SPEAKER_04: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the Netherlands, about an hour and a half south of Amsterdam, there's a city called Breda. Like many Dutch towns, it has cozy narrow streets, canals, and plenty of bicycles. Last year, I moved all the way from an island in the far east of Russia to the medieval Dutch city.
SPEAKER_05: Here's producer Tatiana Kim.
SPEAKER_04: I'd never been to the Netherlands before. Moving to Europe was exciting.
SPEAKER_05: The contrast between this thousand-year-old Dutch town and the young city in Russia that I came from is striking. Instead of gray Soviet structures, I'm now surrounded by Gothic churches and narrow red brick houses. Something you see on the past cards that your friends sent from Europe. There's one historic building right in the middle of town that's really caught my eye. A big cylindrical structure, four stories tall, capped with this massive greenish-gray dome, nearly 125 feet up. And then, stepping inside the building, there's a wide open circular hole the size of half a football field. With a sprawling dome overhead, you feel like an ant trapped under a giant rice ball. Along the curved brick walls, there are heavy orange doors, more than 200 of them spread out evenly across the four floors.
SPEAKER_04: And behind most of these doors are small rooms that were once prison cells. When this place was first built in 1886, it was a penitentiary. But not a typical one. This was a panopticon.
SPEAKER_05: The panopticon might be the best-known prison concept in the world.
SPEAKER_04: In the original design, all the cells are built around a central guard tower, designed to maintain order just by making prisoners believe that they are constantly being watched. The panopticon design is more than 200 years old, and it still shows up in popular culture, like Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy.
SPEAKER_00: If we're going to get out of here, we're going to need to get into that watchtower.
SPEAKER_03: Look, it's 20 feet up in the air and it's in the middle of the most heavily guarded part of the prison. But the panopticon has turned into something way bigger than just a blueprint for penitentiaries. It's become the metaphor for the surveillance state.
SPEAKER_05: George Orwell's Big Brother, The Hunger Games, and The Handmaid's Tale, they've all been described as panoptic.
SPEAKER_04: In real life, when social critics talk about what it means to have cameras everywhere, the panopticon is always the metaphor of choice. Michel Foucault had probably the most popular take on the panopticon concept. He used it to warn society that what actually keeps all of us in check isn't necessarily that someone is watching you. It's just the feeling that someone might be watching you.
SPEAKER_05: But, as popular as it has become as an idea and a metaphor, relatively few real life prisons have come close to their original panopticon design. And one of the oldest is right here, in the middle of my new city. This giant cylindrical building that locals call the Cupol Fan Breda, the Dome of Breda.
SPEAKER_04: It closed as a prison back in 2014. Since then, Breda's dome has been repurposed and rented for hackathons, musicals, and wine tastings. On the building's website, there are pictures of the giant circular hall filled with smiling people dining by candlelight.
SPEAKER_05: The tables and chairs are covered in crisp white linen, surrounded by the heavy metal doors of the prison cells.
SPEAKER_04: When this building was completed more than 130 years ago, it was on the cutting edge of European penitentiary construction. This may seem hard to fathom today, but Dutch reformers and architects believed that they had created a humane way to prevent people from committing crimes. But instead of improving the prison system, it quickly became one of the cruelest forms of incarceration.
SPEAKER_05: The whole idea of mass incarceration began around the 16th century. Locking people up was seen as a vast improvement on the old system of public flogging, hangings, and beheadings. Netherlands was one of the first countries to introduce prisons actually in the world as an alternative to torture and to capital punishment and to corporal punishment.
SPEAKER_04: Rene von Swanigen teaches criminology at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He says, in the Netherlands at the time, reformers and politicians argued that idleness was a major source of criminality and social deviance. So the obvious cure was hard work, which would eradicate one's quote-unquote inter-criminal. In 1596, the Dutch began building what they called Teufthausen, or houses of correction.
