How Prison Made Me Hate the Police

Prison changes everyone, and rarely for the better. I’ve been housed in the American federal prison system — the Bureau of Prisons (BoP) — for well over eight years now. As of this writing, I am 28 years old. I have changed a lot since coming to prison, and certainly not for the better. One of the changes that has occurred for me is that prison has given me a visceral hatred of the police even more intense than the sweltering festival heat that beats down on non-air conditioned prisons like Terre Haute FCI all summer long. Much has been said about police brutality and holding police accountable in recent years, following numerous high-profile cases of excessive use of force by police, but very little is ever said about the bottom rungs of the police force — corrections officers, who are almost never held accountable for what they do, despite being to the police force what school janitors are to the education system.

On the street, anti-police rhetoric usually compares the police to Nazis, Brownshirts, and other paramilitary fascists — and those comparisons are firmly rooted in reality, with the police terrorizing black and low-income neighborhoods the same way that the Nazis and the Brownshirts terrorized their opponents. Such analogies undoubtedly sound pretty radical to the ordinary person, but the experience of being in prison has radicalized me to such a point that I, too, now think of the police as Nazis and Brownshirts (keep reading and you’ll clearly understand why). On a much less grandiose scale, prison staff members are comparable to extreme school bullies. The main difference, of course, is that, unlike with school bullies, there is absolutely no way of standing up to prison staff, as they have total, unlimited power over you. Here’s one good example: at Butner FMC, an officer once took me out of my cell at lockdown time and made me scrub all of the doorknobs in the unit while calling me a “bumpy-faced faggot” and a “terrorist wannabe”, swearing that, if I didn’t comply with his orders, then he would place me in solitary confinement. If this had been a schoolyard setting and a bully had told me that he was going to make me scrub doorknobs, I would have simply kicked him in the balls and walked off. But here’s what would have happened if I had tried that with the C.O. at Butner: he would have called in at least 10 officers in full riot gear, who would have pounded me to a pulp, injected me with Haldol (an extremely powerful antipsychotic that causes excruciating side-effects for me), and brought me down to solitary confinement in restraints. The officer would have planted drugs and/or weapons in my cell and would have had all of my property destroyed (a lieutenant at Butner did eventually have all of my property destroyed on my birthday, then came down to my solitary confinement cell to taunt me about it). In addition, I would have had my phone, email, and commissary taken away for months.

In many prisons — especially at Butner FMC — it’s also routine for inmates to be placed in “dry cells” (cells without any running water) in solitary confinement, with staff refusing to bring them any water. Staff refusing to bring inmates food and/or medication was also the norm at Butner FMC. In nearly all prisons, it’s very common for inmates in solitary confinement to be kept in “four-points” (their hands and feet tied down so that they can’t move) and for said inmates to be held that way for days (or even weeks), forcing the inmates to urinate and defecate on themselves (officers can do this to inmates for any reason, or for no reason at all, and officers can keep the inmates like this for as long as they choose to, even though it is technically illegal). Being kept in four-points, it goes without saying, also means getting no food or water. At Butner FMC, inmates in solitary confinement are not given a cellmate, and Butner FMC regularly keeps inmates in solitary confinement permanently, both of which are also technically illegal. At certain prisons, staff are also notorious for doing “stair drops”, in which they handcuff an inmate’s hands behind his back and then repeatedly throw that inmate down flights of stairs, usually until the inmate is either a vegetable or dead (any time an inmate is killed by a prison staff member, the prison will always report something completely fraudulent about that inmate’s death, and there will always be absolutely no outside investigation of any sort). Of course, at female prisons, male prison staff are also known to regularly rape female inmates, with the prisons always trying their best to cover this up as well.

Another thing that separates prison staff from conventional bullies is that prison staff monitor all of your communications, so they know everything about you — and they can use that to torment you on a level that school bullies could only dream of. For example, let’s say that you receive the news over the phone that your mother has just died. Well, prison staff listen to all of your phone calls, so you can rest assured that they will soon start taunting you about your mother’s death, telling you that your mother rots in Hell, that she was a whore, and so forth. And, again, you are completely powerless to do or say anything back to them. Prison staff also have unlimited access to all of your medical records and all other personal information about you, and I’ve seen, for example, prison staff members tell everyone that a certain inmate has AIDS. In addition, prison staff are in charge of sending outgoing mail from inmates and delivering incoming mail to inmates (after they read all of the mail, of course), and it’s routine for prison staff to throw away inmates’ mail and even to tamper with inmates’ mail in more malicious ways (just use your imagination).

