Transcript for the Piece Audio version of SURVIVORS: Solitary Confinement in America's Prisons

SURVIVORS: Solitary Confinement in America's Prisons
Final Script

ACT I: INTRODUCTION

Narration:
President Obama recently declared that "We have banned torture without exception. " However, some would take exception to this claim.

Names 1:
Hakeem: The Hole.
Bilal: We called it The Hole.
ArchAngel: The Hole
Tommy: The Hole

Narration:
The Hole. That's what prisoners call it. Among other things.

Hakeem: The Bucket, the Can.
ArchAngel: The Box, the Hole, the Bing.
Laura: The Chiller.
ArchAngel: Lock up.
Laura: Maxy Maxy.
Bobby: The SHU
Bilal: Solitary Confinement

Narration:
Solitary Confinement.
One person per cell.

ACT II: THE EXPERIENCE

Robert: The cell that I lived in most of the time was 6 wide and about 9 feel long.
Bobby: The cell was probably like, maybe 7 feet. Maybe 9 feet long.
Tommy: Maybe 9 by 6.
ArchAngel: 5 by 9. 5 by 9.
Munirah: Maybe a 10 by whatever.
Bilal: It was big enough for me to lay down. And I'm 6 foot 3.
Munirah: It's very small.

Narration:
These men and women are survivors. That's the term for prisoners who have survived solitary confinement. Because the Hole is something which must be survived. If you're lucky.

Hakeem: Lock down. Total lockdown. The best way I can describe it is this. The cell was a windowless cell.
Bobby: And you had a bar door and an outer solid door closed over you.
ArchAngel: The door was a double lock, slide door.
Bobby: Uh, the walls were cinderblock.
Tommy: Cement. Like a slab for us to sleep in.
Bobby: The bed is a 4 inch slab of concrete.
Ray Luc: The bed is concrete. There's a small concrete slab that serves as your table.
Hakeem: And the floor. It was concrete.
Laura: There was a sink. With no stopper. And a toilet.
Ray Luc: There's a combination toilet and sink that's stainless steel. No seat, you know.
Hakeem: Everything is concrete and steel.
ArchAngel: Metal and cement.
Robert: That was it.

Narration:
No two stories that I heard were exactly alike. But a picture of the experience of solitary confinement was emerging.

Bobby: The light.
Laura: I did not have control over the light switch.
Bobby: Alright, double neon light.
Laura: It was usually on. And it was very difficult to get it turned off at night.
Tommy: There's one light that comes through from the outside that's on all the time.
ArchAngel: There's lights on, um, most of the night.
Robert: The light would be on, sometime, 24/7. It never went out.
Bilal: People are in situations where they have the lights on 24 hours a day. And the situation I was in the lights were out 24 hours a day. They never turned the lights on.
Robert: You're in the dark for an extended period of time.
Bilal: It was dark all the time.
Robert: It's been too much light, which can be blinding. And it was too much darkness which was also blinding. It's been both, at times.

Narration:
Solitary confinement is about sensory deprivation.

Ray Luc: The box car cell is designed for sensory deprivation. Because the cell itself is recessed. It sits in. And there's bars on the front of it. But then you have what's called a trap, or a dead space. And then you have another solid door and wall. You can not stand up to the bars and see a little bit down to the left or a little bit down to the right.

Bilal: There was a big door that closed. And you didn't hear anything outside of the door.
Laura: And the first night that I was there I thought, "Ah it's so quiet." But very quickly the quiet becomes oppressive.
Ray Luc: It can get eerily quiet in these places.
Hakeem : Real quiet.
Ray Luc: Mostly what you're going to hear is your own breathing, you know. You might hear your heart rate pumping up.
Bobby: You could hear bugs.
Ray Luc: What you hear is nothing. You know, there is no sound to hear.

Narration:
Sensory deprivation. But, it's also about overwhelming the senses.