SPEAKER_05: These were hard labor prison camps. They were based on the idea that work would correct the inmate by instilling discipline and morality. The philosophy of these prisons were written on the entrance gates. Wild beasts must be tamed.
SPEAKER_04: But the goal of actually rehabilitating inmates was quickly lost. The houses of correction devolved into just convenient sources of very cheap labor. And they were miserable places. People, criminals, they were locked up in big groups.
SPEAKER_05: Ross Flohr is a sociologist who has studied Dutch prison architecture. They had big rooms for where they ate, where they slept, where they worked.
SPEAKER_08: And in that period, the prison got the name the University of Crime.
SPEAKER_04: Since everyone was mixed together, these prisons became places where younger inmates were easily influenced by more seasoned criminals. Diseases spread quickly. The jails were so awful, mothers would bring their misbehaving kids to have a look, just to scare them straight. There was not, no individual cells.
SPEAKER_09: There were big cages, and like we go to the zoo, you could buy a ticket to go and watch people locked up.
SPEAKER_04: By the mid-19th century, it was clear that the houses of correction were not getting rid of crime. If anything, they were making it worse. And so Dutch reformers began looking for a new way to design prisons that wouldn't just punish inmates, but fundamentally change them.
SPEAKER_02: They found just the sort of idea they were looking for in the work of a French diplomat.
SPEAKER_04: Alexis de Tocqueville had traveled to the United States to study its penitentiaries.
SPEAKER_05: He visited one prison which at the time was based on a whole new model of incarceration. It was run by Quakers who believed that instead of locking prisoners up in huge cages, each individual should be kept in complete solitude. Only by being alone in their own cell would each prisoner be transformed into a pious citizen, ready to rejoin society.
SPEAKER_04: This novel approach was called solitary confinement. In today's prisons, especially in the U.S., solitary confinement is pure punishment, a prison within the prison. But in the 1800s, the Quakers thought that solitary confinement could actually be a key to healing and true religious penitence.
SPEAKER_05: Kind of like a monk, it was believed that isolation would bring the inmate closer to God. So you would be locked up with one book, guess what book? The Bible, obviously.
SPEAKER_09: And you were not allowed to talk, but you were to reflect upon your sins, basically.
SPEAKER_04: Back in France, Tocqueville co-authored a small but influential report about what he'd seen in U.S. prisons. His European readers saw this American model as a big improvement on their current system of locking people up together en masse in giant cages. They said, well, they do things more in a more humane way.
SPEAKER_09: And this was one of the lessons Tocqueville took back from the States, and then it spread all over Europe.
SPEAKER_04: Across the continent, solitary confinement got really popular, which led to a major design change, the rise of cellular prisons. Those buildings were very different. In the old type, you needed big, big rooms.
SPEAKER_08: And in the new type, you needed small cells for one person. And they thought by that way it could be possible to make people repent their crimes. The Netherlands was part of this wave of redesign.
SPEAKER_04: Solitary confinement was the new philosophy, and cellular prisons were its realization. That approach gave Dutch prison reformers the roadmap they needed in order to overhaul the nation's prisons.
SPEAKER_04: There wasn't enough space in the existing prisons to retrofit them with individual cells, so they'd have to build something completely new. In 1870, the Dutch government turned to one of its most experienced architects to help realize this vision.
SPEAKER_05: His name was Johan Frederik Metzler.
SPEAKER_04: Metzler was the head engineer for the Ministry of Justice. He'd already designed and built multiple prisons and courts throughout the Netherlands. For these new penitentiaries, Metzler had to create a design that would fit a lot of inmates, but give them each an individual cell and enough supervision.
SPEAKER_05: And each cell had to be strictly isolated from each other, allowing zero interaction between the inmates. He was drawn to a prison design idea that originated outside of the Netherlands. It was called a panopticon.
SPEAKER_04: Credit for the panopticon concept typically goes to British reformer Jeremy Bentham, but Philip Steadman, who has researched panopticons, says that's not quite right.