The usual chorus of “tough on crime” bootlickers (mainly on the political right) have, in recent years, tried relentlessly to staunchly deny that there is any significant racism in America’s police force, but the vociferous racism of prison staff indubitably proves otherwise. Prison staff overwhelmingly tend to be just as racist as inmates, as prison staff members are essentially just inmates who haven’t been caught yet (it’s mainly bottom-of-the-barrel degenerate lowlives who seek out careers as corrections officers). Almost all white and mestizo prison staff hate blacks, and almost all black prison staff hate whites and mestizos. In most prisons, the staff is either 99% white or 99% black. If you are a black inmate at a prison where the staff is 99% white, you will be called a nigger by staff on a daily basis, and staff will find any reason (or no reason at all) to brutalize you, ransack your belongings, and throw you in solitary confinement. If you are a white or mestizo inmate at a prison where the staff is 99% black, you will be targeted by staff in a similar fashion. Prison staff are, it goes without saying, virulently homophobic as well. If you are gay or bisexual or staff thinks that you are gay or bisexual, they will bully and antagonize you for it relentlessly. I am neither gay nor bisexual (and, even if I was, nobody in prison would know about it), but that certainly hasn’t stopped prison staff from constantly flinging homophobic vitriol at me because I’m perceived as talking and acting gay.

Prison guards are the most fascist people on the face of the earth, and one of the defining characteristics of fascists is that fascists get off on abusing the weak. Anyone viewed as a weak link by prison staff will be subjected to endless extreme bullying and harassment. This was especially true at Butner FMC, a medical setting where staff would particularly target the inmates who were least capable of standing up for themselves, i.e. the ones with the most severe mental and/or physical disabilities. When I first arrived at Butner FMC, one of the very first things that I saw there was officers in the solitary confinement wing banging on inmates’ doors and yelling incredibly vulgar, hateful, and sexualized abuse at the severely mentally ill inmates in isolation. That, of course, foretoken my entire hellish experience there. Because I have autism, prison staff have always viewed me as easy prey, and have targeted me accordingly. For example, at one point, two high-ranking food service officers at Terre Haute FCI spent several weeks trying to convince me that I had been hired as the food service clerk (a job that, in reality, doesn’t even exist). They even went so far as to actually take me into the warehouse one day and have me fill out some paperwork like I was a real secretary. They did all of this so that they could then pull the rug out from under me and laugh at me. In this particular case, however, the joke was on them, because I did not even really care, nor did I particularly want that job anyways. But this is, nevertheless, a typical example of the sadistic, predatory mindset of the people who work in America’s prisons, paralleling the sadistic, predatory mindset of the inmates (who, at the very least, don’t have the same kind of unlimited power).

After I left Coleman FCC Medium, the institution got a new captain (from Hazelton USP, one of the worst prisons in the country) who complained that Coleman FCC Medium was like “Disneyland” and decided to go absolutely out of his way to make life as miserable as possible for the inmates there, including getting rid of all of the tables and benches, making it much harder to move around the institution, and closing down the outside rec yard entirely. This is a perfect example of the mentality of the average prison staff member. This captain had absolutely no logical reason of any sort for doing any of these things. Rather, he did them solely because he determined that the inmate population was not miserable enough and that their misery level needed to be increased. These military fascist types genuinely believe that treating inmates like animals is going to set them straight, but, in reality, it only does the complete opposite, which is precisely why our prisons are such incubators for hardened criminals.

