> Some prisoners don’t even have pillows

LOL. I just did eight years at two facilities in the USA, neither of which allowed pillows. Try going to sleep tonight without a pillow. It sucks.

> The temperature in the cells is kept low.

This is par for the course in most jails and prisons. They make an excuse that it "keeps down germs".

> The air conditioning runs noisily and ceaselessly

Same

> Strip lights are left on 24 hours a day.

I had five years in cells with 24/7 lighting

> Hanging up anything to dim the brightness is treated as a punishable offence

Same in every jail and prison

> Taps drip.

Is there a prison well-maintain enough anywhere in the world where all the mechanicals actually work?!

> There is no toilet paper, so prisoners have to use a hose.

It is common in the Middle-East to wash your undercarriage with a showerhead.

> Occasionally, they are allowed to exercise for 45 minutes in a small, concrete yard.

Better than I had in the USA. I never saw the sun for eight years.

> In Dubai, inmates have to buy everything, including soap and detergent for cleaning the cells, as well as newspapers and phone calls.

They were allowed newspapers.. this is better than any place I was at which had total news blackouts.

> A small range of food items can be bought from outside the prison, by placing an order through the police kitchen. Cornelius buys a hamburger twice a week and pizza on Thursdays.

Nice! Most jails don't have hot food ordering, but it is becoming more common as there is good money to be made.

> Martin Lonergan, who spent nine months in the cell next to Cornelius’s in 2019-20 after getting caught up in a separate business dispute, carried out an informal survey among the prisoners. He reckons inmates lucky enough to have money on their cards spend an average of around 150 dirhams a week, or $40.

Cheap! The jails I was in.. if you didn't max out the $100 a week limit you were considered a loser. The goal for most people was to find one of these "losers" and buy his remaining credit off him (for say, a 25% surcharge) so you could buy $200-300 of commissary a week.

> Prisoners report that they rarely see the jailers. Every night at 9pm cells are locked and the phone line to the guards is switched off. If an inmate has a problem, there’s no way to get assistance. Sometimes prisoners can be heard screaming for help.

Same in the Cook County Jail in Illinois. If you have a heart attack at night, good luck! They'll find your body the next day.

> Medical care is almost non-existent: a single doctor covers all the inmates. Under the rota system prisoners may be given an appointment six months down the line.

This seems quick for jail medical care.

> That didn’t stop covid from running rampant through the overcrowded prison. His block is reportedly being used as a dumping ground for anyone who might be infected.

LOL. When I was in the CCJ, the NYT declared it to be the epicenter of the entire COVID pandemic.

> A person close to Cornelius says he accepts that he “made mistakes”, but that he’d been assured by cch that he could borrow money to invest if he submitted “certain invoices in a certain way”. Though Cornelius never dealt directly with dib, he has said he was led to understand that the bank was “supportive” of this chicanery.

Yeah, if you don't have it in writing, you're on the hook. My personal manager at PayPal was very supportive of me running a private TV torrent tracker, but if I'd had to subpoena him to court I'm sure he would have told a very different story :D

> In most Western countries, debt is considered a civil matter. Charles Dickens’s father was sent to a debtors’ prison and Dickens’s depictions of these prisons’ horrific conditions in his novels bolstered a campaign that led to their eventual abolition in Britain in 1869. The uae, by contrast, still treats debt as a crime.

It is still a crime in the USA. I met many people in jail incarcerated for debt. Legally you can't be incarcerated for debt, but there is a way around it that courts in the USA use. If the judge orders you to repay a sum of money and you fail to do it on time, then you have disobeyed the judge and committed contempt of court and are jailed for that, not the debt. Easy!