SPEAKER_07: His brother Samuel was the man who actually invented the idea. We think of Jeremy Bentham as the inventor of the panopticon, but he always says, I got the idea from my brother. Samuel Bentham first thought of the concept as a way to keep an eye on the man who worked for him.
SPEAKER_05: He told Jeremy about his idea for a circular workshop with a central tower where the manager would have a 360-degree view of his workers. Samuel's theory was that if the laborers even thought they were always being watched, they'd automatically be more productive. And you'd need fewer supervisors down on the shop floor. The idea that we're under constant surveillance seems familiar to many of us now.
SPEAKER_04: We just kind of accept that there are cameras and CCTV everywhere and that we're always being tracked on our computers at work. But back in the late 1700s, a design for watching so many people all at once in a way that Bentham hoped would make everyone more productive, this was a major innovation that could bring big economic benefits. Jeremy Bentham saw huge potential in panopticons.
SPEAKER_05: He envisioned circular schools, hospitals, asylums, and of course, prisons.
SPEAKER_04: But he wanted his panopticon to be different from his brother's idea. Jeremy was a social and legal reformer. He envisioned something that didn't just suit the needs of those who ran the place. Jeremy imagined a prison that would make inmates' lives better.
SPEAKER_07: Bentham wanted the panopticon to be a place where prisoners were trained in crafts, which they could then carry on when they left the prison and so on. So it was a reforming institution. In 1787, Bentham published a series of letters detailing how he wanted his panopticon prison to be designed and operated.
SPEAKER_05: First of all, he said it should be circular. And of course, he called for a guardhouse right in the middle so the jailer could see each and every prisoner at all times. Bentham hoped that this kind of constant surveillance would keep things orderly inside the penitentiary. He was very taken with the central idea of observation from the center.
SPEAKER_07: He thought this was a key idea, a very profound and powerful idea in architecture that would have a lot of influence.
SPEAKER_04: But Bentham was interested in more than just this centralized surveillance point that has become so synonymous with the panopticon. In his letters, he stressed another critical design feature – individual prison cells.
SPEAKER_05: He believed that isolating inmates was key to a functioning panopticon prison. Individual cells kept prisoners from fighting or conspiring to escape. It was easier for guards to keep an eye on inmates who were alone, making sure they did nothing but repent for their crimes.
SPEAKER_04: For Jeremy Bentham, isolation and centralized surveillance worked hand in hand. He said that inside a well-watched cellular panopticon, jailers would see the inmates as a multitude, though not a crowd, and the prisoners would be, he wrote, solitary and sequestered individuals.
SPEAKER_05: Bentham hired an architect to draft the design, which showed a building with large windows, a lot of light, and lots of internal mechanisms, which allowed the whole prison to operate like a well-oiled machine.
SPEAKER_07: You could think of the panopticon as a gadget. It was meant to have a lot of quite advanced technologies, not obviously CCTV, but the inspectors had speaking tubes, there was a supply of water to all the cells, there were lavatories in each of all the cells. They had means of getting hot meals up from the basement kitchens to the cells and so on. It was a very advanced building. It would have been.
SPEAKER_04: It would have been, because as passionate as he was about his circular prison, and as hard as he tried to get the British government to build one, Jeremy Bentham died in 1832 without ever seeing his panopticon prison completed.
SPEAKER_05: But several decades later, Dutch architect Johan Metzler picked up Bentham's ideas. He was drawn to the panopticon because it solved several practical concerns. One of the things Metzler liked most was the emphasis on individual cells, an ideal design for solitary confinement. Since the cells were arranged in circles, inmates would have minimal interaction.
SPEAKER_04: It was important to isolate the prisoners from each other. And in the round prison, your opposite neighbor is about 50 meters away from you. And it's very difficult to make a conversation then.
