that offers the kind of privacy that we had never seen in the states. let me show you the bathroom. this is the standard bathroom for n unit. in an american prison, all the toilets are out in the open. in this prison, people could actually walk into their bathroom and shut a door and have privacy. translator: that s the law. one n block inmate, a 24-year-old, agreed to speak with us. he is serving a life sentence for murder and says his problems began after borrowing money from a friend to buy drugs. translator: i did not have money to pay my debt. he said he would help me to pay my debt but i have to go somewhere with him. i was stupid enough to pay my debt this way. the two men attempted to burglarize a home. translator: my job was to search the house and not to hurt anyone. nobody was supposed to beat this man.
on one busy downtown street is a flashpoint of warsaw s volatile past, mokotow prison. been to over 20 american prisons. they re usually located in remote areas far from cities for security reasons. so we re on these busy warsaw streets and we turn and these massive blue doors open up and we enter into this facility. and when we were inside and i was standing on prison grounds, i would look up and see apartment buildings surrounding us, businesses. the prison was built in 1904. it used to be called the place of no return. between world war ii and the fall of communism in 1989, it housed a countless number. of freedom fighters, many of whom were tortured and killed in mass executions.
he s knocked out, so he s out of the way. you know. but in reality it s different. the guy started to fight back. and then it turned into a knife fight. then it turned into a murder. i know that people say and write things about me. that i m a cold-blooded murderer but there is no such thing as a cold-blooded murderer because every time when you decide to take someone else s life, it is such a mental strain on you. it s so much stress. it s so hard on your nerves. there s just no way to describe it. bitterman escaped execution because of the nation s decision to abolish the death penalty. instead, he will spend nearly every hour of every day confined to a cell. life for some of the general population inmates offers a little more diversity. as our crew soon discovered. we were actually filming in another area of the prison. and we heard some music.
rehabilitative programs. more than we have ever encountered at any prison ever profiled on lockup. translator: we have a family school right inside the prison. they learn the basics of home making, how to cook, there is gardening, exercise, music programs. but arguably the most innovative program of all is the establishment of a mother/child living unit. this special unit allows inmates with clean behavior records to live full-time with their babies between 1 and 3 years old. it holds up to 15 mothers and 20 children and is the only one of its kind in the czech republic. translator: i have a daughter here, because i have no one on the outside to take care of her. i think the best thing for vanessa is to be with her mommy. nella is serving two years for armed robbery and related drug offenses. she was pregnant at the time of her conviction.
the monument on the prison wall honors the victims. there are probably over 1,000 people who had been tortured and executed at this prison during the various regimes. there were a number of staff members who made a comment to me that they felt they ve seen ghosts there, they have felt ghosts there, that there s just a weight of what has transpired at that particular prison. today, mokotow houses prisoners because of their crimes instead of their beliefs. it is a maximum security prison with more than 900 inmates, including some of the most notorious in poland. but officials claim they rarely have disruptions. that might be because the prison s elite special response team is always prepared for the worst. we were told ahead of time that they were going to have a demonstration for us from their special response team so we set up for it and we were prepared.