The average guard's salary rose from $14,400 in 1980 to $54,000 in 2002, almost twice the national average for a prison officer.One federal investigation reported last year that "rather than CDC staff correcting prisoners, some correctional officers acquire a prisoner's mentality: they form gangs, align with gangs, and spread the code of silence".
Worse, California's "correctional facilities" singularly fail to correct: three in four prisoners will be convicted of another crime within three years and three out of five will be back in prison.
The majority of women convicted in Moscow courts are taken to correctional colonies located between 200km and 500km from the capital.
Russia's "correctional colonies" are unlike any prisons in the west.
"He did a lot of threatening, hollering in my face, telling me I was gonna lose my kids, I wasn't going to never get out of prison," Johnson remembered of Zuley, 20 years later, from Logan correctional center in Lincoln, Illinois.
Speaking from Stateville correctional center, Griggs remembered Zuley and Abreu interrogating him.
The south-west corner of Mordovia, one of the constituent ethnic republics of the Russian Federation, is 400km away and I visited its three women's correctional colonies on a research trip in 2007-8.
The Federal Penal Service rejected a request from Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova to serve their remaining time in Moscow; given the high profile nature of their case, they are afraid for their safety in the communal environment of a correctional colony.
Some women's correctional colonies have nurseries for infants under the age of three.
They escaped in the early hours of Saturday morning from Clinton correctional facility, about 20 miles south of the Canadian border.
The penal service recognises that the remote location of its correctional colonies is a problem; its most recent solution is to suggest that prisoners talk with their loved ones by Skype.