SPEAKER_08: Also, the panopticon was a cost-saving design. It would require less construction than a typical prison because there'd be no need for a separate church.
SPEAKER_04: The priest could just deliver his sermons from a central structure without the inmates ever leaving their cells.
SPEAKER_05: Plus, the prison was designed so it would take fewer people to run it. Today you would call it a business model, right? In the sense that you would try to economize on guards.
SPEAKER_05: You wouldn't need as many guards as the typical prison, because just the specter of constant surveillance would do a lot to maintain order. I always saw the panopticon as a very, let's say, economic measure. Try and construct a prison with a maximum overview of the cells and a minimum of staff to manage the prison.
SPEAKER_09: But Metzler wanted the new prisons to be more than just practical. Throughout his life as an architect, he often looked for ways to integrate art into his buildings.
SPEAKER_04: As strange as it may sound, he hoped to do the same thing with this prison. Metzler wanted to create something elegant. He pulled these artistic and practical considerations together and drew up plans.
SPEAKER_05: And in 1886, Johann Metzler finally managed to achieve what Jeremy Bentham could have only dreamed of. The 68-year-old Dutch architect completed Breda's panopticon.
SPEAKER_04: The domed prison became the first part of a large complex that grew to include a courthouse, a detention center, and a women's prison.
SPEAKER_05: Today, the buildings are still full of original details. Floral patterns carved into wooden panels. Intricate metal work and stone archways. The gatehouse looks like a castle. As soon as the panopticon was finished, prison officials opened it up to tours. The town's bourgeoisie would pay to go inside the circular building and stare up in amazement at Metzler's magnificent domed roof.
SPEAKER_04: By the end of the 19th century, prisons in the US and across Europe were being built with an emphasis on individual cells.
SPEAKER_05: These were expected to be penitentiaries in the truest sense. And the Dutch were among the first to take that concept and pull it off in the form of real, working panopticons. Three of them, actually, including Breda.
SPEAKER_04: When Breda's prison first opened, it filled up quickly. In the 19th century, just smuggling some butter across the border could land you a few days behind bars. There were 205 cells, each one just slightly smaller than an 11 by 11 foot room. The prison was very modern. There was central heating and even electricity.
SPEAKER_05: The inmates spent almost their entire days in their cells in complete solitude, eating, sleeping, reading their Bibles, and, theoretically, repenting for their crimes. In the very early prisons, you had one cell to yourself and you were not allowed to speak. If you went to work, you would wear a kind of bag over your head so nobody would recognize you. So solitary was solitary.
SPEAKER_04: The Dutch believed that this form of punishment was the best way to make criminals more fit for a God-fearing society. The Netherlands enthusiastically used solitary confinement to both discipline criminals and prevent crime. But by the early 1930s, about four decades after the Breda Dome prison first opened, people were realizing that this whole theory of rehabilitation was nonsense.
SPEAKER_05: The expensive, groundbreaking panopticon experiment in the Netherlands was actually a torturous disaster.
SPEAKER_04: Dutch researchers were finding that isolation wasn't rehabilitating anyone. Instead, it was causing severe mental illness and death among prisoners. Although this was a panopticon building, the main issue wasn't surveillance. It was solitary confinement. People do not really improve if you lock them up in solitary confinement with the Bible. They got crazy.
SPEAKER_09: It's been very hard to find personal accounts of the inmates who experienced the horrific conditions inside Breda. But prison administrators were reporting what we all know today.
SPEAKER_05: That solitary confinement is one of the cruelest and ugliest forms of punishment ever invented.
SPEAKER_08: And they say that there were quite some numbers of suicides in those prisons. So the criticisms of the system were growing in numbers through the years. But the Dutch government had spent a lot of money building prisons like Breda and wasn't eager to give up on them. So they stayed open.
SPEAKER_04: And then came World War II. When the sun rose on that fateful day, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Without warning or the slightest provocation, they unleashed upon their innocent nation...
