February 20th, 2012 | 
Author: Hearing about the horrific fire at the Comayagua prison in Honduras last week, and the loss of at least 350 lives, sent me back to the few hours I spent in another Honduran prison.
This is what it felt like: Escape from New York meets Midnight Express.
I ended up inside the main prison in the pretty coastal town of La Ceiba in 1998.
For a series of articles, I was tracking down U.S. pedophiles who used the Central American country as their personal sexual playground. And I had heard that a Philadelphia elementary school teacher was incarcerated there.
He’d been found in a hotel room with naked, underage boys in 1996 and had yet to be charged with a crime.
So, I went to visit the teary-eyed teacher. Nervous ticks invaded his face. His teeth were rotting because of the lack of proper nutrition.
And he would have given up a limb for a shower.
His last one was minutes before he was nabbed.
While guards closed cell doors at night, inmates were let back out in the yard in the morning, he told me.
And he could move about the prison freely, unscathed by bully or gang members.
An artist in his spare time, the teacher had earned the respect of fellow inmates by sketching their faces.
So, he gave me the grand tour.
La Ceiba prison was a city within the city — a place with its own rules, power structure, trade and food vendors.
Yes, inmates in La Ceiba fed themselves with grilled bread and hot dogs or fried dough bought from other inmates who set up outdoors stands.
Those who wanted to eat needed cash sent by family or friends. The teacher’s folks in Pennsylvania sent him money, but by the time he paid off guards, he didn’t have much left.
“I lost 100 pounds since I’ve been in here,” the once portly inmate told me.
Because some of the 200-plus, mostly hardened criminals jailed in La Ceiba often were their families’ bread winners, some had their children and wives with them in prison during the day.
Women and children were kicked out at night, and often slept on the sidewalk across the street.
The prison was built like an old military fort: Residential quarters within thick walls surrounding a dusty courtyard the size of four football fields.
Like La Ceiba’s central square, the prison yard was a bustling center, a meeting point — except that here, misery seemed to be the currency.
Guards, I was told, rarely came into the courtyard. Indeed, I didn’t see anyone with a uniform during my time there.
What I saw were dozens of inmates wearing dirty, torn threads, many of them appearing malnourished, many of them walking around in a daze.
There was a soccer game in one corner of the yard with a ball made of compressed rags. Several players came up to me for the latest scores of Honduran soccer.
The teacher’s home was a 10-by-12 cell he shared with 68 other men — most of them drug gang members and several murderers — and an untold number of roaches and rats.
Everybody was able to fit in because they built their own bunk beds — seven high under the 15-foot ceiling. The higher the bed, the smaller the inmate, or the whole set up would collapse like a card castle.
The teacher was eventually released and seemingly returned to Philadelphia. He’s not responding to interview requests.
And he hasn’t been in touch with Richard Atkins, the American lawyer who represented him 1998. Atkins said he, too, thought of his former client when he heard about the fire.
“I have dealt with many Americans jailed around the world,” Atkins said, “and I remember that [his] incarceration was absolutely horrific. Unfortunately, prisons like those are the norm in many developing countries.
“He didn’t die in prison. Trust me, he could’ve.”
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