Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center. Photo courtesy of prisonfinder
In a piece titled “Thinking Out Loud,’ Karter Reed, the subject of my book Boy with A Knife, and a young man who has become my friend, wrote his take from the recent Souza-Baranowsji fiasco which I wrote about last week:
“In the Spring of 2006, I was imprisoned at MCI Shirley Medium, just a stone’s throw from the SuperMax where the latest DOC manipulation has garnered so much media attention. I had spent the morning speaking to High School students in the institution’s visiting room as part of a youth outreach program at the prison. As the other participants and I exited the visiting room we saw that the line outside the cafeteria for staff access period—colloquially known as “happy hour”—stretched around the corner and almost the length of the prison’s main walkway. I arrived back at my housing unit only to discover that an institutional memo had been posted that morning announcing that “tier time”—the time prisoners are allowed outside their cells in the unit—was being cut in half, along with other institutional cutbacks, due to staff shortages, despite the fact Massachusetts has consistently held one of the highest staff to prisoner ratios in the country.
After ten minutes or so of the institution’s Superintendent fielding the same question from one prisoner after another and responding only that it was a security issue which he would not address with prisoners, he simply walked away leaving hundreds waiting in line to be heard. The process was repeated with the Deputy Superintendent and Director of Security before it was announced that no further questions about the reduction of tier time would be addressed. The two to three hundred prisoners who remained stood there dumbfounded. Moments later, dozens of Correctional Officers and Inner Perimeter Security descended upon them screaming that this was a demonstration and the institution was going into lockdown to address the insurrection. No one resisted, no one threatened or even suggested violence, and everyone headed back to their cells as ordered.
Meanwhile, I had been waiting in my own cell for my unit to be called to lunch. The call never came and my cell door never opened. The lockdown lasted more than six weeks. The DOC released numerous official and unofficial statements to the public and media citing informant information that violence was imminent if the lockdown ended. But it was all a farce. There was never a threat or even a risk of violence. But this “incident” and the department’s account of it would serve to support the idea that the original reduction in tier time and visitation days was indeed necessary for security reasons. The DOC emerged even more victorious than could be imagined—they painted a wholly compliant prison population as dangerous and insubordinate, all while completely silencing them with intimidation and an unparalleled show of force. They made it clear that they could do whatever they wanted without reason or justification and could forcefully suppress any protests, no matter how legitimate.
When the lockdown finally ended, tier time had been cut in half, visiting days had been eliminated, and twelve hundred prisoners were left with the unmistakable impression that their lives were insignificant and their rights arbitrary. Though it has been nearly a decade and a half since I found myself at the mercy of such an oppressive and mentally crippling system, I bear the scars in grotesque and indelible fashion. The latest news filtering out from Souza-Baranowski has washed over my psyche and disrupted the the peace and tranquillity I have worked so hard to establish since my release. Undoubtedly, it is a textbook case of PTSD, the vivid and all too real recollection and reliving of that long ago trauma, triggered time and again with random unpredictability.
Some days I am fine, others I am not, and I wonder at the psychological damage being inflicted on thousands of prisoners throughout the state, and millions across the country. How many will fare worse than I have, will never recover enough to rejoin the rank and file, never again feel safe, secure, or whole, and will grow exhausted from the futile effort of trying to escape a inescapable past? My heart aches for them and I can only hope the supposed “evolving standards of moral decency” we as a society profess will permeate the unseen world they live in. Until that day comes, the nightmare of my past will be the reality of their present.”