Prison Facts

Martha Stewart became a billionaire while in prison.

In 2013, a homeless man from Oregon robbed a bank for $1, then casually sat down and waited for police to arrest him so he could receive healthcare in prison.

There is a prison in Brazil that allows inmates to pedal stationary bicycles, providing electricity to a nearby city in exchange for reduced sentences.

Before escaping prison, Winston Churchill left a letter of apology on his bed. The letter began: "I have the honour to inform you that as I do not consider that your Government have any right to detain me as a military prisoner, I have decided to escape from your custody."

A surprise inspection of a men's prison in Acapulco, Mexico in 2011 uncovered 100 plasma TVs, 2 sacks of marijuana, 2 peacocks, 100 fighting cockerels, 19 prostitutes, and various other contraband including slot machines and a small arsenal of knives.

In 2013, the Netherlands scheduled 19 prisons to be closed due to a lack of criminals.

In Brazil, prison inmates can reduce their sentence by 4 days (up to 48 days a year) for every book they read and write a report on.

It has been reported that rich people in China can hire "body doubles" to serve their prison time.

Philosophers at Oxford have proposed that future biotechnology could theoretically alter a prisoner's perception of time, making them experience a 1,000-year sentence in just eight hours—raising profound ethical questions about punishment.

Hollywood casts Danny Trejo as the villain in over 400 films - because he spent 11 years in and out of prison. In August 2019, he was near a Sylmar intersection when a car ran a red light and flipped an SUV with a baby inside. Trejo crawled in through a broken window, and with bystander Monica Jackson freeing the car seat latch from the other side, pulled the child to safety. He kept the boy calm by yelling "superpowers" together. Hollywood was wrong about him.

Virginia inmate Robert Lee Brock sued himself for $5 million. His argument: getting drunk violated his own civil rights and caused him to commit crimes. Since he could not work in prison, he asked the state to pay the judgment on his behalf. The judge praised the innovative approach, then dismissed the case as totally ludicrous. He sued the one person responsible for his problems and lost.

Ricky Jackson is 18, headed to death row for a crime he did not commit. The only witness is a 12-year-old boy whose story was fed to him by police. He walks out 39 years, 3 months, and 9 days later - the longest wrongful sentence in US history. Cleveland pays him $7.2 million. He forgives the kid.

On the eve of Thanksgiving 1997, a New York woman brought five puppies into a maximum-security women's prison and taught a group of inmates to raise them. Today her prison-raised service dogs go home free of charge with wounded war veterans, each one spending two years with someone serving time and learning more than 70 commands. The puppies still grow up behind bars.