Clack, Clack, Clack: Murder in Confinement

“Hurry the fuck up,” an officer barked.

I was desperately trying to wash the last remnants of the soap off my balls. You see, in confinement at Suwannee CI the officers didn’t readily supply you with soap. The piece I was using was a chip from a bar of soap I found in my confinement cell when I was moved yet again to another level within this hell I lived. The water was cold, but I welcomed the chance to wash off the filth I was surrounded by. As much as I was cleaning my body, I was also attempting to let all the fear, the anger, the violence, the old chemical spray, the torture, the torment go down the drain as well. I could feel the weight lift, if only for a second.

“Motherfucker, I said kill that shower now, motherfucker.”

The officers didn’t allow us towels to use, and it seemed they didn’t want to waste any more water on what they considered subhuman. Allowing us soap in Suwannee’s confinement was a sick joke. This tiny sliver was precious to me, like the ring of power was for Bilbo, Frodo Baggins, and Gollum.

So, when the soap got caught on my pubic hairs while the officer was banging the gate, calling me a motherfucker, my hands rushed to untangle the pubey soap. Because I’d been slashed with a razor previously in my wrist and my tendon partly severed, my hand, you see, never healed properly due to muscle atrophy. And with this barking motherfucker ready to unleash Black Jesus down upon me once again, the fucking soap fell… right down the motherfucking drain.

It was slow motion, watching my last tiny sliver snag on the brass drain catch and then fall out of sight to another layer of hell beneath my bare, wet feet.

Sighing, I turn and grab the ripped, torn, worn, dirty inmate blues shirt the officers made us dry off with. It’s hung in a certain particular way, by me, on the thick metal bars to protect my private parts from an inmate across the way in another cell the officers allowed to jack off and pleasure himself. I could see that fucker across from us in the shower going to town. This fucking guy always had toilet paper. One more way the officers wanted to humiliate us. They wouldn’t hand it out to us but would supply this fuckhead with enough to ejaculate onto all those precious squares that could wipe all the asses in this fucking confinement.

The screaming officer’s still screaming at me to put my hands behind my back so he can cuff me and take me to my confinement cell, but his friend’s cracking a joke to him.

“Sarge, check him out!” he laughs, motioning with his head to the inmate gunning the shit out of me and my bunky G in the next confinement shower. “He’s really taking their fucking heads off today, ain’t he, Sarge?” and he laughs his stupid face off.

Sarge looks back. “Oh yeah,” he says, and he chuckles between his onslaught of expletives directed at yours truly. He tells me, “I think he wants you to bend over for him. He looks like he’s about ready to cum.”

“Take me to my cell,” I tell him through clenched teeth.

“Motherfucker, you want to talk to Jesus again?” He’s referring to the chemical agent he used earlier. Black Jesus, the officers love to call it. They say it makes Black men holler for Jesus. They think that’s a real riot, really makes them laugh their heads right off.

He opens the gate when he gets the cuffs on me and yanks my arm in the direction of my cell. The two officers are still laughing and making dumbass comments. Immediately to my right, from the shower straight down the iron gangway, is my cell. If I’m looking out my cell’s tiny window I can see the showers. It’s a corner cell. I like it. It’s on the second story, and from it I can see all the other confinement cells too.

Walking toward my cell, I look slightly to my right at the other confinements. There were no faces looking out the windows. At other confinements, at other prisons, you’d see many faces. Here, no. You look out those confinement cell door windows, and you might never have another chance to see anything again.

Here, it’s a sin. At least they treated it like it was. Try to catch a glimpse of the goings‑on outside the door and you’d be sprayed within an inch of your life. You’d be beaten. Then tortured. This isn’t a fiction story. It’s worse. It’s really happening, even now.

At other confinements you’d see fishing lines moving contraband from one room to the next. You’d hear yelling, sometimes screams or crying. You may hear rap battles between inmates on different sides of the wing, or inmates screaming for a wick (made from toilet tissue rubbed between hands, making the tissue thin and thick, that once lit stays burning for a long, long time), something used to light tobacco cigarettes or K‑2 (spice). Sometimes you hear guys working out, training like gladiators. And ohhhh boy, you’d smell the sweat. The smell that’s impossible to clean and scrub off.

