[1] The Romanian People's Republic adhered to a doctrine of state atheism and the inmates who were held at Pitești Prison included religious believers, such as Christian seminarians.

[2][3] According to writer Romulus Rusan [ro], the experiment's goal was to re-educate prisoners to discard past religious convictions and ideology, and, eventually, to alter their personalities to the point of absolute obedience.

[4] Journalist and anti-communist activist Virgil Ierunca referred to the "reeducation experiment" as the largest and most intensive brainwashing torture program in the Eastern Bloc.

[18] Țurcanu, who was probably acting on the orders of Securitate deputy chief Alexandru Nikolski,[19] selected a tight unit of reeducation survivors as his assistants in carrying out political tasks.

[22] Guards would force them to attend scheduled or ad-hoc political instruction sessions, on topics such as dialectical materialism and Joseph Stalin's History of the CPSU(B) Short Course, usually accompanied by random violence and encouraged delation (demascare, lit.

[19] According to Virgil Ierunca (an anti-communist activist and member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania), Christian baptism was gruesomely mocked.

[23] Any prisoner who refused to become a perpetrator or who did not beat a former friend mercilessly was crushed by Țurcanu’s most brutal assistants — Steiner, Gherman, Pătrășcanu, Roșca, and Oprea.

[5] In addition to physical violence, inmates subject to "reeducation" were supposed to work for exhausting periods doing humiliating chores – for instance, cleaning the floor with a rag clenched between the teeth.

[27]: 208 [29] Historian Adrian Cioroianu argued that techniques used by the ODCC could have been ultimately derived from Anton Makarenko's controversial pedagogy and penology principles in respect to rehabilitation.

[19] Such connection was however disputed by historian Mihai Demetriade, who noted that similar cases of extreme violence within imprisoned Iron Guard groups existed before the advent of the communist regime.

[30] Literary critic Arleen Ionescu argues that, "although Makarenko's and Țurcanu's projects of engineering a New Man show structural analogies, the texture of the experience was very different.

"[31] The prison also ensured a preliminary selection for the labor camps at the Danube–Black Sea Canal, Ocnele Mari, and other sites, where squads of former inmates were supposed to extend the experiment.

[33] Responding to new ideological guidelines, the court concluded that the experiment had been the result of successful infiltration by American and Horia Sima's Iron Guard agents into the Securitate, with the goal of discrediting Romanian law enforcement.

[35] Abandoned and partially in ruin, the prison building was sold to a construction firm in 1991, after the Revolution of 1989; several of the facilities have either been torn down or underwent major changes.