It is difficult to express in words just how authoritarian the prison system is. If you have anything in your possession that was not purchased on commissary, then you’re not “authorized” to have it; it’s contraband that can and will be taken from you, regardless of how harmless it is. If you alter or modify anything that you purchase on commissary — like adding pockets to your sweatshirt or taking the face off of your fan — then it’s also contraband that can and will be taken from you. If you cannot prove that you purchased something off of commissary, then it’s subject to confiscation as well (at any time, prison staff can ask you to prove that you purchased something off of commissary and, if you are unable to, they can then confiscate it from you and punish you for “possession of an unauthorized object”; staff at Terre Haute FCI very frequently did this with inmates’ shoes, especially if they had a personal vendetta against a particular inmate). There are always very strict limits to how much of each item you can have, both commissary and otherwise — for example, inmates are only “authorized” to have five books in their possession at any given time; anything more can and will be taken from them as contraband. If anything is passed from one inmate to another, then it’s automatically contraband as well, regardless of what it is (so, if an inmate doesn’t want their lunch tray and hands it to another inmate, then that lunch tray is contraband and both inmates can receive incident reports for it).

Federal prisons have Hobbycraft, where inmates are ostensibly permitted to draw, paint, airbrush, make ceramics, make leather crafts, sew, knit, bead, and crochet, but, if you hold on to anything that you made rather than sending it home immediately, it will be confiscated as well and you will be served an incident report (or multiple incident reports) for “possession of an unauthorized object” (even though the drawing, sewing, knitting, beading, and crocheting are done in your cell using materials that you purchase through special order Hobbycraft forms, so it wouldn’t even be possible to mail those items home immediately). Even things that were purchased from commissary and not altered in any way will often be taken from you (every single time that prison staff do shakedowns, they always confiscate massive amounts of commissary from inmates, especially if those inmates dared to store any commissary items outside of their lockers). In fact, even institutionally-issued items — like jackets and blankets — will frequently be taken from you by prison staff. Officers can ransack your cell at any time and take anything and everything that you have at their own discretion. Even if you are completely “authorized” to have something — in fact, even if it’s something that the institution gave you — it will still be taken from you. Literally anything and everything that you have will be taken from you, because, in prison, absolutely nothing is yours except for the space inside of your head, and prison staff get off on sadistically hurting and terrorizing inmates as much as they possibly can. Prison staff are so profoundly evil and sick in the head that they will even take things like prescription eyeglasses and medication from inmates on a regular basis.

In case you had any doubts about how Hobbycraft works, let me explain it to you: the prison encourages you to make things in your cell, but you are not allowed to have anything that you make in your cell. You are encouraged to purchase Hobbycraft materials to make things in your cell, but anything that you make is contraband that you are forbidden from possessing. If prison staff finds any Hobbycraft items in your possession (Hobbycraft items which, again, the prison explicitly encourages you to make), all of the Hobbycraft items will be confiscated from you and you will receive incident reports for “possession of an unauthorized object”. Hobbycraft is essentially the BoP setting a trap for you: make things in your cell so that we can then take those things from you and give you incident reports for making them. I truly wish that I were making this up, but I’m not. I legitimately could not make this shit up if I tried.

The first time that I told my mother about having a crocheted beanie confiscated from me and facing punishment for “possession of an unauthorized object”, my mother simply couldn’t understand it. Why would the police take something like that (especially when it’s something that the prison actively encourages inmates to make)? In what possible way does a crocheted beanie even remotely endanger the institution in any way, shape, or form? What people on the street don’t understand is that it’s not at all about protecting the institution or anything like that. To the contrary, it’s simply about humiliating and degrading inmates and exerting complete and total oppressive power over them. Prison staff don’t actually devote too much effort to taking away things that legitimately endanger the institution, like drugs and weapons (in fact, officers have actually told me that, whenever they find shanks, they usually go and plant those shanks in the cells of inmates who they don’t like). Rather, these fascist, sadistic pigs focus primarily on taking away completely harmless things that they know will upset you. Prison staff will constantly take away your food, your clothes, your blankets, your mattress, your hygiene items (especially your toilet paper), your fans, your cleaning supplies, your books, your mail, your stamps, your eyeglasses, your medication and other medical items (which can include pills along with things like inhalers and breathing machines), your legal papers, your locker’s shelves, your family pictures, your religious items, anything that you’ve made (or are in the process of making) — whatever they can take in order to break you down and to remind you that you are nothing more than property of the state.

