Exercise
Prisoners cannot earn the right to exercise immediately after entering the prison; they are only given the right later on. The frequency of exercise permitted for each prisoner may vary from once a day, to once a week. Officially, these prisoners are allowed to walk and exercise in the courtyards for a minimum of 20 minutes and a maximum of an hour. The actual times vary depending on the weather, the number of prisoners, and other factors.
Because of the special status of prisoners in Qincheng Prison, each prisoner is only allowed to exercise alone. Prisoners cannot see any other prisoners due to the high walls, and they are not allowed to see any other prisoners while they are in the jail house. If two prisoners are released from their cells to exercise and they meet each other, one is ordered to back to his or her cell to wait until the other prisoner is gone.
During prolonged solitary confinement during the Cultural Revolution, calcium deficiencies would result from the lack of exposure to sunlight. Many prisoners would lose their hair and teeth, and developed many other health problems. Prisoners jailed during the Cultural Revolution often had permanent disabilities after their release.
Read more about this topic: Qincheng Prison
Famous quotes containing the word exercise:
“I will have no Parsons around me but such as drink deep, ride to Hounds and caress the Wives and Daughters of their Parishioners. A Virtuous Parson does nothing to test or exercise the Faith of his Flock.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Chaucer sawed life in half and out tumbled hundreds of unpremeditated lives, because he didn’t have the cast-iron grid of a priori coherence that makes reading Goethe, Shakespeare, or Dante an exercise in searching for signs of life among the conventions, compulsions, self-justifications, proofs, wise saws, simple but powerful messages, and poetry.”
—Marvin Mudrick (1921–1986)
“When a girl of today leaves school or college and looks about her for material upon which to exercise her trained intelligence, there are a hundred things that force themselves upon her attention as more vital and necessary than mastering the housewife.”
—Cornelia Atwood Pratt, U.S. author, women’s magazine contributor. The Delineator: A Journal of Fashion, Culture and Fine Arts (January 1900)