Officers are outside the door yelling, “Uncover your window” over and over. I don’t respond. I am sitting on my bunk with a wet towel tied over my nose and mouth. Everything that needed to be said was already said. This is all that I have left. Voices echo in the dim warehouse of C-4 pod here at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia. Prisoners yell, bang, kick their doors in angry solidarity, in protest to what is again playing out. We are not new to this. We all hear the what. We all know the who and why. We all dread our turn behind the covered window.
Those officers that get assigned to C-Building, where Red Onion hides its solitary confinement pods, are the lost causes. They are those officers who have caused so much conflict in general population that other officers don’t want to work with them. Those same officers, who have been written up by prisoners in so many complaints, that even this place, with its legacy of cruel and unusual treatment of humans, has decided that they are not fit to work with general population. In solitary confinement, those same officers are free to be petty and childish and attention-seeking with no oversight. In solitary, prisoners are confined to their cells for 23 or 24 hours per day, so these officers are safe to speak and do as they please. These same officers are the people I depend on for everything. They serve my food, they pass me the telephone, they alert the medical department that I am in need of assistance in an emergency situation. Or, if they so choose, they do none of those things. One such officer is outside my door. He is the cause of the covered window. He is the cause of many covered windows. It is near the 6:00 shift change, and no one can go home until this issue has been resolved. We prisoners know this. The timing is not accidental.
In solitary confinement, a door with its window covered is considered a security violation. The institutional infraction is titled “Tampering With A Security Device.” It is a 100-series infraction. By comparison, an assault on a prisoner is a 200 series. 100 is to 200 as felony is to misdemeanor. Officers with some conflict resolution skills will come to the door and ask at the covered window, “What’s going on?” “Talk to me,” they will say. When that doesn’t work they will knock, bang, or kick on the cell door. They will lose their civil tone. They will revert to commands that the window be uncovered. Threats will follow. When no response comes a supervisor, ranked sergeant or higher, will be summoned.
Supervisors wear body cameras on their uniforms. Sometimes they will even turn them on. If the cell window remains covered, even after the supervisor has ordered the window be uncovered, Supervisor Williams then send another officer to fetch a handheld camera. This other officer will hold the handheld camera. The supervisor will identify himself, he will identify the prisoner, the time, date, and location. The supervisor will order the prisoner to uncover the window for the handheld camera. If the window is not uncovered, the supervisor will tell the camera that gas will now be deployed.
The supervisor will open the door to the pipe closet that accesses the noncompliant prisoner’s cell vents. He will spray a foot tall tank of tear gas through the air vent into the prisoner’s cell. Then the officers will wait while the prisoner suffers. If the suffering prisoner still does not uncover the window another canister of tear gas will be emptied into the same prisoner’s air vent. More waiting. More suffering. I have seen four tanks emptied into one cell.
Four cells share the same air vents. Two on top, two on bottom. Those vents are so well connected that if one prisoner speaks into his own vent all four cells can hear him clearly. The vents are connected, so spraying one cell is the same as spraying all four cells. I sit inside my cell after the second spraying, unmoved. I carefully inhale through the wet cloth over my nose and blow it out through my mouth. The smell is like gasoline and hot sauce. I am careful not to cough because I don’t want them to know that I am suffering. The officers cough outside my cell. I can hear the supervisor speaking to the handheld camera saying that the gas has been deployed but the “inmate has not uncovered his window.”
What will not be spoken into the handheld camera is any mention of the incident that incited a man to jeopardize his health and safety in this way. There will be no record made that might cause any officer to rethink his oppression of the men in the cells. No records will be generated that might hold an officer accountable for his own actions. No. That will be left up to the prisoner behind the covered window.
The front entrance to the pod opens and closes. The number of voices multiply. Hard plastic clicks against hard plastic. The conversation between the coughing and sneezing officers is excited and upbeat. The static sizzle of raw electricity crackles, again, for a solid two-second-long burst. This is the final threat to a prisoner who would dare defy the orders of a corrections officer. This is the next step for those who won’t comply. No matter what the reason for a prisoner’s noncompliance, the response will be the same. If a man is on his floor unconscious or experiencing a mental health emergency the response will be the same. I sit on my bunk breathing through my wet towel mask, eyes closed against the cloud of poison inside my cell.
The “goon squad” is a collection of the biggest officers available at that time in Red Onion. The goon squad will soon converge on C-4 pod. They will put on hard plastic shoulder pads with chest plates and back plates, helmets with clear plastic face guards, gloves, and knee and elbow pads. When they are all equipped and ready, seven of them will line up outside the cell door. The motor above the door will be disengaged so that the door can be pulled open with no resistance. When the motor is disengaged, one officer will yank the door open. Another officer will rush into the noncompliant prisoner’s cell carrying a four-foot-tall, two-foot-wide shield. A special shield. This shield has a battery. It is clear plastic with four copper strips inside it that run from its top to its bottom. These strips connect to two metal prongs halfway up the shield’s face. When the goon squad charges into the noncompliant prisoner’s cell, the two metal prongs will throw a bright blue arc of electricity between the two metal prongs that will electrocute the prisoner. The shield is nicknamed the shock shield. It is a very powerful, giant taser. The officer carrying the shield into the cell is usually the biggest of them all. He will be followed into the noncompliant prisoner’s cell by six other shield-less officers all in the same riot gear.
