This is why you don’t let women read books or give inmates their own personal TV sets: it puts ideas into their heads.
Back in the first half of “Breaking Bad” season five when Mike was still alive (R.I.P.), he handcuffed Walter White to a pipe and left him there. But since Walter White is Walter White, he figured out how to escape in approximately three minutes.
Walt took an electrical cord from a coffeemaker, bit off the end and used the wire to burn through metal plastic handcuffs until it fried his skin.
Some intrepid inmates in a Queensland, Australia prison used Walt’s electrical cord trick to light cigarettes, ruining about 400 televisions in the process, the Courier Mail reports.
Prisoners at Lotus Glen are charged just two dollars per week to keep TVs in their cells, because it is considered a “basic human right.” (Author’s note: WTF, I can’t even afford to have a TV in my own room.)
Smoking cigarettes, however, is not considered a basic human right, so inmates used Walt’s trick and used the electrical cords from their personal televisions to light cigarettes.
The Courier Mail explains that the “technique of turning an electrical cable into a blowtorch was popularised in hit US television drama ‘Breaking Bad,’ when anti-hero Walter White (Bryan Cranston) used the cable from an electric coffee pot to burn through a wrist tie.”
Don’t worry, the Queensland Corrective Services is on it! Instead of banning TVs altogether, they plan to “introduce a trial system to make inmates pay a $30 bond to have a set in their room, although all inmates would still have access to them in common areas until the 6pm lock-up time.”
An Australian criminologist noted, “If they don’t ensure that they allow basic human rights it makes it difficult to control the [prison] population.”