence, but there are so many obstacles to overcome that the possibility of escape is remote. First of all, correctional officers or cos are not as easily fooled as the drunken guards at Flambard Tower, sir. Move forward, take a step towards the door, open it Charlie 41 4. Be honest, we don't trust anyone. to make sure inmates don't dress up as visitors or take staff uniforms and try to exit through the front door facing the wall.

I will search you very quickly before returning you to Southbridge many times it is staff negligence and that is why they keep our staff on alert, you don't take anything for granted, okay, get in the cell Mr. Dino Pantes, he is serving a life sentence for having killed to his wife, I don't see where anyone can plan an escape in this institution, this institution is very safe I work in the ground unit when you are outside on a hot summer day and you look up you see a shotgun coming out of this house, they take seriously security around here any prisoner thinking of escaping faces a barrage of physical obstacles the Tower of London had four layers of Defense The North Branch has seven its cells are made of extremely strong concrete they are cemented into a cell block controlled by CCTV all cell blocks are identical to confuse prisoners the large open space around the blocks is monitored by guards In the guard towers, the first perimeter fence is four meters high and has microwave sensors that activate automatically the reflectors.

Beyond this is the final escape barrier, the outer fence which is covered with a special type of wire that has sharp edges. The engineer's gems Stansfield is about to tackle. a small section of this simple but effective barrier, this is my barbed wire moat, it is now made of coils of high tensile steel wire and on those coils there are fixed spikes drilled and sharpened, it is exceptionally difficult to get through now I am going to try See how far I can go to give us an idea of ​​how he does what he does. You immediately feel like the tension in the cables is preventing you from getting anywhere and what, oh, now I'm properly stuck on the way this stuff grips. in my clothing it is such that I cannot move forward or backward it is because the shape of these barbs now a well equipped prisoner can have some type of wire cutter the thing is with barbed wire it has a reputation due to the tension in that high steel resistance that pings, where you don't expect it if you try to cut it a little nervous, okay, that's got my arm now, it's actually quite a struggle to get it out.

I'm going to give up. I don't want to go any further if I persist, which I can do, it will only cause more physical damage. I have some animal skin here. If I pushed it here, it would get caught in these spikes like that. that the more you fight, the more it bites you and it reaches a point where to get out you have to make a hole in yourself. The North Branch Correctional Institution is surrounded by row after row of barbed wire, the warden here knows the courage of him to escape attempt at another prison.

They made me a wire pulley because he tried to escape. You get trapped pretty bad. We had to wear a leather welder suit to get in and keep us from getting cuts. It is almost impossible to break the seven barriers. Probably every North Branch prisoner has thought about escaping, but the last thing I think about is that the easiest way to get out of prison is through the court system. Back in the 1300s, the Tower of London shows that many layers of fortification make a prison safer, but as prisons grow larger it becomes more difficult to monitor inmates to build the largest prison in the United States.

The architects must separate the prisoners but keep an eye on each of them oh in 1829 social reformers in Philadelphia build the largest prison of their time Eastern State Penitentiary on which a revolutionary idea is based, they believe the secret to making penitent to a person was to lock them away from society and give them time to look into their hearts, so this new philosophy led to a new word of penitentiary, a place to make someone look into their heart and feel true repentance. At that time, Eastern State is a technological marvel, each cell has running water, central heating and toilets, luxuries that not even the president can enjoy in the White House, so here we are in a typical Eastern State cell, measuring approximately two and a half meters wide.

It is 12 feet deep, it has a 12 foot barrel vaulted ceiling with a skylight that we are to bring in the light of God almost like a monastery with a recluse who lives in silence and contemplation, they go to eat in the cell, they sleep at work in the cell in the cell Worship in the cell this was their whole world the concept of isolating prisoners in this way is innovative before most Eastern State prisons crowd all inmates, men, women and children together Under one roof, these prisons are overcrowded, dirty and are a breeding ground for Crime in the 18th century.

Architects are beginning to think of ways to solve this problem. English philosopher Jeremy Bentham comes up with a clever idea: he knows that keeping many prisoners in one space is a recipe for problems locked in separate cells. Prisoners are difficult to monitor. Bentham arranges the cells in a circle and stacks them in layers, puts a watchtower in the middle so a single guard can see every sound just to make this prison

bigger

, it has to grow unfeasibly or incredibly tall, The legacy of Bentham's idea lives on. At Eastern State, his design is so clever that only a few guards can monitor hundreds of prisoners with ease.

They remain the central hub of Bentham's design, but the cells are arranged in long arms radiating from the center. There is a guard in the middle. and one patrolling each of the hallways. Thanks to this radial design, a handful of guards can watch over hundreds of prisoners who can never be sure when they are being watched. This was the 1820s version of a video surveillance system as the central surveillance center was in the center of the building and surrounded by radiating spokes like a wheel so that a single officer could turn on his heel and see the seven corridors of this prison. .