Ray Luc: When there is a noise, like a steel gate opening because the guards are going to come down the tier it's just nerve wracking to hear that noise.
Bobby: Coming on to the tier, it's a heavy steel door. And it opens electrically, which means you hear, "EEEEEE". They step in and they just let it slam shut, alright. They walk down the tier. They've got combat boots on.
Ray Luc: Boots hitting concrete. And all the guards carry clubs.
Tommy: Banging the batons or whatever it is they have the nights sticks, against the wall.
Bobby: You hear a lot of banging. Mental ill guys do this banging.
Tommy: Screaming and yelling. Crying. Uh, cops threatening. Constant threats.
Robert: There were times when it got close to being so loud it was intolerable.

Ray Luc: A crying baby or the leaves of a tree fluttering in the wind. You don't hear any of these sounds at all.

Robert: Sometimes you welcome the noise. You wanted to hear somebody, regardless of what noise they made.
Bilal: I really wanted to talk to somebody. You know, just somebody to be there.
Hakeem: You can go days without talking to people. Sometimes weeks, sometimes months.
Bilal: You can't touch anyone. You can't hear anybody speak.
Laura: There was no touch. There was no human touch.
Tommy: No, no human touch. Reverb: human touch.
Laura: Except for aggressive touching by guards when they would come in to chain me up to take me out...
Hakeem: You have no contact with guards unless you are handcuffed and shackled.
Laura: ... Or pat-search me, which they would do, although I was only in that cell so what could I have.
Hakeem: I did not touch anyone for years. Reverb: For years, for years.
Bilal: It's all, it's just all in your head.
Tommy: Well, you can touch the cement. Uh, that's about it.

Narration:
The Hole affects one's sense of Touch. Sight. Sound... even Smell.

Hakeem: It's a dusty smell. Smell like concrete.
Tommy: There's steel. I think maybe some rust.
ArchAngel: Stale. Musty air.
Tommy: You know the smell of rust? Uh, steel?
ArchAngel: Reverb: Metal and cement.
Robert: Reverb: That was it. That was it.

ACT III: NINE PEOPLE

Narration:
Nine cells. Nine bodies. Nine stories. Who are these people?
Americans are in prison for everything from drugs or theft, to possession of weapons and robbery... to assault and murder. And some are innocent. Two of these nine former prisoners had their convictions overturned -- after decades in prison.

Hakeem: My name is Hakeem Shaheed. My prison number was 10199050. I was a Federal prisoner from 1989 to 2006.
Laura: My name is Laura Whitehorn. And I'm from New York City. I did a little more than 14 years. I was a federal prisoner.
Bobby: My name is Robert Dellalo. I'm from Massachusetts. I'm 66 years old. I just completed a 40 year sentence that I overturned. Well, I hit most of the reform schools. I hit the Concord prison and Walpole state prison. Been to Marion Illinois twice. I been in Louisburg, Pennsylvania.
Bilal: My name is Bilal Sunni Ali. I'm originally from Harlem, New York. I'll be 60 years old in July. I was in prison for five years totally, if you count it all up.
Munirah: Munirah El Bumani from Newark New Jersey. I was in prison for 4 years in the Etna Mayhem correctional facility and uh Northern State Prison.
Ray Luc: Ray Luc Levasseur. I was born and raised in Maine. Left for many decades. And returned in 2004 when I got out of prison. I was in prison 20 years including the notorious prison Federal at Marion, which is the prison which replaced Alcatraz. And then when ADX, Administrative Maximum was built, I was sent to ADX.
Tommy: I'm Tommy Escarciga. I'm originally from El Paso Texas. I was in a jail that was called Sybil Brand Institute for Women.
ArchAngel: Diano King ArchAngel Rodriguez. Member of the All Mighty Latin Kings and Queens Nation. New Jersey state. I've been in the pen as an adult twelve and a half years. Northern State Prison, Yardville Correctional, Bordentown Correctional. Trenton, Southwood. And as a juvenile probably around 26 institutions.
All: Reverb. Montage of prison names under previous ArchAngel.
Robert King: Robert King Wilkerson. Angola State Prison, Louisiana. It's a maximum security prison. It covers 18,000 acres. It gets its name from the country Angola, Africa, because it's alleged that a lot of the slaves coming from Angola were habitated at that plantation.

