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Louis Theroux goes to the Miami mega-jail
2011-05-20 10:28:32
20 May 2011 Last updated at 00:40 Share this page Delicious Digg Facebook reddit StumbleUpon Twitter Email Print Louis Theroux goes to the Miami mega-jail A sketch of a typical cell in the Miami jail Continue reading the main story In today's Magazine Does the Queen do fashion? 10 of your Vidal Sassoon cuts How hard do you work? The cult of lawn
Imagine a jail where dangerous inmates awaiting trial live 24 to a room and fight each other under a violent gladiatorial code. This is life inside Miami's mega-jail, writes Louis Theroux.
For a bespectacled, peace-loving Englishman, there can be few places less congenial than a berth on the sixth floor of Miami main jail.
The place has to be seen to be believed. Up to 24 inmates are crowded into a single cell, living behind metal bars on steel bunks, sharing a single shower and two toilets.
Little of the bright Miami sun filters through the grilles on the windows. Visits to the yard happen twice a week for an hour. The rest of the time, inmates are holed up round the clock, eating, sleeping, and going slightly crazy.
But what is most shocking is the behaviour of the inmates themselves. For reasons that remain to some extent opaque - perhaps because of the bleak conditions they live in or because of insufficient supervision by officers, maybe because they lack other outlets for their energies, or because of their involvement with gangs on the outside, or maybe from a warped jailhouse tradition - the incarcerated here have created a brutal gladiatorial code of fighting.
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