Anyone who didn’t meet his target was forced back to the tunnel with the other shift and held there until the end of that shift with no food or rest at any given moment until they met their daily target. Police officers inflicted extraordinary violence to those prisoners who refused to enter the tunnel.

In the first years of the camp’s operation, in the years 1968-1971, there were four sleeping areas in Spaç, which were one-story barracks made of mixed concrete.Later in the camp, three-story sleeping areas were built, where every room housed 35 to 50 prisoners.Their number depended on the intake of arrests and political convictions pronounced by the regime. The sleeping areas’ routine was almost the same.That’s where prisoners passed most of their time after eight hours of exhausting work in Spaç’s mines.  Sleeping and waking hours were closely related to the three-shift timetable applied for work in the mine.

There was one room where the prisoners slept, particularly after going from one-story barracks to three-story ones, as the sketch indicates, which was full of these bunk beds connected to one another mainly in a U shape and equipped with wooden stairs to climb to the upper bed.Prisoners shared their common space with no separation between mattresses and when the number of prisoners increased, everybody had even less space to give room to the newcomers.

In Spaç’s tunnels, tragedies caused by accidents were frequent.    The main cause of accidents were technical conditions out of any standard as tunnels were secured with primitive methods.   Often, prison command, to meet the high targets of mineral extraction, forced prisoners to go and work in dangerous fronts, declared as such by engineers, too.   After the accidents, the wounded were mainly medicated in the premises of the camp infirmary.  Those who died were buried by prison command in a secred terrain.

In Spaç, there was poor quality food with no standards whatsoever.According to archival records and several testimonies collected among former prisoners, the food diet has changed frequently.Most of the time of its operation, however, daily quotas for prisoners working in Spaç’s mines were these:900 grams of bread per day.Breakfast included soup with seasonal vegetables, and sometimes a little meat.  Lunch was soup and a ladleful of pasta or rice with some meat.The standard was 40 grams of meat, but they were almost never provided with as much.Dinner was tea and 20 grams of feta cheese or, if there was no feta, 10 grams of typical yellow cheese and, in times of crisis, apple or fig marmalade.The first shift had the most normal food diet, whereas the two other shifts had tea for breakfast, soup for lunch and soup and rice or pasta for dinner.  This was adapted to their times of leaving for work and returning to the camp.Some archival documents, as well as many testimonies of former prisoners, record frequent food poisonings of prisoners.In a report dated 27th August 1979, prison command had complained for the poisoning of 150 prisoners.The most common symptoms were stomachaches and nausea.

In the first years of the camp’s operation, prisoners ate wherever they could, as there was no dedicated area to eat in.According to Shkëlqim Abazi’s testimony, prisoners gathered in groups and consumed their food wherever they could in the areas near the barracks serving as a kitchen.