History Main / HellHolePrison

* Vorkuta in ''[[CallofDuty Call of Duty: Black Ops]]'', where a very bloody uprising leads to hundreds (if not thousands) of Prisoner and Guard deaths, and the lone escape of Cpt. Alex Mason.

** Back in the 19th century isolation was the standard means of imprisonment for all inmates outside work camps. Grand majority of the released prisoners were hopelessly demented.

** This example [[RecycledScript also happened]] on ''TheATeam''.

Plenty of [[{{Prison}} prisons]] simply content themselves with confining people, but some go the extra mile and actually try to break them. This sort of prison is an absolute hellhole - between the lack of food and proper clothing, the absence of light or sanitation, the sadistic guards, and the violently insane fellow prisoners, they hardly ''need'' the nasty looking torture equipment they probably have scattered around. Sometimes, they won't bother with things like individual cells - prisoners will just be lowered into a big pit and left to fight each other for whatever scraps are thrown down. Expect the inmates to be treated like animals, and expect most of them to ''act'' like animals as well. Indeed, being thrown to the prisoners might be used as a punishment just like being thrown to the lions, and jailers in such places occasionally suffer KarmicDeath that way too.

* The HonorHarrington series has the prison planet Hades, more commonly called "Hell." The climate is dreadful, the native life inedible (but the local carnivores haven't figured out that they can't eat people) and if the guards decide that one of the small prison camps spread around on its surface is getting too uppity, they just stop delivering food to it.

** They didn't actually enjoy their work and used methods which showed little of the [[PrincessBride six fingered man]] type "craftsmanship" but much of brutality. Nor did they want information. All they wanted was for him to shut up and stop being [[LaResistance embarrassing]] to the regime.

** London was infamous for Newgate until the end of the 19th century(though it was used to hold only the very worst prisoners for the last half of the 19th century until it was shut down at the end of the Victorian era). Numerous references to it used the phrase (or something very near to) "Hell on Earth" to describe it, Rioters on numerous occasions made it a point to burn the place down first off, and even official reports criticized it for harsh prisoner treatment and malnourishment.

* The [[http://www.prisonexp.org/ Stanford Prison Experiment]] appeared demonstrate that ''any'' prison has the potential to turn into this: guards, if not held accountable for their actions, become abusive; prisoners, lacking other means of fighting back, become passive-aggressive and prone to riots. The results of the study are still controversial among researchers, however; with claims that flaws in the construction of the project encouraged much worse results than would be achived in a real-world setting.

-->Harry, HarryPotterAndTheMethodsOfRationality

->What was that place? That wasn't a prison, that was HELL!"

->"They've got a jail here that makes Alcatraz look like Disneyland"

* Supermaxes. [[GoMadFromTheIsolation Just the solitary confinement can break prisoners]].

* ''{{Stargate SG-1}}'' had an episode where SG-1 found themselves in one.

* The Nazi death camps during World War II

* WalkerTexasRanger infiltrated one of these, where the prisoners were being used in some kind of Fight Club-esque tournament in which the other guards bet on who'd win, all run by the DirtyCop warden.

** And TheSentinel. And probably a lot of others. This trope's rather popular in ActionSeries.

* In {{Bioshock}} 2, we have [[spoiler: Persephone Penal Colony, a place built by the opportunistic businessman Augustus Sinclair to house those who speak out against the hypocritical city leader Andrew Ryan. Suicide, violence and suffering were common, and many prisoners endured having to serve as test subjects.]]
* Vorkuta in [[CallofDuty Call of Duty: Black Ops]], where a very bloody uprising leads to hundreds (if not thousands) of Prisoner and Guard deaths, and the lone escape of Cpt. Alex Mason.

* In JusticeLeague Mister Miracle spent his childhood in such a place called the X Pit which he somehow escaped.

** Only partly. It wasn't built to "break" people. It was built simply to get them out of the way. The reason it was so bad is because its commandant was an ObstructiveBureaucrat .

* Supermaxes.

** Only partly. It wasn't built to "break" people. It was built simply to get them out of the way. The reason it was so bad is because it's commandant was an ObstructiveBureaucrat .

* ''PrisonBreak''. Bizarrely, however, this prison has access to things like chem labs- which kind of makes a person wonder why riots aren't a heck of a lot worse than they already are.