Yelp Reviews of Bay Area Jails and Prisons Reveal Helpful Insider Tips

NBC Bay Area ^ | 4/9 | Tamara Palmer

[nickcarraway]

eading restaurant reviews on Yelp is a popular local pastime, but the site's reviews of local jails, police stations and prisons are a much more fertile source of page-turning insight from the inside.

"What is this, Belfast in 1970?" asks one user in a review of Santa Rita Jail in Dublin. Their writeup contains a useful warning to wear layers to your next protest or drunk evening out because they say the holding cells at Santa Rita are "freezing and squalid." Oh, and you'll probably lose your shoelaces as well.

Potential minor law-breakers in the Mission District might similarly like to know that the police station there has, according to another Yelper, "the cleanest public restrooms in the Mission!"

And then there's this gem about San Quentin: "Apparently it's not just for murderers."

[nickcarraway]

Isn’t this what you were asking me about the other night?

[Dilbert San Diego]

Yelp reviews of jails and prisons??? Really???

Can I make the observation that, if you find yourself in trouble with the law, you don’t exactly get a choice of where you will be sent??? What are you going to do as you get arrested, tell the cop you are checking Yelp, and ask to be taken to the most recommended jail??? Really???

[Laslo Fripp]

So that “Get Directions” link is unnecessary?

[doorgunner69]

Well, this could be a real hit on the homosexual websites for "gay-friendly" vacation spots.

Certainly plenty of action for them at these places. I hear they get really excited about "rough trade"?

[nickcarraway]

I guess it would be good to know who the COs to stay away from where.

[wardaddy]

Avoid urban jails....big problem for little cracker.

Avoid most state penitentiaries .....especially southern farm systems and big houses

And New Mexico and Illinois and Ohio

And for sure maximum level old school United States Penitentiaries like Atlanta USP or Lewisburg USP or Terre Haute USP or Marion USP or Lompoc USP

The old McNeil Island was rough they say....closed in 81

and if that ain’t enough avoid Bahamian prison

I had a buddy sit in Fox Hill 3 years...a dungeon.....crap and piss in a bucket.....shower monthly with fire hose.....porridge porridge and porridge.....for dope smuggling by air in Exumas.....in a place where most officials took bribes

Yours truly narrowly escaped the Hatian Guarde Nacional back in 89 or I might have landed in the old National Penitentiary on Champ Des Mars

A black hole of dead starving souls

My offense.....punching a Hatian person of note in the nose on the cafe veranda at the now pancaked Hotel Montana in Petionville when he refused to pay for his last 10,000 bags of cement from Chichiriviche VZ

avoid jail....but sometimes it just happens

Sounds kinda gay in San Fwan

[Rodamala]

Reminds me of the book review I posted here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3199467/posts?page=4#4

[exDemMom]

OMG, that book review is priceless!

[olepap]

LA Country Jail was a hellhole back in the ‘70’s. Guy were getting ‘hung up’, stabbed and thrown off the tiers every night. The Crips ruled the jail.

[Rodamala]

I know... I am glad I thought to capture it and repost it in full form with the link to the writer's amazon.com profile and even the font colors. Amazon took it down. I was pissed when they did. Most creative and hilarious book review ever... and the targetted tome, with it's Godless self-help claptrap "Course in Miracles" secularized ripoff of Norman Vincent Peale's work, deserves ridicule.

Always be Jim, never Marcus.

[Trillian]

That was hilarious!