I'm just gonna link to this:
http://www.oldandsold.com/books/mongolia/mongolia-15.shtml

I'll quote some of it later ...
Just ... Fuck!

Sorry couldn't read through all that but brings to mind "Midnight Express" and how realistic that situation seemed. Not too far different than a down south good ol boy system or even a Los Angeles prison for that matter.

They may be harsh on their prisoners, but we have 10,000 times more locked up at any moment subject to abuse. Most of theirs deserve what they get, 60% of ours are innocent of any real crime.
If you know you are innocent and try to fight back, oh man YOU ARE FUCKED.

Om excuse me while I roll another joint.

Let me quote this one part then:

Passing on to the interior, we came upon a heavy wooden chest, some 4 to 41 feet long by 2 feet deep, iron-bound and secured by two strong padlocks. To our horror we discovered that it contained a man one might have imagined that a wild beast to be sent by train was temporarily imprisoned therein ! But a man ! The hole in the side was of sufficient size to enable the prisoner to thrust out his manacled hands. This also provided the sole means of ventilation. But this unfortunate creature was well off compared with the others we saw subsequently. At least he was breathing in the open air. The dungeons, we were told, were so full that this prisoner had to remain outside. While we were discussing his pitiable lot, clank, clank, went the great bars and bolts, and the gaoler had opened the double doors leading into the first dungeon. There must have been from twenty to thirty coffins in this, some piled on the tops of the others, and the atmosphere was absolutely putrid. The two Mongol officials, whose general tone l cannot say impressed us very favourably, now very ostentatiously held their long sleeves over their noses, accustomed to smells though they were. One imagines that there may have been some means of cleaning out the coffins from underneath as is the case in cages in a menagerie, for it was most strongly impressed upon us that never under any circumstances whatsoever are the prisoners allowed to come out except for execution or rarely to be set free. The majority are in for life sentences.

One's eyes growing accustomed to the darkness the only light that penetrates it is from the doors when they are opened one became gradually aware of wild shaggy heads poking through the round holes in the coffin's sides. I was standing, quite unconsciously, close to a coffin, when, glancing down, I saw a terrible face, nothing more, almost touching the skirt of my riding coat.

Beside one coffin was a pool of blood which told its own tale. Within it there was a poor devil. coughing his lungs up. The Russian officer, knowing Mongolian well, spoke a few words to one or two of them, but they seemed too dazed to understand. Their minds, like their limbs, quickly atrophy in this close confinement. After a breath of fresh air in the tiny space that separates the dungeons, which, by the way, are four or five feet below ground level, another double door was unbarred for us, and we entered the second dungeon where there were a similar number of Chinese, in the coffins. It struck us as infinitely sad to find these gentle, highly civilised Chinese here, Shansi merchants most of them, friends and neighbours no doubt of the men with whom we had drunk tea in their charming guild rooms adjoining the little temple in Mai-mai-ch'eng. There they were, shut up for the remainder of their lives in heavy iron-bound coffins, out of which they could never under any conditions or for any purpose move. They could not lie down flat, they could not sit upright, they were not only manacled but chained to the coffins. They saw daylight but for a few minutes, when their food was thrust into their coffins through a hole four or five inches in diameter, twice daily. In one way only did they score over their Mongolian fellow-sufferers. Their narrower Chinese skulls enabled them, painfully and with difficulty, to protrude their heads through the hole in the coffin side. The Mongol cranium is too wide to do so at all.

See now I just do not get the life without parole sentence. It especially pisses me off when a judge orders 3 life sentences. I mean what the fuck, make the taxpayers spend from $60,000 to 100,000 per inmate per year for decades. (it was $47,000 per inmate just a few years ago)

I mean in a prison like that where is the incentive for locking someone up for life? 

If someone commits a crime so horrendous that the sentence requires 3 consecutive life sentences then doesn't the death penalty make far more sense?

What are they going to do when the prisoner finally dies? Stack em in the hallway and continue to charge the public for the extra lifetimes! Like the greedy landlord who hides the bodies and continues to cash the peoples SS checks. 

For cash/profit prisons work in somewhat that way ...
Quick further reading ...

Mr. Gull talked to the Chinese as long as the brutal-looking gaolers would let him, and I admired the pluck which enabled him to remain so long in that fearsome atmosphere. The men told him that all they knew was that they were suspected of supporting the Chinese Republic at the time of the Mongol declaration of independence. They had apparently had no trial, and they saw not the slightest chance of escape from this appalling situation. They seemed thankful to have a few words with anyone in their own tongue.

I'm thinking that the prison they are referencing isn't exactly a high cost to Mongolia ...

I bet you are right, but they have a harder time taxing Mongolians.

I dunno; the penalties are pretty steep ...

Penalties for what? I guess if you color out of the lines it might be an infraction.

Mongolia has NEVER been a place to fuck around ...
Kind of like Singapore ...
... Only worse

For the fuck of it:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-torture-devices/

Just adding some more fun stuff to this topic ...
http://www.ishr.org/countries/peoples-republic-of-china/methods-of-torture-in-the-peoples-republic-of-china/

While you are at it realize that Saudi Arabia (our good friend) has beheaded dozens in the past couple of years and everyone is focused on the few by Isis. What the fuck is that saying about our national priorities?

