By Socalbd
When the lights came on, I woke up. The bright glaring light was impossible on this morning to ignore. There was talking from the hallway I couldn’t make out. At least two people were having a conversation. I heard steel doors open and close. And then it went quiet. Being in solitary means being ignored. Whoever they were they had to know someone was on the other side of the door. But they didn’t care. I was just an inmate in solitary. No need to worry about me. No need to check on me.
The pod door opened and a guard entered. He sat a bag of food on the flat steel food slot of the cell door and then left the pod closing the hallway door. No conversation. No exchange of the bag from the dinner meal the night before. Just a delivery to be made. A banana, protein bars, and a box of dry cereal were in the bag. The first meal that didn’t include a peanut butter sandwich.
I passed the day like the day before with one change. I made up the bunk and then realized I could use the blanket for my stretching. Why stretch on the hard concrete floor when the blanket would provide some comfort and padding over the concrete. Off came the blanket and stretched it out onto the floor. So much better. I was sort of proud of myself for making this revelation and disappointed it took two days.
Stretching with leg cuffs on is challenging. I made it work. I also added in some body weight exercises today. Inclined pushups against the back wall and on the floor along with calf stretches by holding the cell bars and going up and down on the toes of my feet among other exercises. It got the heart rate up a bit. I felt good.
I decided to get some steps in, too. From one end of the cell to the other was 3 ½ steps. That’s it. 3 ½ steps to get from the wall to the cell bars. 3 ½ steps to get from the cell bars to the back wall. Clink. Clink. Clink. There was the constant scraping and clinking of the leg cuff chains on the concrete floor as I walked back and forth. I found out after my release that the inmate in the adjoining pod could hear the clinking on the floor, and it was driving him nuts. It was like nails on a chalkboard to that inmate. He said he couldn’t wait for it to end. I thought, “he could hear that?’ but we couldn’t hear each other. How sound traveled in the facility was interesting.
Lunch arrived. Dropped off on the food slot. No bag this time. It was protein bars, bags of almonds, crackers and a banana. At least there wasn’t another peanut butter sandwich. He dropped the items on the cell food slot and walked out. This was starting to get to me. The lack of conversation. The repetitiveness of the food. Being treated like something, not someone. Being warehoused. I was a task to the guards. Nothing more.
Between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner I had no contact with anyone. No checks. No conversations. Nothing. From time to time I could hear a brief conversation from the hall. At least it sounded like it was coming from the hall. I couldn’t be sure. There were also hours and hours of quiet. No sounds at all coming from any place. I slept a lot to kill time. One of the guards told me he came to check on me once and I was sound asleep that afternoon snoring away. I never heard him come into the pod. He decided to leave me alone. I lost my one chance that day for any kind of interaction.
The boredom had set in. When I was awake it was to find a way to keep my mind active or look at the walls or the bars. There was a lot of that. I kept reminding myself I asked for this. I asked to be locked away. I asked for it to be isolated solitary confinement. I asked to be ignored. I asked to be kept like this to understand what it did to the mind and the emotions. It was getting hard and I kept telling myself it was only for a few days and I could make it through. I was getting a small taste, a very small taste, of what others endure for years.
When the pod door opened for the dinner delivery, he was carrying a small round steel plate. On it was what looked like some sort of loaf. It was handed to me and I stared at it. I thought it was nutriloaf and swallowed hard. The guard picked up on that and started laughing. I said a few choice words to which he responded I better eat quickly as I would pay for those words. He walked out.
I sat on the bunk, used my fingers to pull a piece of the loaf apart and slowly inserted it into my mouth. Just before that I had filled the tin cup with water and placed it on the bunk next to me thinking I would need a lot of water to wash whatever this was down. To my surprise, it was actually pretty good. If some salt had been added I would have said it was a good slice of meatloaf. I ate it all. If the intent was to play with my head, it worked. The worry of seeing the steel plate and what was on it got me immediately. Worry set in. Dread set in. How would I get through this meal? The head games that can be played with someone in this situation are plenty. It doesn’t take much effort. The use of food as punishment, or perceived punishment was a method of control. It worked.
As soon as I was done eating the guards entered the pod and ordered me to place all the dinner remnants on the top bunk and to then lie face up on the bottom bunk. They unlocked the cell door and quickly went to work with chains, cuffs and padlocks. When they were done, I was stretched to each corner of the bunk in a four-way lockdown. This was my punishment for my backtalk earlier when dinner was delivered. They closed the cell door and left. The lights were turned out, and I was in the dark. Was I to sleep like this? I just ate dinner. It couldn’t be close to lights out, yet I thought. Maybe it was 8 o’clock at most. I had hours to go before lights out.
They left me stretched out for several hours. No contact. No checks. No worry about the inmate shackled and chained down to his bunk. I tried to do some isometric stretches to keep the discomfort and pain from progressing. Being stretched out and not able to move the limbs much is not fun. The discomfort sets in quickly. This was supposed to be painful and boring. It was.
When the one guard returned a few hours later, he entered the pod without saying anything to me. He opened the cell door and slowly started to remove the shackles and chains, being sure to lock the leg cuffs back onto my ankles. I moved the limbs slowly as the blood returned. The guard stood next to the bunk and watched. Neither of us said a word. I finally had enough strength and movement to sit upright on the bunk with my feet on the floor. The guard sat on the bunk next to me and put his arm around my shoulder. I leaned my head into his shoulder, and I started to whimper and cry. He just held me. He finally talked asking why the tears. I didn’t have a reason. They just came.
When I composed myself, he said he would turn the lights out soon. He stood up and left, closing the cell door and walking out of the pod. I heard the pod door close. This time the lights stayed on for a while. I had time to move the sheets and blanket around, remove my uniform shirt and climb into the bunk. The lights went out a few minutes later. As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about why the tears. For the first time since intake, I had a human interaction that wasn’t institutional. It wasn’t a task. It wasn’t scripted by policy in handling an inmate. It was a simple human to human interaction. I was seen. Being seen matters. Being human matters. That’s all I could come up with, but it was enough.
I woke up again throughout the night. I was taking naps during the day, and it was screwing with my sleep. The naps were a way of filling time during the “waking” hours, but they came with a cost. I would look around the cell in the blackness of the night. I couldn’t see anything. I kept thinking my eyes would adjust but the reality was there was no light source during the night to create even the smallest, dimmest ability for my eyes to focus on something, anything.
My mind wandered to what time it might be. Was it 3 AM? Perhaps 4 AM? I didn’t know. I did know I was about to be on day 4 of my sentence. Two more full days to go if I went through to the scheduled end. I knew at least one of the other inmates was still incarcerated along with me. I could hear his voice from time to time through the vents. Not enough to understand what was being said. Enough to know I wasn’t the lone inmate in the simulation.
To be continued …