WTF Fun Fact 12895 – The Mumbai Thief Punished With Bananas

Bananas are very nutritious, and they can often help with constipation. But we’ve never seen them employed as a laxative punishment.

It all happened in Mumbai, India back in 2016…

The thief and the bananas

Indian police caught a thief who had allegedly stolen a gold chain from a woman on the street in Mumbai. In order to conceal any crime, the thief decided to swallow the gold chain.

Of course, we now have ways of checking to see if there’s a gold chain in someone’s stomach, so police had his stomach X-rayed at the hospital to reveal that the gold chain was indeed inside him. An enema was administered but yielded no results.

And THEN came the uncomfortable part.

Rather than let nature take its course, the police wanted to retrieve the chain more quickly. So they force-fed the man over 40 bananas.

Bananas are one of the best foods to help with digestion since the carbohydrates they contain are easily broken down by the body. And if someone’s not feeling well (say, after swallowing a necklace), bananas are a gentle way of easing stomach pain. Of course, the point here was to use them as a laxative.

The banana aftermath

According to The Guardian (cited below), “Doctors suggested performing an operation, but police officers decided it would be too expensive and opted instead for the bananas.”

Mandatory surgery seems pretty darn drastic! So in this case the bananas were the less extreme option.

It’s unclear if the police used a technique other than simply mandating the man eat the bananas behind bars. A senior inspector with Mumbai police named Shankar Dhanavade said “He was fed more than 40 bananas throughout the day,” so that’s all we know.

The 25-year-old man eventually passed the chain – and we’re happy not to have the gruesome details of that part. What we do know is that the police made the man wash and disinfect the chain before handing it over.

A not-so-rare approach

Apparently, banana-feeding is not a rare occurrence in Mumbai (perhaps because swallowing allegedly stolen jewelry happened more often than you’d think).

The Guardian noted that “According to reports, it was not the first time Mumbai police had used this technique in order to recover a stolen item. In July last year, a chain was retrieved after a thief was made to eat two-dozen bananas and drink several litres of milk laced with laxatives, the Hindustan Times reported. In April, a thief was fed five-dozen bananas after swallowing a gold chain with a large pendant. The thief successfully excreted the loot, but the disgusted victim refused to touch it and instead took it to a jeweller in a plastic bag, the newspaper said.”

In case you skimmed that, it said 5 DOZEN bananas and a LARGE pendant. We’re pretty sure that thief never wanted to swallow anything again after that traumatic episode! And while we can’t be sure, we also imagine he never wanted to eat another banana again after that.

While we don’t advocate swallowing jewelry, we are now considering adding more bananas to our diet – in moderation, of course.  WTF fun facts

Source: “Indian police force feed 40 bananas to thief who swallowed gold chain” — The Guardian

WTF Fun Fact 12632 – The Penal Treadmill

If spending time on the treadmill feels like cruel and unusual punishment, that’s because it was designed to be. Prisoners were supposed to learn from their sweat, and the machines would typically power a mill or a water pump of some sort.

The “treadwheel” was invented by engineer William Cubitt and was first installed in London’s Brixton Prison. Prisoners would press down their feet on steps (sounds more like an elliptical!) that would cause a wheel to turn and ground corn.

Now, maybe you think it wasn’t so bad if you choose to walk on a treadmill today, but not only were there partitions between the (up to 24!) prisoners on the treadmill, but they were put on the machine for hours—ten hours in the summer and 7 in the winter.

When the British began to “reform” their prisons, they were concerned that the poor would use them to get free meals and a place to sleep, so they felt like they needed to deter them. Hence the punishment.

Eventually, the treadmills were no longer used to power machines and were merely an instrument of punishment…or some would (and did) say torture.

By 1842, 109 out of 200 prisons in the UK were making prisoners “work the treadmill.” But eventually, people began to see them for what they were, and by 1901, only 13 remained. Of course, they also exported the idea to America, which had four prison treadmills.

Eventually, prisons converted their work to a factory model, ostensibly to teach prisoners practical skills while incarcerated in the name of rehabilitation.

According to JSTOR Daily:

“It resurfaced in 1913 with a U.S. patent for a “training-machine.” In the 1960s, the American mechanical engineer William Staub created a home fitness machine called the PaceMaster 600. He began manufacturing home treadmills in New Jersey. (He used it often himself, right up until the months before his death at the age of 96.) Now, it’s the top selling piece of exercise equipment in the U.S.” – WTF fun facts

Source: “Treadmills Were Meant to Be Atonement Machines” — JSTOR Daily