If you have anything good, prison staff will do absolutely everything that they possibly can to destroy it. If, for example, you are a skilled artist who likes to make drawings in your cell, prison staff will make sure to take your drawings and destroy them in front of you. For many officers, simply taking your things isn’t enough — they have to go the extra mile to further humiliate you. For example, at one point, an officer at Terre Haute FCI took one of my homemade hats from me, kept it in the officers’ station, and drew dicks and balls and “I ❤ COCK” all over it with a black permanent marker (this particular officer, it should be noted, happened to be a female-to-male transsexual who was almost certainly bullied for her entire life and now wants the chance to be the bully, which is very typical of prison staff). The pigs have taken away almost every single thing that I’ve had since coming to prison, including many invaluable and irreplaceable things that I will never get back. Imagine if, every few weeks or so, the police ransacked your home and took away all of your money and all of your belongings. You would hate the police, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s the everyday reality of life in prison. Prison staff go absolutely out of their way to demoralize and dehumanize you as much as they possibly can. They go above and beyond to take away not just all of your physical possessions, but also every single last shred of dignity and humanity that you have. The foremost concern of prison staff is to completely and utterly destroy any sign of peace, happiness, or contentment among inmates and to make 100% sure that every single inmate remains in a permanent state of abject terror, misery, humiliation, and hopelessness. Prison staff don’t just delight in tormenting, abusing, degrading, and dehumanizing inmates; they live for it.

Many prisons don’t have air conditioning (in fact, most state prisons don’t, even in the sun-scorched south), and Terre Haute FCI doesn’t even have a ventilation system of any sort (in prisons that do have ventilation systems, the officers will often shut off the vents to torment the inmates). In these non-air conditioned prisons, you may usually purchase a fan, which is always either an 8-inch plug-in fan or, even worse, a tiny battery-powered fan (depending on the prison, it will be either one or the other). These fans — which, it must be noted, are very expensive — do absolutely nothing other than blow hot air around, and they aren’t even very good at that. You are, of course, only “authorized” to have one fan in your possession — if you have any more than one fan, then the fans can and will be taken from you and you may receive an incident report (or multiple incident reports) for “possession of an unauthorized object”. If you take the face off of your fan so that it will blow harder, then it’s automatically contraband and, again, it will be taken from you and you can be punished for “possession of an unauthorized object” (or, in the case of altered electronics, the far more severe “possession of a hazardous tool”, which carries much greater penalties). Even if your fan is not altered in any way, it will still often be taken from you; at Terre Haute FCI, it was routine (especially during summer) for staff to take all of an inmate’s fans, just as it was routine during winter for staff to take all of an inmate’s blankets, jackets, and even windowpanes. In addition, you are not allowed to have your fans hanging and you are not allowed to have them fixed to the wall either (so, in other words, there is no way to keep your fans blowing on you without violating the rules). In the meantime, prison staff members always have air conditioning in their officers’ stations, taunting us with their cool and comfortable working environments while we bake under suffocating triple-digit heat in buildings that are designed to be like ovens, with the prison walls absorbing as much heat as possible during the day and breathing it out all night long (so there is never any relief whatsoever until summer is over). Some prisons are designed to capture heat even moreso than Terre Haute FCI is; in many prisons, it will be hot inside of the prison even during winter. In state prisons with no air conditioning, you cannot have a fan while you are in solitary confinement, so being in solitary confinement in state prison is essentially like being locked inside of an oven (solitary confinement in state prison is nicknamed “the hot box” for that very reason). It’s also not even remotely uncommon for the air conditioning to be broken in the solitary confinement wings of federal prisons, with prison staff never bothering to even attempt to fix it. At Butner FMC, there were also several cells that had extreme heat blasting out of the air vents all year long, and getting prison staff to fix even that was virtually impossible (even though it would have been a very easy fix for them). Quite frankly, getting prison staff to fix anything is usually downright impossible and, the more you bother them about it, the more likely they are to retaliate against you while, of course, never fixing the problem in question.

