San Pedro Prison is the largest prison in La Paz, Bolivia renowned for being a society within itself.

Significantly different from most correctional facilities, inmates at San Pedro have jobs inside the community, buy or rent their accommodation, and often live with their families. The sale of cocaine and other goods to visiting tourists gives those inside a significant income and an unusual amount of freedom within the prison walls. Elected leaders enforce the laws of the community, with stabbings being commonplace.

The prison is home to approximately 1,500 inmates (not including the women and children that live inside the walls with their convicted husbands), with additional guests staying in the prison hotel. The walled community is divided into eight sectors with varying degrees of luxury, and cells are bought or rented for the duration of a prisoner’s sentence. The wealthiest area “La Posta” provides inmates with private bathrooms, a kitchen, and cable television; such cells are sold for around $1,500-1,800 Bolivianos ($210 USD). Wealthier inmates can buy luxury cells, that may include 3 floors, and a hot tub. One inmate paid for a second floor extension to be built on his cell, giving him views across the city. However, most of those inside the prison live in cramped conditions with it being common for single-room cells to accommodate five people.

Almost all living sections contain market stalls and places to play games such as billiards, poker, chess, or in some, video games. The canteen and restaurants are owned and run by the inmates, while other places sell ingredients for those with kitchens to cook for themselves.One of the larger open areas doubles as a small football pitch, with teams representing each sector regularly competing. Within the walls there is also a hotel for visiting guests, a hospital, and multiple churches.

Aside from the 1,500 prisoners and the guards there are numerous others inside the prison walls. The wives and children of the inmates often stay inside the walls but are allowed to come and go as they please. Without the income of the husband they often cannot afford to live by themselves in the city. They will often provide an important link with the outside and can bring items into the prison that are sold on the market stalls or directly from cells. The 200 children are cared for in two nurseries inside the prison walls or are educated in nearby schools; they spend the rest of their time playing within the prison grounds.

Around 80% of the inmates are serving sentences for drug-related offences, and around 75% of the total prisoner population are awaiting trial. There are on average four deaths every month inside the prison from natural causes or from violent attacks. The police rarely enter the prison.

There are several sources of income for the prisoners and those who run the establishment. Embol, the Bolivian brewery who own the exclusivity rights to produce Coca-Cola in Bolivia, have a deal whereby their products are advertised and sold inside the prison and rival brands are banned. In return they provide cash, tables, chairs, and umbrellas for the grounds. Most prisoners have jobs such as messengers, hairdressers, and shopkeepers, with many profiting from the tourist trade. Many inside the prison work as tour guides or sell handmade crafts to the visitors, and tourism provides many of them with a source of income. There is also a gambling trade, with betting on the inter-section football matches being worth up to US$20,000 a year. Players are also sometimes bought and sold between teams.

Cocaine is produced inside the compound with large laboratories producing a significant amount of the drug while other inmates utilise crude processing systems in their own cells. Consequently the amount of drug use and addiction around the prison is very high. The cocaine is then trafficked outside, meaning that the prison is a large supplier of the drug. Alcohol is also widely available and its sale is an important source of income for some of those inside the prison.

From Wikipedia

Steven Jay Russell has many other names. As well as the 14 known aliases he used while fabricating bogus credentials and passing himself off variously as a judge, a doctor, an FBI agent and a bar student, he has been nicknamed “Houdini” and “King Con” for his remarkable ability to escape from prison. From 1992, when he was imprisoned for the relatively minor charge of insurance fraud, Russell managed to escape four times from several different Texan jails over a five-year period.

Russell’s life story is also the stuff of improbable fiction. His prison escapes were marked by astonishing brazenness that left law-enforcement officials slack-jawed in bafflement. Russell’s shenanigans were driven by his obsessive love for a fellow inmate called Phillip Morris whom he met in jail in the early 1990s (his escapes always took place on Friday 13th, the day on which Morris was born).

When Russell and Morris were released on parole in 1995 they set up home together in Houston, and Russell went in search of money to lavish on his lover. He persuaded a medical insurance company to hire him as their chief financial officer on the basis of a greatly exaggerated CV with all references directed back to him. In five months, he embezzled $800,000 from dormant accounts to fund the couple’s glamorous lifestyle of Mercedes-Benz cars, jet-skis and matching Rolex watches. 

Eventually, he was found out and sent back to jail, but not before impersonating a judge over the telephone and demanding his own bail money be lowered from $900,000 to $45,000 (he paid with a cheque that later bounced). Back in captivity, his escapes were from then on shaped by the single, overwhelming desire to be with Morris. This turned out to be his fatal flaw. Despite managing repeatedly to outwit the federal authorities, Russell was always caught because, each time he escaped, he would end up beating a path to Morris’s door.

Russell’s escapes were never violent – he claims, even now: “I didn’t break out. They opened the door and let me through” – but they were ingenious. Twice, he simply walked through the front gates. In 1993, while languishing in the Harris County Jail in Houston for making a false insurance claim about an injured back, Russell disguised himself as a workman with a walkie-talkie and a pair of women’s black trousers stolen from the prison infirmary. “I tapped on the security gate with my walkie-talkie and the guy let me through,” he explains, nonchalantly. Was he scared? “No. And if you are scared, you really mustn’t show it. You have to act like you’re meant to be there.”

Three years later, he stockpiled green felt-tip pens from prison art classes, squeezing the ink from the cartridges into a sink of water and dying his overalls the colour of surgical gowns. “You have to be very careful because if you wring them out, you get streaks in the material,” he says matter-of-factly. Underneath the makeshift medical clothes, Russell taped several plastic bags tightly to his body so that police dogs would not be able to follow his scent once he was on the run. He picked a moment when the woman manning the front desk was on the telephone and then, unquestioned by prison staff, simply walked out “dressed like Dr Kildare”.

“You do get a huge adrenaline rush. I walked to the woods just outside the penitentiary and after about 100 yards, I turned round and went like this [he mimes giving someone the finger with the glee of a naughty child]. I guess it was kind of arrogant.”

Russell walked to the nearest house, knocked on the door and claimed to be a doctor who had been involved in a car accident and who needed a lift into town. The stranger obliged. “By the time they had their helicopters and search teams out, I was drinking margaritas in a bar in Houston.”

But not for long. Within the year, he was back in jail, this time plotting his most daring escape ever.

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