Most confinements and prisons in Florida don’t have AC, or on the inside what we call climate control. The Florida Department of Corrections operates 143 total correctional facilities statewide, but only 56 (49 state‑run and 7 privately contracted) of those are major, high‑security state prisons. When it comes to climate control, 75% of all inmate housing units across the state don’t have air conditioning, forcing the vast majority of Florida’s 90,000 inmates to rely entirely on fans during summer. In Texas and other states, you can buy personal fans for your bunks. Florida general population inmates are strictly prohibited from having personal fans.

Listening to the quiet wing, the only thing I see and hear are these two asshole officers making dumb jokes and barking orders at me to move my fucking feet. I almost wish I could hear the damn industrial exhaust fans making that rhythmic hum all day and night long. They don’t lower the room temperature down any. They aren’t designed for that, but built purely to pull stale air out of the building to force outdoor air in. So, when it’s 95 degrees or 100 degrees with high humidity, the exhaust fans simply vacuum that 95–100‑degree humid air directly into the dorm or confinement.

But nooooooo. Suwannee is a climate control camp. I’d rather be baking and hearing some type of noise rather than only listening to these morons continue to be dicks. Sometimes all the noise in other confinements is annoying and it’s hard to get any sleep, but I’d take that right about now simply to hear something, anything. This place is a ghost wing, a hollow shell, but when you put your ear up to this conch you don’t hear the sea, only silence.

It’s so quiet and cold. To this very day I’m not a fan of the cold. Suwannee used the cold against their inmates, as a torture weapon. They keep it bone‑chilling cold. And those thin boxers definitely don’t warm you any. And if the officers put you on property strip for the week and take away your bed and your shitty blue state‑issued clothes, forget about any sleep. The only way I ever could was to do thousands of jumping jacks, squats, and pushups to warm up just enough to sit on the steel toilet to sleep by folding my arms inside my body and slouching over my legs, if only for a moment or two.

Approaching my door, the officer stops me before I enter.

“Inmate, we had a party in your room. You’ll have to clean it up.”

Then he pushes me inside.

I smell it first. Urine. That harsh, pungent smell. It shoots up my nostrils and fills my lungs. Then I see it. My room is a mess. Beds thrown against the wall. Our sheets on the floor and our mail ripped up, soaking in the pools of piss on the floor.

These motherfuckers.

Now, I’m not one to shy away from a fight with an officer. But here you might as well just run and jump over the top tier hoping the fall kills you, because here at Suwannee CI fighting doesn’t accomplish anything, even if you win. Because this is Vegas. It’s rigged. You always end up being the loser. Sometimes you get added time for fighting an officer, but that would be generous here.

At Suwannee, they will kill you. They know they will. You know they will. It isn’t up for any discussion, and then they’ll write it up in a way to make you the guilty party no matter what and say it was a justified action. Cause and effect.

Don’t believe me? Well, keep reading.

Next to enter the cell is G. He looks at me with an amused look on his face. After the doors are rolled closed, our cuffs are off, and the officers have trotted away, as the echoes of their boots march off G turns to me and says, “You think they sword‑fought their dicks when they did this?”

…And we bust out laughing.

This is nothing new to us and definitely not new to him. He’s done almost ten years and is about to be released soon. He came from North Carolina on a Bonnie and Clyde crime spree with his Bonnie, catching time in North Carolina and Florida, with the time being run concurrent between the two states.

G was pretty funny, though I’d begrudgingly admit it.

When I was first moved to this cell, his cell, one of the first things he said was, “Man, what type of time is Florida on? This backward, Jim Crow, racist, psycho‑killer officers, dirty‑ass shithole place is this? I’ve done almost ten years inside North Carolina prisons and I’m telling you… This last year at Suwannee, I’ve never seen anything like this place. These motherfuckers will kill you here. They want to kill you.”

And he was right. They do want you to die, at least it seemed like that to me even though I’d only been in around two years at this point. This was 2012. Suwannee CI’s Death Year.

“Well,” he says, bending to pick up his wet blanket, “I hope they don’t have chlamydia. Naw, fuck that, I hope they have gonorrhea and their little dicks fall right off, the fucks.”