The prison disciplinary system is designed so that quite literally anything that you do can result in disciplinary action being taken against you. To use one perfect example: your toilet is located inside of your cell, but you are not allowed to cover your cell door’s window for privacy. If you do so, you can receive an incident report (and the officer will tear down your cover). In fact, covering your window is actually classified as a sexual offense in prison, and can get you branded as a sex offender. On the other hand, if an officer happens to look in your cell while you are using the toilet, they can (and often will) charge you with indecent exposure (which, obviously, is a sexual offense as well). There is literally no way to urinate or defecate in prison without the risk of getting in trouble. And, of course, if staff suspects you of masturbating anywhere (even if in your cell under the covers), they can and will charge you with “engaging in a sexual act” (which, needless to say, will also get you branded as a sex offender, since any sexual act in prison is automatically a sexual offense). At one point, an inmate on my unit at Terre Haute FCI got placed in solitary confinement for “engaging in a sexual act” because an officer thought that he was masturbating under the covers in his cell (and, in this particular case, he actually wasn’t). In the SHU (Special Housing Unit, i.e. solitary confinement), all showers have windows in them so that officers can watch you in the shower if they so desire as well. There is absolutely no privacy or autonomy of any sort in prison, and the only thing that’s yours is the space inside of your head. It’s soul-crushing oppression and dehumanization on a level that not even North Korea could ever dream of.

The prison justice system is a complete perversion of the actual justice system. Any time you are a victim of anything in prison, you will always be the one who gets punished the most severely for it — especially if it’s something sexual. If you report to prison staff that you were raped, here’s what will happen: you will spend at least nine months in solitary confinement while staff pretends to investigate (the person who raped you might spend one month in solitary confinement, if even that). Once the fake “investigation” is completed, you will be shipped to another prison and absolutely nothing will happen to the rapist. The entire time, you will be harassed relentlessly by prison staff, who will call you a faggot, tell you that you asked for it, threaten to rape you themselves, and so forth. In addition, most prisons give you a cellmate in solitary confinement (by law, they are required to), and prison staff will deliberately give you the kind of cellmates most likely to victimize you again. The entire process is designed to deter inmates from reporting that they were raped — because, the less rapes that get reported, the better the prison (and, by extension, the entire BoP) looks. I’ve actually known inmates who had been raped in prison, but didn’t report that they were raped because they knew what would happen to them if they did and, to them, it simply wasn’t worth it. If you request protective custody (i.e. choose to go into solitary confinement for your own safety), many prisons take additional measures to punish you, including placing you on “mattress restriction”, where your mattress is taken for most hours of the day. In all BoP institutions, all inmates who request protective custody must spend at least six months in solitary confinement before they can even be put in for transfer to another institution, which typically takes several additional months (if SIS “verifies” that there is indeed a credible threat to the inmate, then that inmate may be shipped sooner, but such “verification” from SIS very rarely happens). Again, the system is designed to deter people from requesting protective custody. The less people who report being raped and/or who request protective custody, the better the BoP looks.

There are no fair trials in prison. Prison trials are comparable to trials in North Korea. If a staff member accuses you of anything — even if it’s something that was obviously completely made up (which is very often the case) — you will always be found guilty, no matter what. Collective punishment is the norm in prison as well. Whenever one inmate on a unit does something wrong, the entire unit will usually be punished for it, including all of the inmates who had absolutely nothing to do with the incident in question (oftentimes, even the entire institution will be punished for the actions of just one inmate or a small handful of inmates). Whenever prison staff takes or “loses” an inmate’s property, staff always mockingly tell that inmate to “file a tort claim”, as if filing a tort claim would ever bring back irreplaceable items like family pictures. Here’s the thing about tort claims in prison, though: the people in charge of approving prison tort claims are the exact same prison staff members who take/”lose” inmates’ property, so of course they deny every single tort claim that gets filed (when the lieutenant at Butner FMC came down to the solitary confinement wing to taunt me about my property being “gone”, he assured me that the prison would not pay any tort claims that I filed). In fact, I sincerely doubt that there has ever been a single time when an inmate has filed a tort claim and then actually been granted money for it. Prisons are in charge of policing themselves, so there is absolutely nothing that you can do when you are wronged by prison staff in any way. Imagine if every case of police misconduct on the street was investigated by the exact same cops who engaged in said misconduct. Imagine if Derek Chauvin had been tasked with investigating whether Derek Chauvin used excessive force. Well, that’s actually how it is in prison. Prison staff can get away with quite literally anything, because they run absolutely everything and they alone police themselves, with absolutely no outside monitoring whatsoever and nobody holding them accountable for what they do. And, when people know that they won’t be held accountable for anything that they do, they will simply behave like the complete monsters that they really are. One can look at the unspeakably vile behavior of prison staff as a perfect example of this, or one can look at the equally monstrous behavior of UN diplomats, Russian soldiers, and all others who know that they can get away with anything and everything. That’s just their true, horrible human nature coming out in full force.

