By Fernando Rivas
This happened on Good Friday. I couldn’t help but see a certain symbolic connection.
At 9am, the fire alarm began blasting: piercing, ear-shattering bursts. My first thought was that someone had lit up (cigarette or dope) in the bathroom, not an uncommon occurrence. But, almost immediately, the presence of dozens of goons (i.e. ‘guards’) indicated that something much, much bigger was afoot. Our 330-man unit was being rudely shaken awake and made drastically aware of the fact that, in lieu of Good Friday religious services, we were being treated to an all-out, full-blown, large-scale, old-school shakedown.
We are incarcerated in a low-security ‘correctional’ institution, but even here the BOP feels it essential to assert the old-fashioned jailhouse approach. We are inmates (i.e. ‘prisoners’) and must be made to remember that gospel truth as often, and as forcefully, as possible.
On Good Friday (Crucifixion Day), step one was to create a sense of complete chaos with the blaring fire alarm, the guards posted at every bathroom to impede passage to those of us with full bladders, the absolutely unexpected and unwarranted show of massive, overwhelming force. Bear in mind that the prison population at this facility is made up mostly of meek, shame-riddled sex offenders, men in wheelchairs and with walkers, aging inmates, and a smattering of street drug dealers and Mexican gangbangers, most likely many whose ‘paper’ wouldn’t hold up in other institutions. This place is what is known informally as a PC compound. As such, it is a perfect training facility for rookie prison guards, a place where they can learn to ply their pat-down and intimidation techniques with little worry of any lethal pushback.
This sort of training was clearly in evidence as we were herded like cattle out the unit doors through a phalanx of screaming and gesturing guards doing their Hollywood best to perform (impersonate?) Gestapo-like crowd control, patting us down and urging us on out of the building and across the compound to the rec yard. At this point, our bladders bursting (I was vehemently denied entry to the restroom by the Unit Manager himself, although he’d just allowed another inmate use of the facility; some inmates are more ‘equal’ than others), we were escorted the distance of five city blocks to the yard. Thankfully, there are restrooms out there, single capacity ones, forced to handle the sudden demand. The cue lines were twenty- and thirty-deep.
On the way out through the goon gauntlet, the guards had made sure to be extra-specially vindictive, yelling at an old inmate who protested his need to urinate, shouting at him to “Shut the ‘F’ up”, taking another old man’s candies from the basket of his walker and tossing them to the ground and forcing him back through the milling throng of inmates to return the basket to his cell. When my turn came to exit the unit, the guard who was conducting the pat-down kept asking me repeatedly if I had anything in my pockets. I kept saying ‘no’. He kept asking, barking the same words over and over, obviously finding something. Turned out I had forgotten I had my ID in my pants’ pocket. I took it out for him and showed it, and was moved on.
After two hours out in the cold, many of us poorly dressed and shivering since we’d not been given a chance to prepare, we were sent on to the chowhall to pick up our lunch trays and return to the unit. In the interim we heard five inmates called over the compound P.A. to the Lieutenant’s office. Upon going back to the unit we found that nothing except the cells of those five individuals had been tampered with. Their cubicles were torn apart, mattresses tossed out into the common area. The shakedown had clearly been targeted. In order to take out five culprits, administration had felt it necessary to punish 325 of us for no apparent reason except to demonstrate that they could and would with no warning and no explanations. Mass punishment may have long ago been deemed illegal and unconstitutional, but in the BOP it is standard operating procedure.
I get it. We pretend to be ‘inmates’ and they pretend to be ‘guards’.
It’s theater.
Theater of the absurd.
I hope the Good Friday raid was in some way worth it, but more than likely it will turn up nothing more than dope, hootch or porn. Nothing will change. Life will go on as before. This is a perfect example of American tax dollars at work. Prison for the old, the infirm, the misfits, the derelicts.
If there is a lesson to be learned here, I certainly can’t figure out what it is.
But what the hell, what do I know? I’m just an ‘inmate’, and it’s just another Easter Holiday in prison.
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