SPEAKER_04: When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in 1940, they turned many Dutch penitentiaries into prisons for those who resisted the occupation.
SPEAKER_09: Most of the Dutch elites who do not want to collaborate with the German occupier, with the Nazis, ended up in prison.
SPEAKER_04: State officials, judges and lawmakers were all put behind bars. Obviously a pretty unusual situation. But those Dutch elite got to experience firsthand the sheer awfulness of prison. And people said, oh, what a hell holes these are. And they said, well, if the war is over, we're going to reform drastically the prison system, try to humanize it.
SPEAKER_05: After the war, Dutch leaders once again called for a transformation of the nation's prisons. This time, criminal law reformers pushed for alternatives to incarceration. Decriminalizations, certain things were decriminalized. Also, shorter sentencing, why sentence somebody through 20 years if 5 would do as well?
SPEAKER_09: The Dutch were also, once again, rewriting their laws to emphasize rehabilitation. This time, not by trying out a new and untested design theory, but instead by reducing the number of penitentiaries around the country.
SPEAKER_04: Because prisons is not inherently good. So you want to be creative and do something else.
SPEAKER_05: Starting in the early 1950s, the Dutch also began decreasing their use of solitary confinement. Inside of Breda, they got rid of strict isolation. They built spaces where inmates could interact, including a library, a gym, and several workshops. Formerly, they slept, they ate, and they worked in their cell. But later, they had rooms for eating, for sports, and for working in different buildings around the prison itself.
SPEAKER_08: More recent changes in Dutch law have led to an overall drop in the national prison population. In just 10 years, starting in 2007, the number of prisoners in the Netherlands fell 20%.
SPEAKER_04: Breda's prison was emptying out, and the building was falling apart. With so many vacant cells and a giant maintenance bill, in 2014, the Netherlands finally moved all remaining inmates out of the 130-year-old prison.
SPEAKER_05: A deafening silence. Breda prison is empty of inmates, like so many others in the Netherlands.
SPEAKER_05: After Breda's penitentiary closed as a prison, Dutch leaders hoped to repurpose the entire complex. They began rebranding the space with its giant panopticon dome as the Crown of Breda. The Dutch government put out a call for proposals for ways to reuse the entire facility. The place is huge, nearly 400,000 square feet, about seven football fields. And it's on prime real estate, right in the middle of downtown.
SPEAKER_04: While waiting for a buyer, it was rented for lots of things. Easily one of the most shocking was where you'd show up to the dome, put on an orange jumpsuit, and join hundreds of others in an immersive prison escape game.
SPEAKER_04: Last September, two companies with bigger ambitions for the space bought the entire complex, which covers more than eight acres. The new owners are planning to turn it into a small village, with green space offices and concert halls. But making any changes will not be easy. The prison has been designated a national monument, which seriously limits how much the structures can be modified. And city officials have asked the new owners to hold off on any renovations so that the space can be used immediately, not as some weird escape room, but as a shelter for Ukrainian refugees.
SPEAKER_05: Just outside the dome, there is an entryway decorated with welcome signs in Dutch, English, and Ukrainian. Inside the large circular hall, there is a glass floor and that epic dome roof. Wow, that is quite the space. From outside, it's hard to tell the dome is so big and impressive. It's just massive. Makes you feel really small, really. The Panoptikon building has preserved some questionable elements from the past. There are still bars on the windows, and the doors to the rooms where the refugees sleep cannot be locked from inside. But the space is actually pretty inviting. Today, there is a dining hall in the center. Sun pours in through the dome skylight and falls on cozy, armed chairs. There is a gym in the basement where refugees get together for yoga lessons and volleyball. I met one of the dome residents, a Ukrainian athlete named Katya. She is sharing her room with another woman from Ukraine. I asked her if it's weird to live with someone you just met. She smiles, and she says that having a roommate makes you feel less lonely.