Prison staff are fascist martinets when it comes to us following the rules, but, unsurprisingly, they really couldn’t care less about the rules set forth for them. To use one perfect example: prison staff are, by BoP policy, forbidden from bringing any tobacco products into any BoP institutions, yet, at every single BoP institution that I’ve been at, prison staff would smoke and chew tobacco inside of the institution every single day. The rules don’t apply to them. The rules only apply to us, the inmates who aren’t even human in the eyes of prison staff. In many prisons, staff don’t even refer to you by your name, but simply as “inmate” in order to drive home to you that you are no longer a human being. In these prisons, if you try to say something — anything — to a prison staff member, you will automatically be given a response of “shut up, inmate.” State prisons go even further to completely remove all sense of identity and individuality from their inmates, with all inmates in state prisons being forced to shave off all of their hair so that they will look as identical to each other as possible. Like most policies in prison, there is absolutely no logical or practical reason for this — it is done solely to dehumanize the inmates and to break their spirits as much as possible. One could compare this to North Korea’s mandatory national haircut, but it’s really more akin to the dystopian society depicted in the 1971 George Lucas film THX 1138, in which a computer dictator forces all humans to live as identical, nameless automatons, shaving off all of their hair and being identified only by randomly-assigned letter and number combinations.

As an inmate, it is quite tempting to characterize prison staff as something less than human. After all, they don’t consider us to be human, so why should we consider them to be human? In reality, however, they are profoundly human. There is nothing more human than cruelty and sadism; after all, we are the only species that derives pleasure from the pain and suffering of other members of our species. Prison guards overwhelmingly tend to be deeply broken and miserable people (not many happy, well-adjusted individuals are going to seek out careers as prison guards) and they are eager to take out their misery on the inmate population because they know that they can get away with it and this is the only power that they have ever had in their entire bleak and meaningless lives. Most prison guards were either bullies in school or were bullied in school and now want the chance to be the bully, just like most school bullies are abused at home, most domestic abusers grew up in abusive households, and most child molesters were molested as children. It is the same vicious cycle.

If you did not hate the police before, you will after coming to prison (just like, if you did not have any significant mental health problems before, you will after coming to prison). When you spend every single waking moment being abused, terrorized, degraded, and dehumanized by the police, it is downright impossible not to think of them the same way that they think of you. Long before I ever came to prison, I already had, to put it mildly, an extremely dim view of humanity as a whole. Needless to say, that has certainly not changed since coming to prison. However, I did not harbor any particular hatred for the police before I came to prison, but I certainly do now. Being in prison has woken me up to what the police really are. The police are not here to “protect and serve”. They are here to abuse and oppress.

It is difficult not to understate just how despicable the behavior of prison staff is and how much they are bullies and thugs. Here is just one of many examples that should give you a good idea of how prison staff operate: at one point, an officer at Terre Haute FCI accosted an inmate who he didn’t like, called that inmate a bitch, told the inmate that his mother sucks dick, and then slammed that inmate to the ground and called in multiple other officers to beat the inmate to a pulp before having the inmate taken to solitary confinement in restraints. This happened in front of multiple other inmates (including myself), who were justifiably outraged, so staff immediately locked down the unit to prevent rioting. The inmate who was beaten and taken to solitary confinement was kept in four-points for days (which, again, means that his hands and feet were tied down so that he couldn’t move), and he was forced to urinate and defecate on himself over and over again for the several days that he was kept tied down. Nothing ever happened to any of the officers who beat this inmate up, of course, but the inmate was eventually shipped to another yard after being kept in solitary confinement for nearly a year. He did absolutely nothing wrong and the entire incident in question was actually caught on camera, but that didn’t matter — whatever prison staff says automatically goes. Prison staff can get away with quite literally anything, as they have unlimited power and absolutely nobody holding them accountable for anything that they do. If prison staff want to beat you, rape you, torture you, and/or even kill you, they can easily do so without getting into any trouble whatsoever. In prison, your life holds less value than the life of a flea or a tick.