Narration:
All of these prisons have solitary confinement cells. The use of solitary is widespread in the U.S. -- and growing. Tens of thousands of inmates are locked in solitary today. In fact there are now more than 30 "supermax prisons" where every inmate in the entire institution is in solitary confinement.

Names 2:
Hakeem: They come up with fancy names. You have SHU. SHU is the special housing unit.
Bilal: It was also called Administrative Segregation. That's the nice polite term for it.
Robert: CCR. And it mean Close Cell Restricted.
Laura: Time out. That's a little euphemism.
Tommy: Another name for Solitary Confinement is El Ollo, which means the Hole.
Bilal: We called it the Hole.

Narration:
Prison itself is hard and dangerous, but some would argue that it is fair price to pay for criminal actions against society. However, being put in the solitary confinement has nothing to do with what you did on the outside -- why you were arrested, tried, convicted. In fact, prisoners are not sentenced to solitary by a judge or in a court of law at all. It's a decision that happens once you're inside. It's made by a prison warden or a prison board -- at their discretion. And with very little oversight.

ArchAngel: I was placed in lockup because of my membership in the Almighty Latin Kings and Queens Nation. That's labeled a gang but now gangs are labeled security threat group units. That's the name they use now. And any member of a security threat group, they'll put you in a control unit, which is a Hole.
Robert King: They placed me in solitary because I was, uh, I was a member of the Black Panther Party. That was their reason, but I think they ran out of reasons after a couple of years.

Narration:
The Hole is supposed to be used for "the protection of the prisoner" -- or those around him. But it isn't always the most violent who are sent there. Instead, it's those who're seen as "trouble-makers." It's used as punishment for those who will not -- or in some cases can not -- obey the rules. The mentally ill end up in solitary. So do the organizers.

Hakeem: It's not always for safety. If you are a leader of any group, or if you are influential of a group of inmates, then they can use that to lock you down.
Tommy: I was organizing the women in Sybil Brand because the deputies there were turning on the heat in the summer and the fan in the winter. So, being that I had not ever been to prison before I said, "They can't do this!" (chuckle) And all the rest of the prisoners were looking at me like, "Yes they can." "No, no, no. We have to organize" and all that. And so they came for me.
Hakeem: The last 10 years of my incarceration was spent in Marion Federal Prison, which everyone knows is a supermax lockdown 23-and-1. I was sent there for giving a speech to the NAACP. The prison officials at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute claimed that the speech that I gave them was inflammatory. The speech was only telling the NAACP visitors at the prison that there was a lot of racism going on in the prison amongst the guards and there was unneeded and unjustified, um, touching from the guards on prisoners. They felt that it was an embarrassment. So they decided that it was time to teach me a lesson. These were their words, now: "To teach me a lesson". Now I was supposed to be sent there for 18 months. However, I spent 10 years there.
Robert King: Of course they say, intended to reform, but they're designed to, to punish. Because all the reform was taken out of prison, the so-called quote reform.

ACT IV: LACK OF CONTROL

Narration:
There're also the stories about physical abuse -- beatings and assault by guards. They're upsetting. Though not unexpected, because we hear those stories. But the idea of solitary confinement, the conscious act of separating a human being from everything that allows us to be human -- that's something we don't hear about.

Bobby: You had nothing in the room but you.
Munirah: Just your lonely body in a cell. That's empty.
Bilal: It's hard to describe nothing.
Munirah: Emptiness. That's what solitary confinement is. No other way to describe it.