Before that happens the prisoners in all twenty-two cells will be coughing. Prisoners in the adjoining pods will have the unmistakable smell of the teargas in their cells. Some of them will have eye irritation and sneezing. Some will have worse. I am on my feet awaiting the sound of the thump. The thump comes when the motor above the cell door is disengaged. The thump comes before the bang of the cell door being thrown open. When the door is open, the officers will rush in, the shock shield will crackle, it will shock. The giant officers will all rush into an 11 by 7-foot, cement-floored, cement-walled cell. There will be a struggle: punching, kicking, poking, twisting, yelling of “Stop resisting!,” whether there is resistance or not, and finally the ratcheting of too-tight handcuffs and shackles. The officers will cough the most. I know all this from previous cell extractions. My own and others. We all know how it goes. We all hate that it must go. One final warning is issued. The supervisor speaks into the handheld camera explaining that a cell extraction is about to happen. Explaining that this Department of Corrections-approved physical assault is about of commence. The motor clicks. The door booms, slammed open. Rushing boots, yelling blends with the thumps and bumps of close-quartered gang violence. The sounds don’t last long, thankfully. A few seconds of coughing and grumbling follows.
“Get him up,” the Supervisor says.
The prisoner in the cell below my own is escorted from his cell. An officer has his hand on the prisoner’s head pushing it down, for no obvious reason. The prisoner is handcuffed and shackled. His t-shirt is ripped. His shoes are missing. He is first dragged to the shower for a pretend rinse off of the fire spray. The rinse will be short and ineffectual. The prisoner is then taken to a seat at a metal table. An officer in riot armor forces him down onto the small round seat. His head is forced down so he faces the dull metal tabletop when he is seated for no obvious reason. Twelve officers crowd around him, too closely.
A QMHP (“Qualified Mental Health Professional”) has been waiting while this prisoner has endured the cell extraction. The QMHP has stood by laughing with the other officers the entire time. When the prisoner is beaten and subdued, handcuffed, shackled, burning from mace and forced to bow his head before the overwhelming presence of officers at and above him, the QMHP will then ask him if he needs to speak with her/him, while surrounded and physically restrained. Next a nurse will ask the now forcibly-compliant prisoner if he has any injuries to report, while he is in handcuffs and shackles that are at that time so tight they are cutting off all circulation to his hands and feet. No matter his response the QMHP will do nothing. The two health professionals will leave as soon as possible.
The punishment for a prisoner who refuses to uncover the window in his cell and forcing what the Red Onion State Prison staff refer to as a “Cell Extraction,” is to be marinated in teargas, sometimes three canisters, sometimes ten minutes of fire, electrocuted, beaten, then after the health professionals have pretended to attend to your mind and body, the now-compliant prisoner will be stripped naked and put into a cell with nothing but four bare walls and a safety smock for 4 hours. Two institutional charges will be written. One for tampering with a security device for covering the window and one for assault on an officer for scuffing the giant officer’s boots with your face.
After all that things will change. When you get your clothes back the phone that you were told was broken will miraculously be fixed. The lunch tray that you had been denied will be given to you. The officer that was so disrespectful to you will have less to say. It is a sad but true story. I know. Every time this is happening to a prisoner, it is happening to me. I hear the things officers say, the things they do. I feel the disrespect that sparks the anger that covers the window. I resolve to see it through to the violent end because the message must be that this will not stand. I breathe the gas physically. I dread the beating literally. I end up in a mixture of sorrow and triumph and oppression with my neighbor and he with me. It is impossible to accurately explain how a man can come to that decision. The decision that being assaulted is sometimes a more useful alternative to not being assaulted. I ask that anyone who reads this try to imagine a life so devoid of options that the above scenario could often be the second if not first option in forcing a difference of outcome. Imagine what a person would have to have already endured to reach a point where all this seems like the next logical step to a resolution.
How long would you go without eating? How long could you sit in a cell and be denied any contact with the people that you love? How long would it take if you were inside a cold cell, with no blankets, while the vent in your cell blew a cold whirlwind around you? Days? Weeks? What if you had no idea how long you would be in solitary confinement? How long would you continue to talk to people who have shown you they are not listening? Recently Red Onion State Prison, in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, has been in the national spotlight because prisoners have been setting themselves on fire inside their cells in protest of the cruel and unusual punishment they have had to endure. I write this to say, for those of us inside, it isn’t just our own individual pain that we must endure.
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