Good point ...
Fuck those reporters ...
*Sigh*

https://historycollection.co/hard-time-7-historys-brutal-prisons/4/

More on China ...
https://ishr.org/torture-methods-in-the-peoples-republic-of-china/

See now I just do not get the life without parole sentence. It especially pisses me off when a judge orders 3 life sentences. I mean what the fuck, make the taxpayers spend from $60,000 to 100,000 per inmate per year for decades. (it was $47,000 per inmate just a few years ago)

I mean in a prison like that where is the incentive for locking someone up for life? 

Come on, you know better than that.

Private prison corporations are taking that money. Sheriffs are taking that money - in some places they get to keep whatever they don't spend on the prisons.

And US prisons themselves are for primarily for slave labor. That's why we lock people up for insane sentences for consensual crimes. Even violent crimes - if you look at other countries, you can deal with many violent offenders with counseling & support + social support on the outside to deter violent crime in the first place. The US does none of that.

It's not profitable to release inmates ...

Profitable is when all the bunks are full and you have people on mattress's under the bunks. It's been like that a couple times when I was in.

My state is still on fire.

Maybe Kamala can come back to put more people in jail so you can have more firefighters.

It seems like you just never have enough doesn't it?
When are those boats from Africa supposed to get here.

250 years ago ...
Half of the people are still in 'holding' though ...

September 29, 1969, was a rainy day. In spite of the downpour and distance, the terrible screams of those being tortured had no trouble in crossing the doors, walls, and the parking lot to get to the three common cells that held ten men each. It is hard to describe the sounds made by men being tortured. They come out involuntarily, deep from the lungs. They cannot be reproduced, but one who has heard them never forgets. It is also impossible to tell how one feels while being tortured but it isn’t only pain.

The interrogation room is small, perhaps 2m. by 2m., and is divided by a wooden wall two meters high. From that height on there is an open space up to the ceiling of the ample second floor hall. There are no chairs or tables, for the torturers stand up while working. There is only the “Dragon’s Chair,”* on which no one wants to sit. The torturer’s working equipment is simple: four wooden stools, steel rods, some Army campaign telephones, sticks, a bucket with water, a ferule, ropes, torn shirts, and blankets.

This equipment was used on me for two hours, but there is no limit for the torture sessions and this is, in itself, a form of torture.

When the prisoner arrives at the interrogation room he is told, after a few blows and kicks, to undress. If he refuses, as has already happened, his clothes are torn from his body. Naked, he is made to sit on the floor, bent forward, hands around the ankles. Generally, blanket strips are attached to wrists and ankles, where ropes are to be placed, in order to prevent lasting scars. After being tied strongly, a steel pole is passed under his knees and elbows. He is then lifted some five feet from the ground as the pole’s ends rest on two of the stools. In this position, one’s weight rests entirely on the knee and elbow joints. It is then that the shock machine and the ferule are put to work.

There are several types of shock machines—I was a victim of some five or six different ones—but the most commonly used is an Army campaign telephone. I am not sure, but it seems that it works with an alternating current of 90 volts. A 110-volt machine is also used. Sometimes a partly dismantled TV set is employed and for the “Dragon’s Chair” the wires come directly out of the wall. I do not know if they use a transformer or something of this nature, but I am certain that the electricity comes out of a normal plug.

If, as usual, a campaign telephone is used, the two wires that come out of the little box are attached to the most sensitive parts of the body. Normally one of the poles is connected to a finger or a toe while the other is often moved from the tongue to the penis, then to the nose, the anus, the lips. The shock produces a terrible pain and violent muscular contraction. These contractions are so strong that the body rises and sometimes almost completely turns over itself.

When the machine stops for a moment, the muscles relax and the body goes back to its original position. The shocks are so intense that if the prisoner’s mouth is not stuffed with a piece of cloth, his tongue shrinks inside his mouth and he bites himself to such a degree that for several days he is unable to speak or eat. The muscular contractions and the position in which the victim is kept for hours make him lose control over his bowels and bladder. While he is hanging from the steel pole, he is also being beaten with sticks on the soles, buttocks, and back.

After some time of this treatment, the victim is no longer able to feel legs or stomach, for all is reduced to a terribly painful mass that no longer obeys any orders from the mind. I thought that my legs had been completely destroyed, as if I had been run over by a tractor. In this state one no longer thinks and very easily slips from semi-consciousness to full unconsciousness. When this happens, the torturers try to bring back their victim by throwing water on him and giving more shocks. Water has a tenfold multiplying effect on the shocks.

I was tortured in this manner for two and a half hours at the Operaçao Bandeirantes’s headquarters and, later, for two more hours at the DOPS, political police. I believe I would not have survived a few minutes longer. Prisoners of a stronger build than I have been tortured for many more hours. One of them, Carlos Eduardo Fleury, who later tried to commit suicide, had a heart failure and was saved by a police officer who was visiting the O.B. and gave him a heart massage. He is alive and can confirm this story, as well as all the other persons whose names I shall mention, except Virgilio Gomes da Silva, murdered, and those who became insane, a fairly large number.