Robert: And you were confined to a cell 23 hours a day.
Munirah: 23 hours. In lockup.
Tommy: I was there 24 hours a day.

Narration:
When prisoners are allowed an hour of exercise, they're still often kept in isolation.

ArchAngel: I got recreation, sometimes. They'll determine whether you should get rec. Whether they want to give you rec. Nothing's guaranteed in a control unit.

Narration:
Nothing's guaranteed. Decisions about every minute aspect of daily life seem random and arbitrary.

ArchAngel: No matter what a book says. If a book says you're entitled to a pencil, you're not going to get a pencil.
Laura: Food that was supposed to be hot would be served cold. Food that was supposed to be served cold would be served hot.
Bobby: It's little micro-aggressions.
Ray Luc: I've been in Holes where they control the toilet flush from the outside.
ArchAngel: It was like, their form of punishment.
Ray Luc: Coming and going, I've got to be stripped searched. Bare-assed naked and it's a full... you know cavity search and the whole thing.
Laura: The main thing was not so much each condition. Because those changed, sometimes. The main thing was the message, "You have no control. You are at our mercy."
Tommy: I felt, uh, very vulnerable, very scared.
Hakeem: You try to do everything you can to please the prison officials, to get out of that situation. Everything you can possibly do. And there's not much you can do.
Bilal: The key is in the hand of a prison guard who may or may not follow the orders of the board that put you in isolation.
Laura: And you had no recourse.
Bilal: Or the people who sentenced you to isolation may tell them, "Don't let him out when his time is up."
Laura: And that was the thing that made me the most depressed, was knowing that there were rules that they were supposed to adhere to. And knowing that they weren't. And knowing that there were no penalties. That no one was holding them accountable.

Archangel: I've spent seven and a half years in a control unit.
Hakeem: Maybe about 12 years in lock-down.
Robert: I was there for 29 years. You know. Solitary confinement. Reverb: 29 years, you know. 29 years. 29 years, you know.
Bobby: Many many years in solitary confinement.

Narration:
29 years in solitary. How could this be happening here? This is not Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. This is Kentucky, Louisiana, California, New York. Every state in America uses solitary confinement.

ACT V: INSANITY

Robert: Solitary confinement is just as real as real could be. It, it plays on you big time. And it could, um, it could wop the mind.

Narration:
What does it do to a person, to be locked up in a 9 by 6 room for weeks, months, years -- alone?

Munirah: A life like that, it damages you psychologically, you know, because uh human beings need to interact with each other.
Bilal: It's not normal to be in the dark for days and days and days on end.
ArchAngel: It strips you or a lot of things.
Bilal: It mixes you up.

ArchAngel: I could hardly sleep. Like I had insomnia.
Bobby: Waking up at night. In the sweats. Panic attacks.
Hakeem: I would have a panic attack. And I would bang on the wall. Bang on the wall.
ArchAngel: It would trigger something in my nerves where I would break out in hives from head to toe. It would happen 3 or 4 times a day.
Hakeem: Your senses is so sharp you can actually hear a mouse walking on the floor.

Tommy: I lost track of time.
Laura: They took my watch. And I was not permitted to know what time it was.
Hakeem: There's no concept of time. You know no time in lock down. There's sleep and awakeness. That's it. And the madness in between all that.
Reverb: And the madness in between all that.

Bobby: The hate and the anger takes such control of you, your rational thinking goes out the window.
Laura: I felt angry. I felt so angry at times that I couldn't focus on anything else.
Bobby: I mean, horrific thoughts are playing in your mind.
Reverb: Horrific thoughts are playing in your mind.
Munirah: It, it, it made me develop hatred.
Bilal: The anger builds up. The frustration builds up.
Tommy: I cried a lot. I cried quietly. I cried loudly.

