Black Beach, Equatorial Guinea

Amnesty International describes incarceration in this Malabo prison as "a slow, lingering death sentence". Torture, including burning and beating the soles of the feet, is systematic and brutal.

The jail, which counts Old Etonian Simon Mann among its inmates, has food rations so meagre that starvation is one of the regular causes of death.

Rats scurry around the filthy floors amid overflowing buckets of excrement but medical care is denied for the numerous endemic diseases.

La Sabaneta prison, Venezuela

Any claims the prison authorities may have clung to that they controlled this infamous jail were destroyed in 1994 when a gun battle left 108 prisoners dead.

This was no isolated incident. In the following year there was no famous shoot-out but another 196 prisoners died and 624 were injured in smaller outbreaks of violence.

Three years after the worst of the violence a cholera outbreak struck almost 700 of the surviving inmates.

Bangkwang jail, Thailand

Tempted to take a little marijuana on your fortnight package tour of Thailand? It may be unwise unless you want to end up in the infamous “Bangkok Hotel”.

In recent years the prison's population has trebled to 7,000 and the guards are out-numbered 50-1. Every inmate there is serving more than 25 years and for the first three months of their sentence each is forced to wear leg irons.

Inside Building 10, prisoners are held in solitary confinement in pitch-black cells two metres square wearing “elephant chains” for months on end.

“Thai prisons are tough," says Director of Prisons Khun Nattee in a superfluous warning to tourists. "You don't want to be in Bangkwang."

Camp Delta, Cuba

One of the inmates still wearing the iconic, orange all-in-ones is Omar Khadr, 21. The Canadian has been incarcerated in the military facility at Guantanamo Bay since he was just 15-years-old.

Along with around 270 fellow detainees Omar has been been forced to wear a blindfold, handcuffs, mask, manacles and leg clamps – after six years he is still waiting to hear if he will face a trial.

Technically, of course, Camp Delta is not a prison. It is a high-security detention camp where the US holds "enemy combatants". As a result these men do not qualify for the human rights usually afforded to convicted inmates or prisoners of war.

Diyarbakir prison, Turkey

The overcrowded, sewage-flooded hallways have a fine pedigree of infamy. In the 19th century, Diyarbakır prison was known throughout the Ottoman Empire as the home of harsh and feared sentences given to political prisoners or members of the enslaved Balkan region who dared to speak out against their rulers.

More recently a series of hunger strikes carried out by prisoners claiming they were routinely tortured were brutally put down.

A UN study published in the mid-1990s described 300 prisoners being dragged along the prison corridors where they were beaten with truncheons, iron bars, chains and clubs.

Mendoza prison, Argentina

In 2004, Amnesty estimated that the prison with an official capacity of 600 was crammed with 1,600 inmates in insanitary conditions.

The inadequate sewage and drainage facilities meant the cells were teeming with rodents and the potentially fatal tropical illness Chagas disease was rife.

In the isolation area, Amnesty found that overcrowded prisoners had no access to showers and were forced to defecate and urinate in plastic bags in front of each other.

The women’s wing was no worse but caused more concern since many of the inmates were mothers and had their children living in misery alongside them.

Nairobi prison, Kenya

Around 4,000 near naked inmates are crammed together on the floors of this maze of chain-link fences and razor wire, which has a notional capacity of just 800 inmates.

In one dormitory 250 prisoners have been recorded sharing five mattresses. Food, clothes and medical provisions are in short supply as the daily budget is $0.30 per prisoner.

Tadmor military prison, Syria

Faraj Beraqdar, a Syrian poet, and five-year inmate, described Tadmor military prison as: “The kingdom of death and madness.”

Human Rights Watch has been a little less eloquent but no less damning on the terrifying facility.

It concluded: “Tadmor military prison [is] infamous throughout Syria for the extremely brutal abuses. . . gross human rights abuses have occurred at Tadmor military prison since the early 1980s, from deaths under torture to summary executions on a massive scale.”

Reports of the violent demise of prisoners includes being cut up into small pieces with an axe, being roped and then dragged to death or just being savagely beaten with metal pipes.

La Santé prison, France

When she accepted the job of prison doctor in Paris’s most feared jail, Dr Veronique Vasseur had an idea that she may encounter one or two distasteful incidents. But within her first couple of days she was appalled to meet inmates so deranged or depressed that they had swallowed rat poison, forks and drain cleaner.

In 1999 alone, 124 inmates committed suicide in La Santé. By comparison there were just 24 suicides in the entire jail population of California that year.

When Dr Vasseur wrote a book exposing conditions inside the jail, France was shocked to hear quite why so many inmates had chosen to kill themselves.

Prisoners would stuff their clothes in the cracks in their cells to keep the rats out and most of the mattresses were full of lice and bigger insects. Some of the weaker prisoners had been turned into slaves by their cellmates and systematic rape and the detention of young offenders in cells with seasoned criminals was common.

Islamic militants, Basque separatists and past inmates such as Carlos the Jackal were recently joined by the rogue trader Jerome Kerviel.

Carandiru Penitentiary, Brazil

The granddaddy of violent prisons. In 1992 a gun-battle ended with 102 inmates shot dead and there are innumerable eye-watering tales of gang warfare, murder and beatings by both inmates and prison guards.

Walter Erwin Hoffgen, the head of the prison, summed up his problems neatly: "Of course I don't have control of the situation. It would be ridiculous to say I did. The prison has 7,500 inmates and only about 1,000 prison officers, divided into four shifts."

It was reported that the medical director of the facility was too scared to even set foot in the prison for several years. Almost one of every five in the prison's health wing was diagnosed with HIV and “luxuries” such as anaesthetics for surgery were routinely denied.

There was only one way to bring the notorious facility under control. In 2002 it was razed to the ground.

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