There is nowhere to hide. The cells even have holes in the ceiling for the ever-watchful eye of God Eastern state becomes the most famous prison on the planet 300 prisons around the world copy its design that makes surveillance so easy when it closes after 142 years has held over 75,000 prisoners North Branch Correctional Institution takes the idea of ​​surveillance to the extreme. There are no cameras in the cells here, but the rest of the prison is closely monitored by CCTV. I feel that this institution is very safe. I come from another institution where when you shower you monitor this institution if there is no CO. looking at you there's a camera watching you when it comes to surveillance North Branch has you covered but the cameras don't see everything they always say if you take an inmate without clothes throw him out of a plane when he hits the ground. you have a gun, it's amazing how they hide it, you can take your hands off the wall, contraband.

Contraband is a huge problem even in a high-tech prison, so at North Branch the prisoners must face the boss, this is the boss, the chair, the body hole, the security scanners. the body for any type of metal, go to the front of the machine, get on and turn carefully, take a seat, you have any metal, it's okay, we have a watch, anything else, no sir, it's okay, try again, give turn around and take a seat again, make sure your back is. We have removed an enormous amount of contraband from these institutions. Every stash of drugs or cell phone we take out of these institutions represents an officer returning home at the end of a shift safe and sound due to theviolence. that is perpetrated in the name of this smuggling is intense this is the special squad that fights against one of the most lethal weapons in a prisoner's arsenal a mobile phone cell phones are extremely dangerous inside a prison cell phones allow them to circumnavigate the security system and organize narcotics drops, they can even organize hits on the witnesses against them and also the correctional staff can organize to try to hurt them also on the outside for you and me, a cell phone has no smell to a dog, It has a multiple compound odor that in the dog's brain we have trained them to associate that compound odor with their toy.

The net dog's natural instincts are to hunt and find things, so he actually thinks he's trying to find his toy, thanks boy, Motorola cell phone, good job, pretty good, I got it. While a correctional officer would have to spend hours and hours looking for this contraband, the dog can locate it in a very small area very quickly, so in that sense it's worth more than 20 or 30 correctional officers, just one dog, okay, cell 44. Last year, the K-9 unit in North Branch discarded 269 phones. Well, we have an inmate who had two cell phones on the charger in the back.

We couldn't take them from him, but we can put him in a cell until he gives them to us. half is isolated and eventually he will get tired of being in that place and give up because we know we will make it one way or another in 1829. The Eastern State Penitentiary shows that strict surveillance is the key to building large prisons, but A Tailor As the prisoners become more and more resourceful, simply observing them is not enough. Engineers building Alcatraz, the world's most secure prison, have to make sure its cells are completely escape-proof. In the 1930s, the United States is hit by a wave of organized crime.

The FBI spends many years trying to catch and convict gangsters like Al Capone when they finally arrest him, they must make sure he stays locked up to contain this new generation of super gangsters. The US government plans to build a super prison. They find the perfect location on an island in the middle of San Francisco. The bay called Alcatraz on the island is a former military fort located in a deep pit dug into the rock. Workers demolish the old building and build three stories of steel-reinforced concrete cell blocks on top. One of the 600 cells has some contact with the exterior walls.

We are a prison within a prison, each cell is equipped with unbreakable steel doors that do not have keys but can be operated remotely. Alcatraz is the largest concrete structure in the world and supposedly the most secure prison on the planet. Bob Luke arrives at Alcatraz in 1954 looking Forward, 12 years on the rock, the ship made a wide turn and then I could see the island and first I saw the houses at the bottom and then I looked up and the prison was at the top of the island, so that was my first look. Alcatraz looked like a French castle to me, but I knew it was an old country house.

This would be my prison for several years. Of course, we all went through Alcatraz. I was going to be at the end of the line. Alcatraz is the last stop for America's most dangerous and violent criminals. This is my mugshot. It was taken the first day I got here in April 1954. It's just a young thug hitting you in positions, look how you hold Banks. I was a thief, car thief, 11 or 12 years in prison for all that, so I was, I was a different guy, I kept people like young Bob locked up. The engineers attached a type of extremely strong prison bar to the cell doors when they opened the prison. in 1934 this was all made with tool steel, you can't cut these bars even if you had a hacksaw blade, it's impossible, there is a heavy hardened tool steel inside this bar.

I used to come in at 12 o'clock at midnight and walk around counting these tears and I always felt pretty safe, you know the doors are not only unbreakable, they lock without keys, they give a whole new meaning to the term The Slammer, we have 13 doors that we can open from this box and the The officer was yelling to the entire line here, simply letting them know that the doors are going to close because that is where you hear the real sound of The Slammer and this is

part

of the Alcatraz punishments here in this open and closed door.