Hakeem: The anger, the rage, the bitterness, the anxiety, the nightmares. And, and as years passed. You know it's ... you know one year's passed, two years passed, three years passed. It just seem like the walls in the cell begin to close in. They begin to close in. You can feel your mind, like, trying to escape from you. And you begin to wonder, well, what's going on with you?

Tommy: I distrusted a lot of my own perceptions.
Robert: Begin to hear voices. Begin to see things.
Bobby: You see sorta like something moved in your cell. That like there was somebody there.
Laura: And you never knew what it was.
Bobby: And there's nobody there. You know?
Laura: I would try to hear things, try to hear human voices and sometimes I would imagine that I was hearing noises.
Bobby: You hear a noise and it sounds like somebody said something to you...
Hakeem: You start hearing things that's not even being said.
Bobby: ... And I'd say, "Yeah. Yeah, what?" And nobody's answering you.
Hakeem: And you wonder, were they whispering about doing something to you? Were they even saying you going crazy? Paranoia sets in so deep, it just begins to collapse in on you.
Bobby: And what happens is chaos.
Robert: Insanity.
Bobby: Reverb: Chaos
Robert: Reverb: Insanity

Narration: The Hole drives people insane. And those who go in with emotional problems come out far, far worse. Psychiatrists describe a syndrome seen in people who have experienced sensory deprivation -- POW's, hospital patients in full body cast, prisoners in the hole. The effects include insomnia, paranoia, rage, time distortion, depression, despair, claustrophobia, hallucination... and more.

ACT VI: TORTURE
Names 3:
Hakeem: They'll say the End of the Barrel. That's what the prison officials called it. The End of the Barrel.
Laura: Control Units.
Bilal: Controlled movement.
Robert: Called it Maximum Security, Administrative Segregation.
Hakeem: Or Disciplinary Transfer.
Munirah: Stigma Unit.
Bobby: Seg
Bilal: Isolation.
Bobby: DDU
Robert: You know, on and on and on and on and on.
ArchAngel: So many of them.
Munirah: I would say, Torture Chambers. No other way to describe them.

Bilal: Solitary confinement is torture.
Tommy: It is torture. 100 per cent.
ArchAngel: Of course it's torture. It's, it's torture in every form and fashion.

Narration:
The United Nations Human Right Committee says that prolonged solitary confinement is torture.

Laura: I believe that putting human beings in total isolation is torture.
Ray Luc: The cell itself is designed to severely limit your senses.
Laura: Human beings are social beings. And to remove, not only human contact, but any kind of color, tactile...
Hakeem: The concrete, the bars, the walls...
Bobby: Sensory deprivation. That's torture.
Hakeem: How do they expect you to maintain your humanity when everything you see, everything you touch is just so hard.

Narration:
The effects of solitary don't end at the prison gates. More than 95% of prisoners are released at some point. And many are released directly from solitary confinement, into the streets.

Tommy: When I first got out, I was really, uh, psychotic, hearing voices, not knowing what happened, or, you know.
Munirah: My thinking level was diminished greatly.
Bobby: Short term memory was gone, alright.
Hakeem: My hands, to this day, still shake.
Munirah: I, I went into depressed mode. And I still do.
Bobby: I wake up every hour or forty-five minutes. I do not sleep straight through no more.
Tommy: I get scared when a door locks behind me. Elevators are a problem for me.
Bobby: The subway train opens up. And a mass of humanity is all around you. Instant panic attack.
Hakeem: Post traumatic stress disorder. When I was released from Marion, I was diagnosed for suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I didn't know what that was.

Hakeem: How can you come out functioning well when you have been remade. Your whole being has being rearranged into something that you don't even know who you are. You don't even know who you are anymore.

ACT VII: WHAT'S THIS HAVE TO DO WITH ME?

Narration:
So... what does this have to do with the rest of us? Who are not in prison. Who don't have a child or spouse in prison? We all have plenty of other problems to think about.

