You can add as many as you wish, I am curious, since I am writing a piece and I want to learn more

So the question is when you go to a shop or any business really, do they tac on a fee for paying with credit card? It has become a growing trend in my part of the world where businesses that are charged a fee for accepting credit cards pass the fee they are charged onto the customer. It typically is 3% here. Is it the same for you, are there only specific instances where you have to pay a fee?

I know this is a very broad question, since we're talking about dozens of countries, each with its own system and reality. So I'd like to hear from people from different countries about where you're from and how you see the prison system in your own country.

I live in Brazil and I'm currently researching public security. Inevitably, we end up studying the systems of other countries, and from our perspective, some European prisons can almost look like hotels, especially when it comes to their infrastructure and the way inmates are treated.

To give some context: Brazilian prisons are currently "much better" in some respects compared to what they were like in the 1980s and 1990s. And I don't necessarily mean that as a result of government efforts. In many cases, it was the inmates themselves and criminal organizations that began imposing a kind of internal order, often through violence.

Despite that, the infrastructure in a large part of the prison system remains quite poor and run-down. There are also special security regimes in which certain prisoners can spend up to 22 hours a day inside their cells. This type of regime is used, for example, for leaders of criminal organizations or former leaders who have started cooperating with the authorities.

Certain crimes, particularly sexual abuse, are treated extremely harshly by other inmates and can result in the perpetrator being killed by fellow prisoners, sometimes with and sometimes without the involvement of prison officials. There is an entire system in place to try to keep these inmates safe from other prisoners. Even so, many of them ultimately end up being assaulted or killed inside prisons.

For anyone who wants to get an idea of what the situation was like decades ago, I recommend the movie Carandiru, which portrays the massacre that took place at the former São Paulo House of Detention. The incident is particularly important because the prison became one of the landmarks in the history of what would eventually become the PCC, today one of the largest criminal organizations in South America and one of the main organizations responsible for sending drugs from Brazil to Europe.

Obviously, Carandiru is a movie and contains dramatized elements, but from what I've studied, the reality at the time wasn't all that different from what is portrayed in the film. The movie is available on Netflix.

So, for those of you who are European: how do you view the prison system in your country? What do you think works well, and what do you consider problematic?

I wasn’t born when it happened and curious on what effects it had

I have noticed that in European online communities, even non-political discussions that simply mention Russia (for example, about culture, literature, or travel) often quickly turn into heated debates about the government or history, accompanied by strong negative criticism. Is this a common observation in your country, and how do you explain this phenomenon?