Emigration
The fourth and final text in our series on world prisons is dedicated to Denmark. This country is known for its advanced economic and social systems, where it would seem difficult to find oneself on the fringes of society. But what happens behind the facade of this prosperity, in the world of prisons, gangs, and drugs?
In a new interview for Nottoday, Artyom, a tattoo artist from Belarus, tells us what a madhouse and a Danish prison have in common, what happens if you clock a guard, and whether a hunger strike actually works in developed countries. Read on: Denmark as it really is.
Artyom, tattoo artist
— You’ve served several sentences in the prisons of both Belarus and Denmark. But today we’re talking about Denmark. How did you end up in a Danish prison? What happened? What were the charges?
— I’ll start from the beginning. I was traveling. I was heading from Copenhagen to Aalborg—I have a friend there. We met in a Belarusian prison. I did a great half-back tattoo for him back then, and that’s how we became friends. So he calls me and says: “Come down to my village in Denmark, you can stay with me.” Well, I figured it was a good idea to crash at his place, and I’d never been to Denmark, so off I went.
When the Danish “legals” (cops) picked me up, he wasn’t home; he had left the keys that day and driven off. Generally, I should say, I understood he wasn’t working construction, but I didn’t poke my nose into his business. I saw various guys coming to see him, and I’d just leave the house and walk around the neighborhood—which is beautiful in Denmark, I must say—why get involved in someone else’s affairs?
— What happened that day?
— I took the keys, rested, and went for a walk. I visited Christiania (a self-governing commune in the Christianshavn district of Copenhagen – Ed.) and filled my pockets with hashish. I came back, had a drink, got high, did my thing, put my headphones on—and fell asleep.
I wake up—through the music, I hear someone scratching. I look: the cops are shining a flashlight through the window, knocking, gesturing with their fingers. I open up and ask: “What do you want?” He answers in Danish, I answer in Russian—I don’t understand a damn thing, I tell them to get lost. Then they shout: “Open door! open door!” So I opened it.
They come in. “Who are you? Where from?” they ask. I say: “I came to stay the night at a friend’s, so I’m sleeping.” They go: “And what’s in the garage?” I’m like: “What *is* in the garage?” The cops immediately: “We have to arrest you”—and they cuff me. They didn’t let me call anyone. They took me to some temporary holding cell, just like the Belarusian ones, and then to prison. Turns out, there were stolen cars in the garage.
— How long did you have to sit there?
— According to their laws, they were supposed to hold me for two months to investigate—standard procedure, like in Belarus. I was sure they’d keep me for two months and let me go. It’s a normal democratic country, after all, and besides, I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I don’t even know how to drive. But in the end, they gave me 1 year and 3 months in prison.
— Why did it turn out that way if you had nothing to do with those cars?
— The judicial system there is very strange. You can be found guilty simply because the judge or the official felt like it; it sounded totally absurd to me. Before sentencing, the judge says to me: “Yes, we see there are no circumstances to convict you, and no evidence of your guilt… But we *feel* like you are connected to gang members, so we are arresting you.” I even showed them my geolocation—I wasn’t even near where those cars were stolen. The only thing connecting me was that they found me in that house after tracking the GPS tags on those damn cars. That’s it. And they take gang members seriously in Denmark. If they think you’re part of a gang, they don’t care about you—they’ll hand you a sentence immediately.
So I served a year of the sentence, and then I was deported to Poland because I had Polish documents. But Poland is another story, and fortunately, I never saw the inside of their prisons.
— Why were you deported? And why to Poland instead of Belarus?
— My documents were Polish. The attitude toward immigrants is like that; there’s a separate system for them. For example, they give you 10 years, and halfway through the term, you’re flown back to your homeland to serve the rest. It doesn’t matter if you were born in Denmark or not. Denmark isn’t going to pay for your upkeep.
I was in with a guy from Somalia who had never even been to Somalia in his life; he was born in Denmark, but his parents were immigrants. They slapped him with deportation, and he had no idea what to do; he was just walking around holding his head. You understand that life in Somalia and Europe has slightly different conditions, but the Danish system didn’t care—on paper, he wasn’t a Dane.
