If it’s so great, why don’t *you* go there?


In the modern age, everything is content. Viewing the world through this lens gives you a bizarre, warped perspective — one that might encourage you to do stupid things like, I don’t know, film a dead body in the Japanese suicide forest or scamming your fans with a memecoin.


Recently, El Salvador is in the news because we keep intentionally and accidentally sending people there with no apparent method or desire to get them back. While news reports from these prisons describe them as effectively hell on earth — one French journalist dubbed CECOT a “tropical gulag” — influencers are here to tell you that, after visiting other prisons, maybe things aren’t so bad!



In the video above, for example, this creator will happily tell you that in the prison featured, workers can make clothes and perform other tasks in order to reduce their sentence. They can also learn new skills to better help them on the outside. How nice, right?


Well, though that might be nice in theory, it really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Sure, you might be able to reduce your sentence by working effectively for free, but that takes on a different weight once you learn that El Salvador has imprisoned around two percent of their population as part of a “gang crackdown,” and that many human rights groups have accused the nation of jailing innocent people. Not only that, but some have received sentences of hundreds of years, which makes the prospect of reducing one’s sentence through work a little less enticing.


That’s not even mentioning the accusations of “torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention, severe violations of due process and inhumane conditions, such as lack of access to adequate healthcare and food,” per Human Rights Watch.



But don’t think that you need to go down to Central America to see people fawning over prisons. Last year, YouTuber MrWhoseTheBoss put out a video entitled “I Entered World’s Highest Tech Prison,” in which he navigates one of the highest-tech prisons in Britain.


Despite being, you know, a prison, he reviews the place like it’s a tech product, ogling at its high-tech doors and drones that monitor the prisoners and saying hello to the dogs that will chase after the prisoners if they get out of line.


While this prison seems nicer than some of the world’s other prisons, it makes no mention of the fact that England and Wales have the highest rates of imprisonment in Western Europe — more than twice the rate of Germany’s, even though the U.K.’s crime rate is only slightly higher. But hey, why question why people end up there in the first place when you can just review a prison keyboard? It’s just like keyboards on the outside!


In short, if you’re an influencer in search of content, you don’t need to pop down to your local jailhouse. Just wait until you inevitably get arrested for doing some dumb shit yourself.