There's a chain of prison-themed bars in England called "Alcotraz"

"Smuggle your liquor and experience the bar behind bars"

"Texas’ juvenile prison system is nearing total collapse"

Texas Tribune:

Its five lockups are dangerously understaffed, an ongoing problem that worsened dramatically last year when its turnover rate hit more than 70%. The state has desperately tried to recruit employees, but most new hires are gone within six months.

...

In June, less than half of the agency’s officer positions were filled by active employees

"Corrections officer is 5th person charged in growing sex abuse scandal at federal female prison [in California]"

LAT:

[The officer] is the latest to be charged in the widening scandal at the prison, which has led to sexual abuse indictments against the former warden, two former prison guards and a prison chaplain.

...

In January, the chaplain ... was charged with two counts of sexual abuse of a ward under his control, two counts of committing abusive sexual contact and one count of making false statements to federal officials.

Prisoners once again escape from an Oklahoma jail by climbing down a rope made out of bedsheets

INMATE ESCAPE: Oklahoma City Police are assisting in searching for an inmate who escaped the county jail.

You can see the cloth rope from the top of the building & busted out window. | @koconews pic.twitter.com/A7tcOAGQbh

— Christine Stanwood (@KOCOChristine) July 31, 2020

It's not the first time this has happened:

The 13-story jail opened in 1991 west of downtown Oklahoma City and was billed as escape proof. It was not. Two months after opening, two inmates in the same week broke the block windows in their cells and used bedsheets to scale down the side of the jail undetected. Others followed.

This time, one of the men, a murder defendant, was arrested several hours later. The other man, a rape defendant, fell from the rope, broke his leg, and was found "laying in the grass" a short distance away.

There's plenty of fingerpointing:

The escape also brought a renewal of the animosity between [the] County Commissioner ... and the sheriff.

[The commissioner] again blamed the sheriff for problems at the jail.

...

In response, the sheriff said, "These escapees had to cut through ... grates, and no one at the jail noticed, so how is that my fault? They hoarded bedsheets for their escape, and were free for more than an hour and Jail Trust administration didn’t even know until outside law enforcement notified them, that’s not my fault.

"The San Quentin prison doctor who performed over 10,000 human experiments"

Nightmare fuel:

He was born in 1886 in Polk County, Oregon to a country doctor. They moved to California when Leo was nine and he graduated from Paso Robles High before starting at Stanford in 1903.

A year later, Stanley was flat broke. He dropped out and got a job as a peanut butcher — slang for newsboy — on the Southern Pacific railway.

“I believe that one year as a peanut butcher was better than a whole at Stanford,” he said in an oral history with the Marin County Free Library in the 1970s. “I learned to know people. I learned to merchandise, to sell."

Selling was a strong suit of Stanley’s, and he sold nothing more vigorously than himself. He eventually returned to Stanford and finished his schooling, becoming a doctor. But then he fell in love and needed a steady job to support his new wife. He offered up his services at San Quentin, which hired him in 1913 to be their chief surgeon. At the time, he had no surgical experience.

*Previously: "the Trump Era Has Wreaked Havoc on Washington’s Plastic Surgery Schedules"

"Rare and Historic Northrop Flying Wing Crashes Into Prison Yard In California"

"the bright yellow flying wing came down inside the yard at the California Rehabilitation Center, a state prison facility."

Ten funny tweets

Tonight I found out that one of my friends got arrested back in the day when she was 21 and the lady let her use her phone for one phone call and instead she used her phone to MAKE A VINE i am dead pic.twitter.com/21IEwWfUpi

— Laurashev (@LauraShevy) February 28, 2019

Sometimes I wonder what happened to the people who asked me for directions pic.twitter.com/alwARBZ3K6

— Melissa (@xomelizza) March 1, 2019

TRAIN: I think I can, I think I can

TRAIN PASSENGER: what the fuck is happening

— Jill la Jill (@JillianKarger) March 3, 2019

That thing of wanting to DM your partner a funny tweet but they are in another room in a protracted struggle w your more difficult child and you don't want to advertise that your situation is allowing you to be all insouciant and on your phone 😂

— Evie Ebert (@ohevie) March 3, 2019

pic.twitter.com/pckrEMvoxN

— zander (@alezander) March 3, 2019

Omg I just realized how cute it is that pirates call their friends their hearties 😍

— Siobhan Thompson (@vornietom) March 2, 2019

CB Lonnie Johnson of Kentucky said the #Seahawks put him in a staring contest lasting "15, 16 seconds" during his formal interview with them. Said he won. Couldn't recall the name of who he went against.#NFLCombine

— Chase Goodbread (@ChaseGoodbread) March 3, 2019

oh. my. pic.twitter.com/7RtzBIoHYu

— Luka Kladaric (@kll) March 1, 2019

Nancy by Olivia Jaimes for March 04, 2019 https://t.co/NlSA91WHZA pic.twitter.com/ZbdlexuWqT

— Nancy (@SluggoIsLit) March 4, 2019

My Damn dog jumped into the McDonald’s drive through 🤦🏾‍♂️😂😂😂 KILO !! pic.twitter.com/Szqd3EPcT7

— ⚰️4L (@KINGTAZDME) March 3, 2019

*More funny tweets.