SPEAKER_04: When Jeremy Bentham first designed the Panoptikon prison, he said he wanted it to be a place where people were treated well, where their lives might even be improved. But the failure of Breda's Panoptikon shows that there is just no such thing as a humane prison. As Bentham himself once wrote, All punishment is mischief. All punishment in itself is evil.
SPEAKER_05: So much thought went into ensuring strict solitude in the Breda prison. So it's ironic how much effort is going into using that exact same space to achieve the opposite goal, bringing people together and helping them feel safe and connected.
SPEAKER_04: Despite the cell doors and old iron bars and gates, Breda's Panoptikon has finally managed to become a truly humane place, but only after it stopped being a prison. Coming up after the break, when Breda was still operating as a prison, it had its own Shawshank Redemption moment. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts, even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices to their curated assortment of mid century modern coastal industrial and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the Geom sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more to claim visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
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SPEAKER_05: Tati. OK, what happened to Tati? So she had this family feud going on. And one day in 2006, when she was 32 years old, Tati came to visit the family and her brother and her new sister-in-law happened to be at that family gathering.
SPEAKER_05: So Tati, in the middle of the feud, stabbed her sister-in-law. And according to the judge, she also tried to hurt her brother with the same knife. As a result, she was convicted of double attempted murder and sentenced to eight years in prison. So what happens to Tati in Breda? So as soon as she got to Breda, she started to think how to get out of the prison from the very beginning. She's quite a smart person. She understands that in order for plan to succeed, she needs to know more about the environment.
SPEAKER_05: And she noticed that in the Breda, there is a rule that the most well-behaving prisoners are separated and rewarded by living in the so-called cottage. Oh, OK. So describe the cottage. So this is like outside of the dome?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. We mentioned in the podcast that Breda prison is not just the panopticon itself, but it's also several buildings on the complex. And so one of the structures is that cottage, it's the closest to the fence, actually. It's like a separate house.
SPEAKER_05: So it's much milder rules. They are checked upon only twice a day and that's it. For the rest of the day, they pretty much live on their own. And so, of course, Tati noticed that and she saw a great opportunity in that. She behaves her best. And she got to the point where she's transferred to the cottage and she's going around her duties. She's mopping the floor and she puts the mop on the floor and she hears the sound and she immediately thinks of the emptiness below her. OK. She notices that the floor underneath her is hollow. So there's something to go to.
SPEAKER_05: Right. And so she explores. She goes and she stomps the mop. She follows this hollow sound, which leads her to the kitchen. In the kitchen, she's looking for the opening and she eventually finds behind the laundry baskets a hatch, which can be opened easily. And there is some kind of a crawl space underneath that's quite big, but there are all kinds of pipes and valves in there. OK. And she goes inside this crawl space, but she finds out that it's enclosed. So in order to get out, she has to dig tunnel from that under the fence and out in the street. So the crawl space affords her a place to secretly dig a tunnel underneath the wall, which is pretty nearby the cottage.
SPEAKER_04: Right. So now she thinks about the tool and she found the perfect tool for herself, a paint scraper from the workshop.
SPEAKER_04: OK. So even with the paint scraper, how long did it take her to dig a tunnel? Oh, it took months. She only could do it in the nights while everybody is asleep.
SPEAKER_05: So Tati keeps digging and digging and she understands that once she's out, she will need an escape car, the getaway car.
SPEAKER_04: Right. Right. Because there has to be someone to meet her, because obviously, like, you can get yourself out of prison. But getting away from the prison is another huge hurdle.
SPEAKER_05: Right. And she has this friend and they met. There was a prisoner's visit where they could talk and Tati told her about the plan. And she said they agreed on the call. She said, once I'm close, I'm going to call you and tell you, hey, my cousin has a very big fight with her husband. Can you go to this house and calm her down and be with her? Be there at this hour that night. And that was their code word. And in order for Tati to understand how close she is to getting out, she used the crocheting needle to poke around. Oh, wow. OK. So they had access to crochet needles, which are, you know, long, metal.
