A reader recently asked me to elaborate on life in the box. Well, that's our term for solitary confinement.
Prison in itself is designed to punish you. Take away all the extracurricular activities you experience in the free world. Give you the bare necessities to survive. Such as a cot, a tooth brush, a bar of soap and a roll of toilet paper. You are allowed to go to reck-yard to exercise. They feed you three meals a day. If you have family that will play, you can call them collect on a pay phone (15 minute calls). There are windows so you can look outside. All you will see is concrete sidewalks, brick buildings and razor-wire. None-the-less, you can see out that window. Fresh air blows in that window. Sunlight shines in that window.
Solitary confinement takes all this away. You will be placed in a cell about six feet wide and ten feet deep. There is a stainless steel toilet with a sink attached. The only light you get is a fluorescent in the ceiling which is controlled by the guard station. The door in and out is solid steel. There is a small door inside the steel door called a bean flap. It's the size of a cafeteria tray so they can do just that....they unlock that flap, open that door and shove your tray inside to you.
If you need something...more toilet paper, a bar of soap, a spoon for your tray....you can summon a guard. Some guys yell out the door to the guard. That won't get you shit. Some dudes knock on the door. That won't get you shit. Personally, I wait until I hear one walk by, then address them politely and ask for some help. They usually tell you, "sure, no problem." But they never come back. Instead they avoid coming back by again. In
Shawshank Redemption, the box is dark and a hole.
Most boxes these days have huge, high-powered fluorescent lights. About the time your exhausted body falls asleep, that light is turned up on bright and burns a hole through your skull. The walls are all bright white and it's like looking into car headlights. Very hard to sleep. And...if you wrap your head to block it out? They tell you to take it off.
Confinement is to break you down.
You eat whatever they give you. The alternative is to go hungry. It's a long time in between meals. Even if you don't like it....you EAT IT!
Monday, Wednesday and Friday are shower days. You strip down to your boxers, then stick your wrists through the bean flap. The officer places hand-cuffs on your wrists. Once again, you are in restraints. The officer yells, "Roll the door!" Your cell door is then opened and you are escorted to a small shower cell. Once inside that cell, you once again stick your wrists through a small flap and they remove your restraints. You are then able to enjoy a 2-minute shower before the guard is then rushing you to get out. The process is then repeated once again and finally you're back at your cell. The experience is quite an adventure.
This is when you have a chance to see the other guys in lock up. You will see guys you know from the compound. They will tell you the latest news. Things you missed since you were taken out of population. Sports scores, who did what, so-on and so-forth. The guards do not like this. They tell you to not chat among each other. So you learn sign language. You talk among each other with hand signals. I learned to sign my first trip to the box. There are other ways to communicate. There are heater vents that go through the walls. So...if I know the guy three cells down and that cell number is 113, I can yell into my cell's vent, "Yo! 113, you there?" And he will reply back. You can carry on a quick conversation until the guards come and shut if down. There is another way to do this as well. Dip all the water out of the toilet bowl. (Yep, you read that right.) If you do this, and another cell does the same, your voices will echo through the stainless steel. Then you are sitting beside the toilet, talking down the hole. If a guard sees this, they are going to call the psych doc....thinking you have gone insane.
Sometimes you run out of paper or envelopes. You can fish for them. There is a 2-inch slit under your steel door. If you rip a small strip off the whole perimeter of your sheet it makes a small rope. You can "cast" it like a fly rod and retrieve items from a cell next to yours. You would throw it down to the next cell door. That guy ties what you need onto the string and you pull it back to your cell. Just figuring this shit out takes hours. Throwing the string over and over until the other guy can reach it. Silly stuff like this is what you do to not loose your mind.
I personally sing out lout. Just to hear another voice. I will laugh out loud. Just to hear laughter. I will burp, then laugh about that. When I'm bored, I wash my socks and boxers, then hang them on the bunk rail to dry. Hand washing them in the small sink. You can only lay on your bunk for so long before you realize you could go crazy. Your mind begins to mess with you. You start to question yourself. I wonder if my woman may leave me. Will my mother be alive and healthy when I'm finally released? How many more of my friends and family will die before I'm released? Will I be able to conduct myself in a good manner? Will I loose my cool when someone treats me badly? Things that you don't usually get hung up on, bother you in solitary.
Your skills to rationalize a situation get rusty. You begin to question yourself. You dig deep into past experiences and relive them. At times it's positive things. Places I have been and times with my family. Other times it's the dark places I've been. Face down in a crack house. Staring down the barrel of a gun. Feeling my mother's pain that her oldest son is gone.
This is confinement. This is the box.
It is not fun. What it will do is make you appreciate that little window that carries in a breeze, the sunshine and a view of my surrounding walls. When they let you out of confinement and you first step back onto the compound....you feel free.
Gives me a small taste of what it will feel like that day I am
truly free!