Every day, the first time you hear that door slam, it's like being buried, you know, you just know that this is going to be like this for a while. Alcatraz seems like the perfect prison, a concrete fortress brimming with technology, it doesn't even need a fence around it. Because it's surrounded by the icy currents of San Francisco Bay, when I used to work on the towers, I used to see logs maybe eight and nine feet long coming out with the tide. If it had an external motor, it would shut down. Sure I wanted to try to escape from anywhere, but I always thought it was impossible to try here, so I gave up even, you know, thinking about it despite all the technology on Alcatraz, three inmates disappear in 1962.

All that's left of They are three dolls made of soap, toilet paper and hair stolen from the barbershop and, of course, the large holes they have made with a spoon in the concrete walls of their cells. The cells are back to back with a quarter in the middle, nothing but pipes they call that. to the top and once they got there you can't see them, it must have taken a year or two of continuous planning. It is amazing how that was allowed to happen despite a massive search operation, there is no trace of the prisoners. I don't think anyone escaped Alcatraz.

Most people don't realize that the closest these inmates came to water was taking a shower. Now one could imagine oneself in a panic at two and three in the morning jumping into that bay. No way, my impression is that they went into the water, they may have gotten out about 100 meters and then goodbye, whether the man escaped or not, the fate of Alcatraz is sealed. An investigation reveals that the supposedly leak-proof concrete is to blame for the leak. Alcatraz uses sea water. to flush toilets, it drips from leaky pipes and settles on walls. Brick chips in concrete absorb water and swell like sponges that wedge open cracks in walls;

Eventually, the reinforcing steel bars expand as they rust and crack the concrete even more. After 30 years, the once super-strong walls are crumbling so much they're no match for a spoon. Repairing the leaking concrete would cost millions, so in 1963 Alcatraz closes its doors for the last time, but the lessons of the rock still live on in North Branch. uses concrete cells, but they are made from an extremely durable type of concrete. Each cell is built in a factory in Pennsylvania. The entire cell is cast as a single piece of concrete to ensure it is flawless. For North Branch we produce 508 double modules each. double weighs approximately 25 tons inside the cell walls there is a widely spaced steel wire cage the steel is placed in a grate it serves to reinforce the concrete but also serves as a safety barrier so that inmates cannot tunnel through through the strange concrete and then pour a secret concrete mix designed to make the cell super strong.

It seems like a simple job, but workers must be careful not to introduce any defects into the cell walls, so you have to keep the concrete coming. Even on both sides as the concrete hardens, workers take samples and mold them into cylinders, then test them to destruction. This concrete is probably twice as strong as what people have in their driveways. This machine presses the concrete until it cracks. Survives more than 3000 tons per square meter. You can see on the cylinder a little bit of failure right here, it didn't crush everything. This is still capable of withstanding at least that force again and even the parts that aren't made of concrete are.

The super strong frames and window frames are actually molded into the module and are virtually impossible to remove. The glass that goes inside the window frames is extremely thick and capable of withstanding impacts from hammers, gunshots, or anything the prisoner thinks to throw at it. In this case, the bolts we use to fix the accessories cannot be removed with normal tools. In some cases, the bolt head breaks off by design. In other cases, safety fasteners use a special head design that cannot be purchased. street people no one has escaped any of us today our cells are escape proof why do I feel like I have cursed myself?

The cells are shipped from the factory to the prison and assembled into a seamless cell block, thick steel doors close the single gap, all the pipes and cables pass through the concrete wall into a small void in the corner called the pipe. Chase, even if a prisoner could break through the concrete to the Chase pipe, he wouldn't be any closer to escaping, okay? This is the Chase pipe that leads to the toilet in the sink areas. It doesn't go anywhere. It's concreted in. top and concrete at the bottom if the sink was removed from the wall there is a spike through the concrete there and there there is nowhere to go if they got into the chase pipe they are in the chase pipe they can't go to Nowhere.

The cells at North Branch don't need CCTV inside because what we have here is totally tamper-proof. It is one of the cells that the inmates of the house use. These are usually cells with double bunks like the one you see here. Here we have a sink in the toilet combination. Also above you can see that we have a sprinkler system in case anyone tries. to set something on fire most of the things in here are not flammable things that are flammable won't burn anywhere except themselves because there are no other fuel sources for it we have a clear plastic television, not really They can hide nothing.

There, if they take it apart, we can see where they got the pieces from. Most of the electronics here are clear plastic, so you can't take out parts, use the metal as a weapon, or store drugs for weapons, none of the sword. everything there has a security rivet you can't just create some type of screwdriver or some type to get in there you would have to be really good at what you are doing to remove a security screw thanks foreigner