As a testament to the level of contemptible cowardice of corrections officers, any time they beat an inmate to a pulp, they usually handcuff that inmate behind his back first. At one point, at Terre Haute FCI, officers handcuffed an inmate behind his back, took the inmate to an isolated area, savagely beat him bloody, and then took the inmate to solitary confinement in restraints and charged the inmate with assaulting staff. The inmate was convicted of assaulting staff, of course, even though what actually happened was the complete opposite. Again, anything that prison staff say automatically goes, and that even includes when prison staff kill inmates (which actually happens all the time). Any time prison staff kill an inmate, they always fabricate a story about the inmate dying some other way (Sandra Bland is the best-known example of this), and, as always, there is never any outside investigation of any sort.

Here’s another perfect example that should give you a good idea of the mentality of prison staff: every time prison staff did shakedowns at Terre Haute FCI, the captain (who was rarely ever seen without chewing tobacco in his mouth) yelled at us about how filthy our rooms were and vowed to take action against us if we didn’t clean up, saying that he would take away all of our unit’s chairs, televisions, and so forth. Yet, every single time that prison staff did shakedowns, they always took away all of our brooms and dustpans and cleaning chemicals and everything else that we used to clean our tiny, dilapidated cells (the cells at Terre Haute FCI are the smallest in the entire BoP, comparable in size to an average closet, and all of the institution’s inmate living areas are as filthy, squalid, and poorly maintained as you can possibly imagine). It’s oppressive beyond words, and it’s enough to make absolutely anyone hate the police with a burning passion. Again, if you weren’t anti-police before, you will be after coming to prison. Prison will make you hate not just the police, but also yourself and everyone else on the planet. And, of course, that is precisely what it’s designed to do. The American prison system is purposefully designed to be a revolving door, turning anyone who enters into a deeply embittered, hardened criminal who will keep coming back again and again until they eventually land themselves behind bars for life.

Comparisons to George Orwell’s seminal 1949 novel 1984 are even more trite and shopworn than references to Star Wars, but one of the most striking things about the dystopian nightmare world of 1984 is just how remarkably similar it is to everyday reality in prison. From the fact that nearly all repairs have to be done by non-professionals (i.e. inmates) to the fact that nothing is yours except for the space inside of your head to your every move (and every word) being watched like a hawk for any sign of unorthodoxy, prison — where you are nothing more than a number and all of your most basic humanity is stripped away from you — is, without a doubt, the closest real-life thing to Oceania from 1984 that exists in the real world. In fact, in many ways, it’s even worse. In Orwell’s novel, the tragic protagonist Winston Smith is actually granted far more freedoms than any inmate could ever dream of. In reality, almost all dystopian fiction depicts a world with far more freedom than any prison in North America provides. Easily the most famous line in 1984 is the one delivered by the socialist party leader to the defeated hero: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Indeed, it’s pretty hard to think of a more pluperfect description of prison than that.

One thing that nearly all dystopian stories have in common is that almost all of them take place in either Stalinist or fascist societies. Prison is, it should be noted, quite possibly the purest manifestation of authoritarian socialism that has ever existed in the real world. Everything is provided to you for free… and everything is of extremely low quality. All forms of private enterprise are explicitly prohibited. Everyone is forced to be equally poor and equally ignorant. Everyone is divided along strict tribal lines (us and them), and anyone different from you in any way is automatically the enemy. You are required to work slave labor with no rewards given to you for your work. You are granted absolutely no freedom or autonomy of any sort. All forms of creativity and unorthodoxy are violently suppressed. There is no private property — nothing is yours except for the space inside of your head. All family ties are completely destroyed. You are nothing more than property of the government, which is your only family. You are ruled over with an iron fist by an all-powerful (yet still wildly incompetent) elite who exercise complete and total control over every single thing that you do or say, along with all of the information that you receive. All trials are merely show trials that you have zero chance of winning. Every single minute aspect of your life is carefully micromanaged and rigidly controlled to make sure that you will completely lose all sense of identity and individuality. There is no individual — you are simply a small part of one collective monolith. You are forced to live in a shared, overcrowded commune where you have absolutely no privacy whatsoever. The only emotions that exist are hate and fear. You are denied your most basic humanity, and the human spirit is crushed into oblivion. Prison is, without a doubt, the ultimate tankie utopia — and the ultimate dystopia for everyone else. Prison is exactly the kind of society that communist dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot (along with fascist dictators like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco) tried so hard to create for the masses.