SPEAKER_04: Right. And, you know, in Europe, you have all these cobblestones in the streets, all these cute, nice rocks in the surface of the streets.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And she thought if she pokes the needle up above her and she feels something hard, that must be the surface. That must be that cobblestone. That makes sense.
SPEAKER_04: And so she could tell that she was pretty close and could get out maybe that night if she if she kept digging. Right. So she's checked how far she is away from the surface with her needle. She has her getaway car. So there must be just one night that becomes the night to get out. So what happens on her final night? Yeah, that was the night of adventure.
SPEAKER_05: She was ready. She was poking with her needle and she found out, yes, there, the hard rock. I'm really close. So she rushes in. She makes a call to her friend. The woman said, yes, I'll be there at 3 a.m. just like you said. Todia rushes in and digs and then she made it. She comes out in the middle of the night at 3 a.m. in actually the middle of the city. I have to remind you that the Breda prison is in downtown. OK. She gets out and nothing. There is no getaway car. Oh, no. What happens then?
SPEAKER_04: She gets out and she figures that she needs to, if there is no getaway car scheduled, then she needs to find one.
SPEAKER_05: And she gets a taxi and asks the taxi to take her to another city. But then she admits to the driver that she doesn't have any ID. She doesn't have any money to pay him. And she's also just escaped the prison.
SPEAKER_04: That's one way to do it, I suppose. OK. Surprisingly, the driver didn't freak out or get her out of the car right away.
SPEAKER_05: He actually, after some convincing, he managed to get her to another city, to the safe place. And one of your friend finally gave her shelter in his cafe. So she sleeps a few nights in the coffee shop. But she's bored. She knows that she cannot go out to see people, but she's bored. She's finally out and she wants to talk to people. So she goes down and she meets nice men sitting and sipping coffee. And they really heated off. They start to talk. They really liked each other. And she moved to live with him.
SPEAKER_04: OK, so she's escaped from prison. She hides out in a coffee shop. She meets a man in the coffee shop. What is her life like? I mean, is she really on the run? And does she manage to enjoy her freedom while she's out? Or is she kind of paranoid and figures that they're looking for her all the time? She actually enjoys her life and her freedom for three full weeks before the SWAT team of the Dutch police kicks in the door of the apartment of her boyfriend.
SPEAKER_05: And I asked her as a fugitive, and they put her back in prison, not to Bratte to a different prison, where she served the remaining of her years. In the Netherlands, at least of that time that happened in 2010, the prisoners who escaped did not have added time to their prison sentence. So she serves out the rest of her sentence for two years?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: And then the guy whom she met and whom she lived with continues, even although he discovers the truth about her, he doesn't abandon her. He continues to visit her in prison, brings her little cakes and things that are not really allowed to be brought. And then she's telling him how to bring it to her and how to hide it. You got to let Tati be Tati.
SPEAKER_04: I guess.
SPEAKER_05: That continues, and after she's released in January 2012, she's officially a free person. And once she's a free person, she is living life to her full potential. She's back with this man. She's having a kid. And she's trying to reach out to Hollywood now and try to make – get a movie done about her. Well, this is so great, a little addendum to the story. Thank you so much, Tatiana. It's been so much fun.
SPEAKER_04: Thank you, Roman.
SPEAKER_04: We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful, uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. Or on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_02: And I'll see you next time. Bye.
SPEAKER_10: One and eight. That's how many people have worked at a McDonald's. Who serve millions the best Big Mac and best birthday party they've ever had. Who haven't just seen kids graduate from a Happy Meal, but have gotten help graduating themselves. Because they know the skills learned here.
SPEAKER_10: They can help you grow from here or keep growing here. One and eight start at McDonald's. And where you start stays with you.
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SPEAKER_06: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit. Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops. The same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops. Find the Loopy side.
