I noticed 2 men sitting on the floor playing chess a few metres from me, then that they were behind bars, then that there were 6–10 hammocks slung from the upper bars of this open cage, all full, plus more men asleep on the concrete floor - maybe 10–15 in all. The prison at Taoudenni in northern Mali (in the middle of the Sahara Desert) was notorious for its abysmal conditions. The water in that area had such a high salt content, that prisoners often died from kidney failure. This may be the origin of the term “sent to the salt mines,” as the local Tuaregs will “mine” salt by digging shallow depressions in the ground and filling them with water, leaving large sheets of salt after it evaporates.
It took a few seconds to take all this in. The cell was in the open area in front of the station, where various other people were presumably queueing for various bits of bureaucracy. The cell was around 3–4m long, 2-3m wide and it was 37°C in the open air.
I must confess that it did make an impression on me, as this was just a local police station holding cell.
This is a one-way road for would-be prisoners of Polar Owl in the land of permafrost and endless winter in the north of Russia.
All of the 400 inmates are serving a life sentence for committing especially brutal crimes or multiple murders. Only after twenty five years spent here inmates are allowed to appeal their sentence, but nobody has done it so far.
These are coordinates of Polar Owl: 66.805000, 65.790278 located near Kharp settlement (Northern Lights in German) founded in 1961.
That mound always happens when all the soil from grave digging is returned to the grave. It is observed world over and it happens because;
- The soil is loose/unsettled in fresh graves and so it occupies a larger volume than it originally did. It is for this reason that civil engineers have machines to compact soil in recently filled trenches. Without such, the ground below a newly filled trench would gradually have spaces of loose earth over time.
- The coffin occupies space in the grave and that means there is displaced soil which manifests in a mound.
Inside the walls of the infamous prison. The core of Kharp was a forced-labor camp for inmates who worked on the construction of the railway. Subsequently, the camp was transformed into a ‘special regime’ colony for dangerous criminals.
Thus prisoners built the polar railway and the prison for themselves and the village for those who guarded them!
The prison received the status of a penal colony for life-sentenced prisoners in 2004.
This is a typical cell in the Polar Owl. Each houses four inmates. There are “stars” serving a life sentence in Polar Owl.
Nurpasha Kulaev (pictured above), the only surviving terrorist from the gang that seized the school in Beslan in 2004. During the “successful” assault that resulted in 333 dead children and adults, he tried to escape by mixing with the crowd but was seized.
Alexander “Bitsevsky Psycho” Pichushkin (pictured above), who murdered 49 people in the Bitsevsky Park in Moscow. He ended up in the colony in 2007. When asked what would he do if he were released tomorrow, he answered, “First thing, I’d kill two people and rape a woman.”
By law, those sentenced to life imprisonment have the right to phone calls and long visits only after 10 years. Many prisoners have no one to visit them, because by then their family and friends have completely rejected them.
The end of the inmates of Polar Owl is sad. Their deaths are reported to their relatives, but they rarely transport the body, and they don’t come to say goodbye. Convicts are usually buried in the settlement graveyard, where they have a separate plot.
Picture Source Wikipedia
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