AMERICA'S HARDEST PRISONS

Find out what goes on inside America’s most dangerous prisons. Visit the institutions where hardened criminals try to break all the rules every day and meet the prison officers who try to keep them in line.

Discover the stories behind the inmates who are kept there. For some, life on the inside is all they know. For others, only thoughts of their loved ones keep them on the right track. And for those who want to go straight, their biggest challenge comes when they try to make a new life on the outside.

The critically acclaimed America’s Hardest Prisons returns for another six-part series beginning with a guided tour of Stateville Correctional Facility, in Chicago, Illinois, by Sgt. Baldwin, a 16-year veteran. He expresses the importance of the outside world to inmates and how it keeps them sane. It turns out family, romance and friendship are the things that make life go around, even among ‘the worst of the worst’.

The series ends in Fremont Correctional Facility, one of Colorado’s largest and busiest prisons, and perhaps for both inmates and officers, one of its most complicated. About half of the state’s sex offenders are housed here and they make up 75 per cent of this facility’s population. Housing such a large number of these offenders in one place is a daunting challenge. Fremont must protect these potential victims inside, while preparing them for life outside the walls, for a society that often does not want them back.