— You mentioned a strict attitude toward gang members; tell us about the gangs in Denmark and their place in the prisons.
— In Danish prisons, there are no “blatniye” (elite convicts) or “smotryashchiye” (prison overseers); there are gangs, and they have some serious shit going on, you know? Mostly they’re in for the drug business. Drugs are everywhere there.
And again, in Denmark, drugs are practically legalized. There’s this place—Christiania, you probably know it? Where a person can easily go buy weed or hash—plant-based drugs. They don’t sell hard stuff there. Using it there is a common thing; nothing happens to you.
— Is it hard to get hard drugs in Denmark?
— No, not hard. The youth are all on cocaine; they have enough money to sniff it.
— Let’s get back to prisons and gangs.
— Prison is where the gang leaders and members of all sorts of gangs from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden end up. It’s the Wild West, real movie stuff. There are gangs like the Hell’s Angels and the Comanches—you know, like in Sons of Anarchy. And all this happens in Denmark. They beat up prosecutors, they beat up cops. They have real wars between gangs, and it’s all for real.
It was wild for me to realize this. I always thought: Europe, Denmark—rich countries, social systems so good that if you’re a Dane, you’ll never have it rough. Insane welfare checks. But it turns out: where the money is, the gangs are, selling coke. And if there’s a market, there will be gangs. And there are many of them. They fight each other, they seize territories.
Even Christiania hasn’t been the same for a long time. No hippies, no marginalized people—it’s all the gang market now. The gangs push the hash and the rest. It was in the second prison that I ran into all these gangsters. They are reasonable, crazy in their own way, but interesting.
— You served time in three different prisons. Tell us about them and how that happened.
— Yeah, three. The first prison in Denmark was more like a madhouse, in Holstebro. They bring me there, and there are only 10 cells across two floors. It looked more like a country house. Only 11 people were in there, guarded by two cops.
It was almost exclusively Danes. The only person I could talk to at all was a Pole. The cops realized I wouldn’t speak to them in English or Danish. So they ask: “Pole?” since my documents were Polish and they don’t really distinguish between a Pole, a Belarusian, a Ukrainian, or a Russian. I say: “Yeah, Pole.” So they put us on the same floor: “A Pole with a Pole, let them talk.” We found a common language right away.
There were two other odd characters on the floor. One lady who wanted to kill a priest, and someone else from Denmark for something similar. You really feel more like you’re in a psychiatric ward. The cells are all singles, like hospital rooms; they feed you sleeping pills, and every time you go for a walk, it’s with different people.
— Singles? It’s not like in Belarus, 20 people to a cell? And why the sleeping pills?
— Who knows why they do it, probably so people aren’t violent. And the cells… it’s nothing like Belarus. To give you an idea, all cells are singles, occasionally for two people, and they look like rooms in a hostel. Rooms are 2×2 or 2×4 meters. You have a bed, a good one, with a mattress. They wash the linens once a week. There’s a sink, a fridge, a TV, a shelf, a table, a lamp—just like a hostel. Essentially, it’s a single room.
The Pole I was talking to said right away: “This isn’t a prison, it’s a madhouse.” And that’s how it was—everyone is stuffed with these pills. Everyone walks around high. If you take the pills—that’s it, you’re fine, it doesn’t even matter where you are.
I was in that first prison for about a month. I started having serious problems with the cops. They took a dislike to me. Because, you know, I’d been in prison in Belarus before; I have my own prison habits. And here they are, all polite and smiling. And I’m sitting there having no idea what I’m doing there or why I was detained. So I kicked up a fuss.
— What happened, and how did the cops and administration react?
— I started causing a real scene. One of the cops turned out to be a racist—they even called for back-up from the outside. Three shifts of them arrived; they only opened my cell then. You want to know how the authorities reacted? The prison warden lunged at me, started choking me, spitting and screaming: “I told you, you bitch, if you cause problems, I’ll get rid of you!” I put my hands up and laughed: “No problem, I won’t resist, why the fuck would I want you to crush me here?” But he kept spitting and choking.
