Names
Once a prisoner enters the prison, his or her original name is no longer used. Instead, the prisoners are referred by number. The number consists of two parts, with the first two digits indicating the year the prisoner was sent to Qincheng prison, while the remaining digits are the sequential number. For example, prisoner 6299 means that the prisoner was sent to the prison in 1962, while he or she was the 99th prisoner sent to Qincheng Prison that year.
Prison employees are also prohibited from referring to each other by name, instead, they are called according to their job title, such as manager, warden, and director. However, their last names are sometimes allowed to be added before their job title when they are addressed.
Read more about this topic: Qincheng Prison
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“I introduced her to Elena, and in that life-quickening atmosphere of a big railway station where everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished, the exchange of a few words was enough to enable two totally dissimilar women to start calling each other by their pet names the very next time they met.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling with forts like chestnut-burs, or Echinidæ, yet the police will not let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring- match on one of them, as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)