Random Most Terrifying Prisons (27 items)

(#25) Coiba Island, Panama

An island off the coast of Panama, the Panamanian government established a penal colony there in 1919. Over the course of two military regimes, those of Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega, Coiba Island housed political prisoners critical of the ruling parties. In a deceptively beautiful paradise setting, reports of mistreatment, torture, disease, and murder abounded.
As a ritual for new residents, guards took them out into the jungle, blindfolded them, lined them up, and held a mock execution, pointing guns at them and counting down, "3, 2, 1, fire..." Coiba ceased operations in 2004, but many believe that the island is still haunted by the ghosts of former inmates.
(#15) Galápagos Islands
- Island Group
On the Galapagos Islands, once used as a penal colony by Ecuador, the emotional toll of the work assigned to prisoners far surpassed the physical. The island is notorious as the location of the 65-foot tall "Wall of Tears," a structure that guards forced soldiers to build for absolutely no reason. They spent years stacking rocks to construct a wall that went nowhere and did nothing other than keep them working.

Active for roughly 20 years in the mid-19th century and again from 1946-1959, it's no wonder that the island claimed the lives of so many prisoners. If the disease, starvation, and workload didn't get you, the overwhelming hopelessness probably did.
(#19) Carlisle Castle Dungeons, United Kingdom

Carlisle Castle once imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, but it isn't the English castle's most famous resident that makes it one of the scariest. It's the treatment afforded to its lower-born prisoners that earned the castle such an infamous reputation. Built in 1092, the castle's dungeons housed prisoners for hundreds of years in squalid conditions.

During the Jacobite Rebellion, Jacobite prisoners crowded into tiny cells in the dungeon. They were given so little sustenance they were forced to lick the stone walls of the cell in the hopes of drinking the tiniest bit of water that may have collected on the walls. The "licking stones" are still on view during tours of the castle.
(#4) Devil's Island, French Guiana

Potentially the most feared penal colony in history, Devil's Island saw 60,000 prisoners sail in its direction and only 2,000 make it out alive. An isolated island off the coast of French Army Guiana in the Atlantic ocean, Napoleon III and the French chose the island in 1852 because it was nearly impossible to escape. Guards worked prisoners nearly to death during the day, building unending roads to nowhere and clearing trees. At night, they were shackled and left in the dark to be bitten by vampire bats that waited in the rafters.
Some prisoners were kept in "bear pits" – holes dug into the ground and covered at the top by iron bars. The island's two most well-known residents were Alfred Dreyfus, a French Captain falsely convicted of treason, and Henri Charrière, an inmate who escaped the island and wrote a memoir about his time there. The book, Papillon, was adapted into a movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
(#11) Port Arthur
- Place
In the 19th century, what did you do when you had massive amounts of criminals that you didn’t want to deal with anymore? If you were England, and your original dumping ground (the United States) just closed for business, you shipped them off to Australia. More specifically, you shipped them to Port Arthur.

After traveling thousands of miles from home, prisoners lived in harsh conditions, spending their time cutting timber, an exhausting job that was very lucrative for the prison.
(#9) Tadmor Prison, Syria

Built in the 1930s in Syria by the French, Tadmor's notoriety began 40 years later, during the rule of Hafez al-Assad. During Assad's reign as President of Syria, Tadmor became a dumping ground for political dissidents, summarily subjected to torture and execution.

Here are some of the scariest atrocities reported at Tadmor:
- Soldiers killed between 500 and 1,000 prisoners in one day.
- Medical treatment was scarce, with guards telling inmates, "Only call us to collect bodies."
- Guards held a "reception party" for incoming inmates that involved hitting them up to 400 times.
- Guards forced two inmates at a time to hold a third by his arms and legs and throw him across the room. When a man refused, he was beaten so severely that he died soon after.
- An inmate described being ordered by guards to remove every pair of slippers, roughly 100, from the dormitory using only his mouth.
- Inmates couldn't lift their eyes from the ground and would distinguish nice guards from sadistic ones by the color of their boots.
Despite the prison's closure in 2001, Tadmor made an appearance in the news in 2015 when ISIS took control of the building and demolished it.