I will get out of prison in the near future, but I will never get back all of the irreplaceable things that were stolen from me by prison staff, nor will I ever be able to undo the permanent psychological damage done to me from being in prison (and especially from being placed in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, often for no real reason whatsoever). These days, thoughts of revenge dominate my mind. I want vengeance on everyone who has wronged me since I’ve been in prison. I want to hunt them down and hurt them the same way that they went out of their way to hurt me. But I will never be able to. There are times when I honestly feel like my current life is the origin story for some comic book villain. The American prison system has tried its hardest to turn me into what the government claims that I am: a dangerous, frightening, violent criminal who poses a very serious threat to society. But I will never let them turn me into that. I will never let them win. I am resolutely determined to have a functioning, successful life primarily because the government does not want me to.

I am placing myself in very serious danger by writing and publishing this article. I do not know how prison staff will retaliate against me for it. But I am no longer afraid of anyone, and I truly feel that it is my duty to stand up to the oppressive prison system, no matter how much hell I catch for it. I’ve fought authority since I was a recalcitrant toddler, and I’m not about to stop now. It is for that reason that I dedicate this article to Warden Lammer, Lieutenant Singleton, Lieutenant Collins, Lieutenant Sims, Lieutenant Kapral, Counselor Dillard, Officer Spradlin, Officer Isom, Officer Wickland, Officer Drogich, Officer Salguero, Officer Snowden, Officer Collins, Officer Hayden, Officer Reese, Officer Reece, Officer Carey, Officer Huber, Officer Middleton, Officer Cox, and all of the countless other prison staff members who have gone absolutely out of their way to torment and belittle me during my time in federal prison. It is primarily because of you all that I am still alive today. Every time I’ve considered ending my life, I’ve imagined how delighted you all would be if I did so, and the thought of you all celebrating and cracking jokes about my death has always stopped me from committing suicide. I swear to you all that I will outlive every single one of you and that I will one day piss on your graves. In the near future, I will be a free man and you will no longer have any power over me, but you will always be deeply insecure, broken, miserable, and utterly despicable scoundrels leading profoundly empty and pitiful lives completely devoid of any kind of meaning, purpose, or fulfillment. Bullies are never remotely happy and contented people, and that applies equally to petty school bullies as well as to bullies with some degree of authority, like prison staff members. The way that one deals with any bullies is to stand up to them, and that is ultimately why I write this article: I am standing up to the bullies who run the American prison system and I am letting them know that I am not going to be afraid of them any longer.

ADDENDUM: I would like to state that I am fully aware of the fact that many police officers do noble things (on the street, at least). Countless lives have been saved by the police, just as countless lives have been taken by the police. I am also fully aware of the fact that some people very much belong in prison. Other than fringe radicals, nobody is saying that there should be no police and no prisons of any sort. Rather, what I and most others pushing police reform and prison reform advocate for is for the police to be held accountable for their actions and for prisons to be humane environments focused on rehabilitation rather than on punishment. Punishment only creates hardened criminals, which is precisely why our national recidivism rate is astronomically high, while countries that focus on rehabilitation — like the Nordic countries — have very low recidivism rates (and very low crime rates in general). I am also fully aware of the fact that corrections officers are not generally seen as being “real” police officers — they are largely just random scum off of the street, and there is far less screening and training of them (in fact, prospective corrections officers don’t even have to undergo psychological examinations, hence why so many of them are mentally ill). Even so, I will acknowledge that there are a very small number of corrections officers who do treat inmates with a certain degree of dignity and respect, but those rare corrections officers who actually treat inmates like human beings are vastly outnumbered by the corrections officers who treat inmates like subhuman vermin. And, until our prisons and our policing are forced to undergo serious reforms, that will, unfortunately, remain the case.