AP Photo

The drive to Prison No. 8 took about an hour from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, and we spent most of that time talking about colleges in California and traffic jams in Moscow, but not about Georgian prisons, which were hardly at the center of the national debate. This was in the summer of 2010, well before Georgian television showed videos of men being tortured at Prison No. 8, and well before those videos changed the course of this week’s national elections.

When only a quarter of the votes had been counted on Tuesday, it became clear just how much damage the prison scandal has done to President Mikheil Saakashvili: he was forced to concede his party’s defeat to an opposition party, which was formed only six months before the elections.