Report from the cages

[Savage]

Sing-Sing

AMERICAN MORNING Source

Chicago Prison Break; Torino 2006

Aired February 16, 2006 - 08:30 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR:
- What in the world is going on at the Cook County Jail? Chicago's big jail is a mess right now, and a series of arrests, suspensions of guards, escapes, guns inside. The question is, is there a political motivation to it all? Is it greed? We're sorting that story out, and while we do it, we've been very curious about what goes on behind closed bars and what it's like for the guards who are charged with making sure the prisoners, or the people -- inmates, the people inside jails are kept where they're supposed to be.
Ted Conover spent a year and wrote "Newjack: Guarding SingSing." He kind of went in surreptitiously with the intent of learning what it was all about, and you got an eyeful, and earful of the whole thing.

Was it what you expected first of all?

TED CONOVER, "NEWJACK: GUARDING SING SING":
- No, as a guard I didn't have the authority that I expected I would, and I was outnumbered during large periods of the day. When I'd be supervising a floor of inmates, there'd be up to 60 or 70 of them and just me sometimes, so this wasn't what I'd imagined maybe from the movies. O'BRIEN: That is the dirty little secret about our prison system here in the United States, is that at any given moment, if the prisoners decided to act en masse, they could take over a jail.

CONOVER:
- That's the thing. The guards are locked in there, too. And there were days where I myself felt a little bit like a prisoner. I'd even think how could I get out of here if I really had to, before before I got to work I'd pass through 15 locked gates, so you share this very particular environment with the prisoners.

Read the reast of the article here


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The Norwegian Correctional Services Link


Increasing prison population Link to source


Statistics on the Norwegian prison population


In 2005, the average prison population in Norway exceeded 3 100 in total. This is an increase of 3 per cent from the previous year - and 13 per cent since 2001. Read the full article here








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[Savage]

From the USAmerican prison population;