Netflix docuseries Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons has returned to the platform with its fourth season, which sees host and falsely convicted ex-prisoner Raphael Rowe explore four more dangerous detention centres.
Over the past few series, Rowe has visited ruthless jails in Papua New Guinea, Ukraine, Columbia, Costa Rica and the Philippines, as well as rehabilitation centres in Belize and Norway – but what about the slammers of season four?
Here’s everything you need to know about the toughest prisons explored in the docuseries’ fourth season.
Maseru prison, Lesotho
Maseru prison is an impoverished detention centre, filled with inmates doing time for rape. “Many are HIV positive and sexual assaults are a way of life inside the prison,” the docuseries says.
“One of the things that’s striking me is the level of poverty,” Rowe says whilst visiting Maseru prison. “This is quite a crazy bit of space, it’s a bit like a bombsite. It’s like rubble everywhere. Bricks piled up.”
Due to the squalid conditions within the prison, rape, gang violence and sexual assault are a common occurrence.
In Maseru Central Prison in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho in southern Africa, he met a man who had murdered his four children and cut out their organs on the orders of a witch doctor. “What I still can’t get my head around is how even under the influence of some hallucinating drug you could take the life of a child, and not just one but all of them at the same time,” Raphael says. “And cut the heart out of a kid? Look, I try to remain as professional as I possibly can when I’m interviewing these people but I’m human. I have feelings and thoughts, and sometimes you can see that in my face.”
The moments where he cannot hide his disgust are when he meets rapists, who he describes as the “cruellest and wickedest” of all criminals.
In Lesotho, nearly half of all inmates were locked up for rape, while one third had HIV.
“I find it a challenge to stand and look a man in the face and ask him why he raped a child, a woman, or a man for that matter, and ask him in detail to try and understand the mentality,” says Raphael. “I can imagine the scars that have been left behind in that individual will be something they will never be able to brush off and will live with them long after the prisoner is freed.”
Show Airs on Netflix from 29 July 2020
