So, did you do your homework? Those of you who read my last post, about a Latvian prison offering overnight “experiences” for tourists, may have found the concept as hot as I did – especially if you watched the video.
Obviously, the regime – in my mind – would involve corporal punishment for the female visitors. Routine, hour-by-hour discipline: the guards would carry whips, and wouldn’t be afraid to use them should a girl step at all out of line. More serious offences – insolence, answering back, fighting, disobedience – would lead to a visit to the duty governor, who would invariably accede to any request that the prisoner should be caned.
But why would a girl be there in the first place? No doubt part of the regime would involve administering the floggings that had been handed down by the court as part of the sentence of imprisonment. The punishment bench would be well-used. Or, perhaps, she would be being detained prior to trial, and a blind eye might be turned by officialdom to the guards’ attempts to beat a confession out of their captive in the interrogation room.
Add in processing a girl on admission – stripped, inspected, forced into a cold shower. Mix with guards who’d bark instructions and tolerate no dissent. And add the thought that those imprisoned wouldn’t understand anything said to them, not speaking Latvian, and hence would inevitably fail to comprehend orders and hence would infuriate the guards… Oh, how I would love to see this particular tourist attraction realise its full potential.
One final thought: much as (in my fantasies) I see this as a place for women prisoners, it would be a shame for gentlemen to miss out on seeing their girls being dealt with. An image comes to mind of a two-bedded cell. A girl is trying to sleep on one bed; I’m on the other. It’s the middle of the night. The door swings open; two guards grab the girl from the bed and pull her into the corridor, where a group of their colleagues are waiting. Time passes. It’s thirty minutes, maybe more, before she is thrown back into the cell – broken, sobbing, the gang of guards having used her thoroughly. And, after all, if she were to complain, they’d only mark her down as a trouble-maker and take her to the punishment cells…
Yes, one can imagine such an institution becoming quite popular, with weekend stays required of girls for sorority initiations or simply as a part of their family tradition. And although it was never explicitly stated it was understood that most academic honors and scholarship programs looked favorably on applicants who proved their pluck with a few nights at Abel’s reformatory.
Tickets to the discipline night were highly coveted, as it was considered quite amusing to see the confident young woman who had been in your office seeking a promotion a few days before slipping out of her school uniform as she prepared to mount her punishment horse.
Discipline would be strict, of course, as it had been in the centuries past. But after all, it was for the girl’s own good.
That first sentence almost made me panic: “homework? I didn’t know we had homework! Oh no sir please don’t punish me…”
Lovely post. Scary but hot.
PS. The first link (to your “last post”) isn’t working: “We are terribly sorry, but the URL you typed no longer exists. It might have been moved or deleted”
After I read the previous post I wanted to go to Latvia. Now that I’ve read this post, I’m afraid what they have in mind would be boring.
Wonderful post!