Actually, there’s plenty of racism in Danish prisons. There were cases where the cops would say openly: “So what’s next? You going to a prostitute now, to your Lukashenko?” stuff like that. And something went down with that racist cop; I asked him for something, human to human. And he goes: “If you want to say something to me, you have to say it in Danish.” I’d noticed a lot of nasty behavior from them already. Well, that was it—I knocked him out. The cops flew in, immobilized me, tossed me in a car, and took me to a stricter prison. That’s their system. If you cause trouble, they take you to a stricter one.
— Tell us about the second and third prisons you were in.
— The second one was like an American prison—oval-shaped, but also small, maybe 90 or 100 people. Three floors, lots of exercise yards. It reminded me of the “Amerikanka” in the Grodno prison—those who know, know. Honestly, regarding conflicts with the cops, I had several.
The first was in the first prison—the madhouse—with that racist. In the second one, there was trouble too. First, when I was transferred from the first prison, they didn’t bring my stuff at all—my drawings and other things I was working on. I started kicking up a fuss again. I said: “Where’s my stuff?” They go: “Yeah, yeah, we’ll look into it.”
After a while, I realized they weren’t going to look into it. Plus, they wouldn’t let me contact anyone at all. Every day I asked: “At least let me call someone!” Just three words, so they know I’m in prison. But they didn’t give a shit. So I started demanding to be allowed to communicate, and I went on my first hunger strike. They fulfilled my conditions then.
— Didn’t they provide a lawyer or one phone call?
— Let’s get back to the hunger strikes. You said there were two; tell us about the second one.
— Yeah, the second hunger strike, after which they moved me to the third prison, the high-security one where the gangs are… By the way, when I got to that third prison, I was shocked. It’s the Wild West. It’s exactly like in the movies. Real talk. Everyone has Lamborghinis, Bugattis—I saw their photos… the money they have—they deal in billions, millions. They’re running cocaine across the sea, you know? Danish documents give them a ton of opportunities. It’s absolutely insane.
— But tell us about the hunger strike. How do you go on hunger strike in Denmark? Did it get results?
— Yes, it did. In the second prison, as I said, there were two. The first was because they wouldn’t explain why I was being held and didn’t transfer my things. They walked around for a week pretending not to notice me.
I didn’t take the rations; I threw them out of the cell. I said: “I don’t need your fucking food, don’t bother.” After a week they come in: “Why haven’t you eaten for so long? What’s the issue?” I explain: “I want to contact someone, preferably with a translator, so you understand me correctly.” And that was it—they started moving. They let me make contact and gave me a lawyer to explain why I was even sitting there.
Before that, I had some paper in Danish that made no sense. They didn’t let me keep it, and no one translated it. But after the hunger strike, they brought it. And when they translated it for me, it still made no sense. Based on the contents, they just locked me up—period. For what, for what business—nothing was written, and there were no other papers. Total bullshit. The paper just formally said I was arrested.
— How long did you fast?
— The first hunger strike lasted two weeks, and they brought me the paper and the lawyer. But then there was a second round, more serious. The reason was the same: “Why am I sitting here?” Even though I unlocked everything for them, they didn’t let me out. I said: “Here are my phones, look at the geolocation, here are the Google passwords, check it—I have nothing to hide.” I truly realized that if I’d gotten into this mess in Belarus, they’d have let me out in a week saying: “Don’t hang out with idiots.” But here they told me: “Everything is fine in Denmark, you should be out in two months.” Because that’s their system: if they hold you and it turns out you’re innocent, they pay compensation for every day. They aren’t interested in that; nobody wants to pay for you. But they still didn’t let me go.
During the second hunger strike, my health went south, and they took me to a hospital in Copenhagen. And after the hospital, they took me straight to the island of Funen. But it’s not a tiny island; it’s a big one with several cities, and the strictest prison is there. That’s where the gangs are—the most hardened bastards. But in fact, that prison turned out to be cool—meaning, normal—where actual criminals sit, who are reasonable people. So that’s how I ended up in the third prison. In those other two I told you about, there were just some bizarre characters that made you hold your head in your hands.