Having served a little time, I can tell you that I saw little effort to put inmates to work outside of the prison walls.

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Former South African President and anti-apartheid fighter Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in jail, once said that in the company of Chinua Achebe's novels "prison walls fell down".

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The former South African president and anti-apartheid fighter, who spent 27 years in jail, "referred to Prof Achebe as a writer 'in whose company the prison walls fell down'", the statement said.

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In those circumstances, austerity programmes would become a prison with impossibly high walls, not a route back to rehabilitation and credibility in the eyes of commercial investors.

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He said limestone set into the walls of the prison was believed to have come from "a Roman quay or something like that".

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As a result, the Constitutional Court was chosen to be constructed right next to Johannesburg's Old Fort Prison, a notorious building whose walls had served to confine two of the best know civil rights figures of the previous century.

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Masri described his prison in Afghanistan as a filthy hole, with walls scribbled on in Pashtun and Arabic.

NEWYORKER: The Black Sites

Walls was sentenced to just over three years in federal prison.

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Our interviews took place in the canteen of the minimum-security prison, a place of cheap plastic-topped tables and bare wooden walls.

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Professor Kassem said his Yemeni client, Kazimi, had told him that, during his incarceration in the Dark Prison, he attempted suicide three times, by ramming his head into the walls.

NEWYORKER: The Black Sites