The next afternoon G and I hear yelling. It’s officers telling an inmate to shut the fuck up. Next, we hear the chains. Down the wing another officer’s running the clinking chains to his buddies.

That’s the sound you hear in this confinement. You hear it all the time. That “clack, clack, clack” as they thread the chains through the steel door handles on the wall and the little confinement door flap they use to slide a food tray through. Our doors don’t swing open, they roll sideways on a track, and with the chains in place they stop short, just enough for an officer to stick his arm in and spray you down with pepper spray, chemical agent, Black Jesus, whatever the fuck you wanna call it.

The hairs on my arms stand up every time I hear that clack. It’s the sound of somebody about to be screaming with misery, and we all know there’s nothing we can do.

“Spray him,” an officer commands, and it’s quickly obeyed.

That sound is one you’re not likely to forget. These cans are big, and when they spray them at you, they make a deep, loud whooshing sound. “Whooooooooshh,” and at the very end the whooshing even sounds like it’s dying. They know they aren’t supposed to spray any more than hit you with a two‑second burst. But at Suwannee they love to use a whole can of the shit.

Then they wait…

G asks me, “You think they gonna hit him with another can?”

“Three,” I tell him. “They’ll do three.”

G asks, “You think he’ll make it?”

We listen, and we hear dude cussing the officers out still, calling them names. Pussy. Bitches. Motherfuckers. “Fuck you, you pussy‑ass police.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I think he’ll make it.”

After the third can of Black Jesus they bring a camera out to film them taking him to the shower to wash the slimy, orangey chemical agent from his skin.

G says, “I bet they make the water boiling so it burns more,” and I say he’s probably right.

We see the officers cuff him and remove him from his cell after the three rounds of spray. The kid’s coughing. His nose is runny, snot dripping through the second‑tier grated walkway to the floor below. All of us in the confinement cells, our eyes are burning. Whenever they spray someone inside here it goes throughout the AC vents and into the other rooms. I hear other men hacking.

“Cough, cough, hack, hack,” all up and down the different confinement rooms.

There are four officers. A lieutenant, a sergeant, and two officers. The sergeant has the camera, the white‑shirt lieutenant follows him, and the officers are escorting the bright‑orange pitiful soul toward the showers. We hear the boots reverberating from the steel walkway getting close.

“Ca‑thunk, ca‑thunk,” and with each step they come closer to our window.

We shy away to the back of our room, pretending to not see them or hear a thing that’s happening outside our door. But we see. We hear. Outside our room we see the showers and then, them. The two officers and the orange inmate, still dripping with the chemical agent.

My eyes burned, but they grew as large as saucers when one of the officers bends over, fast as lightning, and throws his weight into the inmate, bear‑grabs him, and lifts him up into the air, turning the inmate so his feet face the ceiling and his head the floor, bringing him down with a tremendous amount of force so that orange head slams against that hard steel grate.

G goes ghost white. I do too. We turn from the window just as the sergeant looks into our cell.

Then the gurgling. The hacking. The sound of a body wanting to breathe properly but can’t.

One of the officers says, “Shiiiiit. This goddamn motherfucker,” and then they dogpile him and say the words all inmates hear religiously.

“Stop resisting.”

And that’s what they do. We keep hearing them say, “Stop resisting,” between the gooey coughs and wheezes from the inmate trying to fight for his life to breathe.

You see, when the two officers made that turn with that orange body toward the shower, the camera was still trained on the wall. It didn’t show the officer lift the inmate sky‑high and slam him on his head and neck. All that camera saw was wall. And then what the camera heard was, “Stop resisting.” Such a classic maneuver by the department. Resisting. Give me a break.

Next, we see a slight panic. The officers must have realized that the inmate couldn’t stand. They must now know that this inmate has a real problem, not only them. This inmate has stopped breathing and fighting for air. Hearing the wheezing grow fainter and then silence… it lets you know shit just got real. Must have for the officers too.

Next you hear them calling for medical and a stretcher. Waiting for the nurse or doctor to come and pronounce him dead.

G and I look at each other. I say, “I wonder what the fuck that paperwork will look like.”

G shakes his head, eyes still on the door. “Fuck, man. You were wrong. He didn’t fucking make it.”

“Fuck.”

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Emmett Tatter.