"Indonesia confirms multiple mass prison breaks in quake-tsunami zone"

"1,200 inmates have escaped from three detention facilities"

"Judges In California And South Carolina Order Carriers To Brick Prison Inmates’ Cellphones"

CBS:

California has since installed nearly 1,000 sophisticated metal detectors, scanners and secret security cameras in prisons to detect and deter the smuggling of cellphones and other contraband like drugs. That effort was paid for by Virginia-based Global Tel-Link, the nation’s largest prison phone company, from the projected $17 million it receives each year from California inmates and their families who use landlines to make phone calls that are monitored for security reasons.

"the Bureau of Prisons confiscated 5,116 such phones in 2016, and preliminary numbers for 2017 indicate a 28 percent increase"

"The Justice Department will soon start trying to jam cellphones smuggled into federal prisons"

Town & Country's guide to prisons for white-collar criminals

A list of perks and famous mates at various locations.

Link roundup

1. Former web heavyweight Worth1000 is on the verge of closing.

2. Gawker:

Pei-Shen Qian, a Chinese artist whose acclaim in China faded once he immigrated to New York City, is at the center of a scandal that allegedly had him fabricate hundreds of paintings by prominent modernist painters, including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell.

The 73-year-old Qian, who lived in Woodhaven, Queens, kept his windows covered at all times while federal investigators believed he created around $80 million worth of forgeries.

3. Wired:

Florida prison officials say a computer “glitch” may be to blame for opening all of the doors at a maximum security wing simultaneously, setting prisoners free and allowing gang members to pursue a rival with weapons. 

But a surveillance video released this week (see above) suggests that the doors may have been opened intentionally — either by a staff member or remotely by someone else inside or outside the prison who triggered a “group release” button in the computerized system. The video raises the possibility that some prisoners knew in advance that the doors were going to open. 

It’s the second time in two months that all of the doors in the wing opened at once, officials say, raising questions about whether the first incident was a trial-run to see how long it would take guards to respond.

What it's like to be Jewish in prison and dependent on the Aryan Brotherhood

SPLC:

I am always the last person to eat. It's part of a compromise I worked out with the skinheads who run the western state prison complex where I am incarcerated. Under this compromise, I'm allowed to sit at the whites' tables, but only after the "heads," and then the "woods," and then the "lames" have eaten. I am lower on the totem pole than all of them, the untouchable. I should feel lucky I'm allowed to eat at the whites' tables at all.

Not that there's anywhere else I could eat. The prison yard is broken down into five distinct racial categories and segregation is strictly enforced.

"Are All the Top French Chefs Freemasons?"

1. "At the heart of the French food world lies a mystery: Are all the top chefs members of the Freemasons? BA opens a 'forbidden' door on this secret society".

2.  Washington Post:

Thirteen female corrections officers essentially handed over control of a Baltimore jail to gang leaders, prosecutors said. The officers were charged Tuesday in a federal racketeering indictment. 

The indictment described a jailhouse seemingly out of control. Four corrections officers became pregnant by one inmate. Two of them got tattoos of the inmate’s first name, Tavon — one on her neck, the other on a wrist.

3.  NatGeo:

The giant moray eel can grow to three metres in length and bites its prey with two sets of jaws—the obvious ones and a second set in its throat that can be launched forward like Hollywood’s Alien. It’s not a creature to be trifled with. But the coral grouper not only seeks out giant morays, but actively rouses them by vigorously shaking its body. The move is a call to arms that tells the moray to join the grouper in a hunt.

Link roundup

1.  Studying roller derby for science:

The authors used a tournament happening at Eugene, Oregon with the Emerald City Roller Girls (the host, from Eugene), DC Roller Girls (Washington, DC) and Silicon Valley Roller Girls (San Jose, CA). They were able to test a few conditions: the teams’ microbial communities before playing, after playing one bout, and after playing two bouts, to see change over time and over contact with different team microbial communities. They sampled from the upper arm, because it’s probably the body part with the most universal exposure across players.

2.  Hollywood Reporter:

The Associated Press is being sued by the documentary makers of the film Hart Island: An American Cemetery, about a small potter's field island in New York City where prison laborers bury the region's unclaimed mass dead in mass graves. The film features four individuals and their six-year struggle to navigate city bureaucracy to locate a body mistakenly buried and properly grieve. 

The reason why footage of Hart Island is so valuable is that NYC's Department of Corrections prohibits filming there.

3.  Seems like just a few weeks ago that ESPN had a long article about praising undersized white athletes for their grit instead of trying to calculate how valuable they actually were to their team.  Here's a new ESPN article about college basketball player Aaron Craft, filled with anecdotes like this:

This is the way he's always been. When Craft was 3 years old, he stuck his father's keys into an electrical outlet while John ran a basketball practice. The shock knocked him off his feet, but the toddler refused to cry.

"A brother of 'The Dark Knight' director Christopher Nolan was allegedly plotting a Batman-like escape from a Chicago federal prison"

"he was being held while fighting extradition to Costa Rica on murder charges"