Word: cellblock
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...interrogated for a week by Peru's counterterrorism police and Interpol before she was allowed to call a lawyer ( or the U.S. embassy. On Dec. 28, McNamara was transferred to Canto Grande, Peru's maximum-security prison on the outskirts of Lima. She was housed in a cellblock where some of Sendero Luminoso's most notorious leaders are kept, awaiting trial or serving sentences for crimes ranging from sabotage to assassination...
...liquor, access to a telephone and a Jacuzzi. Last summer the U.S. team that keeps an eye on the drug barons prevented them from getting the ultimate amenity: a private exit. The agents discovered a tunnel leading 800 ft. from two abandoned houses across from the prison toward their cellblock...
...outlook always should have been grim. Riots have beset American prisons from the beginning. But those manifest failures along the way were only specifically disappointing, not generally disillusioning. A spasm of violence at a particular prison, epidemic madness at another, each was explained away as a technical error: the cellblock configuration was wrong, the recreation policy too lenient. One who saw through to the inherent failure was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose famous 1831 tour of the U.S. was, first of all, a survey of American prisons. "Nowhere was this system of imprisonment crowned with the hoped-for success," he wrote...
...lights: dozens of couples, hugging, smooching, oblivious. In Leavenworth's vast mess hall, inmates grab their silverware from a miniature Conestoga and eat off red-and-white checkered tablecloths; the hoe-down amenities seem almost too perky to bear. In one dim passageway leading to an Illinois cellblock, some wry convict has painted a skillful trompe l'oeil escape route, railroad tracks disappearing into a tunnel and freedom...
Someone on cellblock B struck a five-string banjo and began to sing: 'I got those cellblock blues/ I'm feeling blue all the time/ I got those cellblock blues/ Fenced in by walls I can't climb. . .' He was good. The voice and the banjo were loud, clear and true, and brought into that border country the fact that it was a late summer afternoon all over that part of the world. Out the window he could see some underwear and fatigues hung out to dry. They moved in the breeze as if this movement...