Placed on trial, he defended his actions and provided his famous "History Will Absolve Me" speech, before being sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment in the Model Prison on the Isla de Pinos.
When Arne Nilsen, the governor of Norway's Bastoy prison, told me that his prison was "an arena of developing responsibility" I knew immediately that he understood the fundamental flaw in the traditional model of imprisonment: the taking away of almost all personal responsibility.
Instead, their treatment at the hands of criminal justice agencies is increasingly punitive, following male models of imprisonment as punishment, regardless of the offence, background, vulnerability or family circumstances of the woman involved.
Inside, you can see the grim conditions of Ai's 2011 imprisonment: these half-scale models of his prison – he was forbidden to discuss it, but remembered the place down to the smallest detail – show scenes of his nightmarish life there.
And if the idea of a convicted criminal nipping out of prison to go to the pictures wasn't ludicrous enough, take a look at the case of Manu Sharma, the son of a politician, who is serving life imprisonment for shooting dead a model named Jessica Lal because she refused to serve him a drink at a party.
The bottom-line lesson for all media is that business models built on imprisonment, on making us do what you want us to do because you give us no choice, is no strategy for the future.
On May 2nd Yasser Arafat was released from his imprisonment in Ramallah, courtesy of a model he wants applied throughout the occupied territories: the insertion of foreign security men.
We're at the end of the tough-on-crime cycle now, and there's hope that a kinder and smarter approach to imprisonment will replace replace the draconian model.
Even though we did not find statistical association with health care workers and history of imprisonment; we forced them into the model, because these variables have been associated with resistant TB [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24].
The loosening of these policies is required if we, as a society, are to end the era of astoundingly high rates of imprisonment and move to a more effective model of rehabilitation.