Robert: People basically, they're concerned with trying to survive. Everyday living that it takes to survive. So they will tell you, "Well, I'm not political. Or I don't..." They don't realize that all of their life depends on politics. You know?

Narration:
There's a practical way to look at the question of how this affects all of us, personally...

Hakeem: Let me tell you something. Most of the prisoners in our country will come home one day. You've got people going insane who were psychologically tortured and some even physically tortured. They going to come through the street one day. And they might feel, you know what, it's time to pay the country back. This is the danger of what's in the prisons.

Bobby: Look it. You have a dog in a cage. You keep hitting him with a stick. Keep brutalizing him. Open the cage and let the dog run free. What's the dog going to do? Lick you? Wag his tail? Or is he going to tear your leg off. This is the same thing with a human being. You take a human being and you dehumanize him, degrade him, emasculate him, disorientate the hell out of him. Take him directly from DDU -- and they do this -- just dropping them into the community.

Hakeem: I know, if the American people were educated as to what's going on in the prisons in our country, they would be up in arms that's something be done.

Narration:
Is this true? That "America would be up in arms if we only knew..." I'm not sure. In any case, I'm going to give the last word to someone who is up in arms,

Teresa: My name is Teresa Vaughn. I'm from Adrian Michigan.

Narration:
Teresa is not a survivor. She is a mother of a young man Timothy Souders, who is also not a survivor. Tim did not survive solitary confinement.

Teresa: Tim was a normal teenage boy who went into prison at the age of 19 for shoplifting.

Narration:
Tim's story is almost impossible to believe. But it's been very well documented. In fact, there was a video camera monitoring his cell. Tim had bipolar disorder. And when he was arrested for stealing a toy from a 7-Eleven he flipped out.

Teresa: Tim was in a manic episode. He wasn't thinking clearly. And as he was leaving the store, all the alarms went off. And then he started to run. And he had had a pocket knife on him. So when the police approached him he was saying, "Kill me. I want you to kill me." And they charged him with felony, resisting arrest.

Narration:
They gave him a 3 year sentence. And then because he continued to act erratically they locked him in solitary.

Teresa: Tim writing me letters home saying that some of these things were going on. And I didn't believe it was as bad as he was saying. Because I was just, you know, I never as a middle class American person never thought that something like that could be going on inside the prisons. I really didn't believe that it was that bad, until I saw the video tape. And it was 100 times worse than I could have ever imagined.

Narration:
Tim died in solitary after being shackled to a concrete bed for 17 hours straight.

Teresa: Tim was in there for 17 hours in 2 inch chains across waist, his ankles and his wrists without anybody letting him up to use the bathroom, without anybody giving him water, without anybody coming into the room.

Narration:
The cause of death was dehydration.

Teresa: And the autopsy said that Tim died of dehydration with complications due to being restrained. Accidental Death. Only in the Corrections Department does somebody die an accidental death from being restrained. I mean, we would call it murder.

Teresa: Tim might be one of the survivors being able to share his story to make a change. But instead it's me. I'm the one that has to do this for him. because he's not here with us.

Names 4:
ArchAngel: Security Threat Group.
Tommy: There's Disciplinary Isolation.
Robert: Keep Lock.
Laura: Special Housing.
Robert: CCR.
Munirah: Ad Seg.
Tommy: Las Olapa.
Robert, Bilal and Bobby:
SuperMax. SuperMax. SuperMax. SuperMax. SuperMax. SuperMax.
Bobby: There's a whole pile of names that people use. I mean, it's just, you know what it is when you go there.

Credits:
"Survivors" was produced by Claire Schoen
Original music composed by Quique Cruz and performed by Quijerema ((Kee-Herr-Eh-Mah'))
Sound effects and technical support provided by Scott Koué.
Special thanks to Tony Heriza and the American Friends Service Committee. And to all of those who lent their voices and stories to this project.
In memory of Timothy Souders.

I'm Claire Schoen

Total Time: 29:00

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