Jonas was buried as a pauper but in a first-class coffin. His funeral and even his formal black suit were presents from his murderers, the agents of the Operaçao Bandeirantes that tortured him to death on September 29, 1969. They paid him a last tribute for his gallantry.

Almost at the same moment Jonas’s body was being buried, on the 30th of September, Hilda Gomes da Silva, Virgilio’s wife, was tied to the “Dragon’s Chair,” seeing her four-month-old son being tortured. Virgilio Gomes da Silva’s alias was Jonas.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1970/02/26/torture-in-brazil/

I was about to ask what country, but then I saw the link.
Reminds me of Midnight Express.

Turkish Prisons are no joke either ....

The idea of setting up a strict prison sounds about right when it comes to fixing the morals of an offender. A person like that deserves a specific correctional treatment if they are to succeed and improve in the future. However, in trying to achieve that, some prisons are known to have messed up. When a crime happens, common sense deems it suitable to punish the criminals with a few years — or a lifetime — of imprisonment, but in addition to that, some prisons treat their prisoners like animals. These institutions neglect human rights laws and go so far with their brutality that it becomes almost difficult to tell who’s the real monster.
The prison of Urga, in Mongolia, was one of the prisons that treated its prisoners in a way that is beyond what words can describe. Cutting across all levels of brutality, the prisoners were given a barbaric treatment in what you can call “the Box of Death”.
Sitting behind a fenced wooden enclosure was a group of small houses. Each house, like a dungeon, was so dark that not much could be seen on the inside. The houses didn’t manage to keep out the cold, only protecting the inmates from the vicious winds. All of these houses had a bunch of wooden boxes inside of them. These boxes, measuring four feet long by two and one-half feet high and surrounded by a 15-foot high stockade of sharpened timbers, were the prisoners’ cells. They were so small that a regular-sized human could not fit in them. When the prisoners were locked inside these boxes, it was so cramped and uncomfortable that they could neither sit nor lie properly. Hence, they were called Coffin Prisons.
As described by the American explorer, Roy Chapman Andrews in his book Across Mongolian Plains, there was only one small hole in each box and hardly any light got inside. As a result, men often lost their vision, not to mention, their sanity, after a time. These six-inch holes were also used to feed the prisoners once a day and their human waste was cleaned once every two to three weeks. Some of the men who had a high chance of escaping had their necks chained to a pair of manacles that fastened around their hands. Eating in a scrunched-up position itself was really difficult for the normal prisoners, let alone the manacled ones.
For the fortunate ones, who had committed lesser crimes, the coffin torture would only last a few weeks but the rest of them underwent it for almost all of their entire stay at the prison. This would take away their ability to use their limbs as they’d shrink and shrivel away. Though most of these men were sentenced to death, many would die in the coffins before their death sentence could be carried out. Since the temperature in Urga drops below zero during the winter, it was common for prisoners to freeze to death.
Out of all the men who were locked up, the majority were Chinese. This is because the Chinese people had invaded the country of Mongolia at that time but had only managed to occupy some regions.
Though this practice was banned in 1920, even today, Mongolia’s prisons are known for their harsh and cruel punishments. According to Amnesty International’s report from 2002, the prisons were far better than before but the prisoners were still tortured and neglected. Furthermore, they stated that if the prisoners didn’t have any outside connections, they would often starve to death. There was evidence of people being locked up without due process and of prisoners having their food held back so they would confess to a crime, whether they committed it or not. Unnecessary and unfair treatments were used in order to extract these confessions.
A report by the National Human Rights Commission from 2017 also mentioned that the prisoners were still kept in inhumane conditions. However, without first-hand accounts of the prisons’ conditions, it’s still difficult to say what the conditions really are today. For now, we can just hope that some boundaries are set on how prisoners should be treated.

https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/this-mongolian-prison-kept-its-prisoners-in-coffins-cceb5a1e4dd6

No mention of their actual crimes. Might be interesting for you to research what their crimes were and why they were considered crimes in the first place to warrant such treatment.

That's the thing ...
Some were labeled as "Chinese Sympathizers", others were poor people who did minor crimes and couldn't pay their way out ...

In that time, people rarely got a trial of any sort ...
Those deemed "disposable" suffered ....

Those that didn't "confess" to crimes were punished with the harshest treatments to force confessions (extreme confinement/starvation)
... then, once they "confessed", were subject to extreme confinement/starvation/worse (usually to death)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0RJV6GwikQ

I was messed up when I came here, and in many ways I have far more self-control. But at the same time, I feel frayed, like I've been living in the face of this sandstorm for 11 years, and it's worn my soul down to a pathetic little nub. They don't really kill you when they give you a date. You are pretty much already dead by that point. The only ones that really bemoan their fates are the ones that were too dense to learn a lesson from this place. That's sort of the sad part. This place ruins people. Some it makes insane. Some, like me it forces to go so deep that they aren't ever able to crawl back out again. Some people get so hard that discipline simply can't ever imprint on them again.

'Far Worse Than Any Death Sentence': Horrific Realities of Solitary Confinement