Torture Through a Child’s Eyes
The hole at Hellzdale Prison
For the October 28-29, 2011 conference of the Pennsylvania Network Against Torture, updated and revised.
“To deny modes of accountability reinforces impunity” —Justice Richard Goldstone, TheNation.com, Pg.8, May 2, 2011
“We now must pay for the soap, toilet paper or sanitary napkins and can’t get them until the Unit Manager feels...we need them...those who are terminally ill can’t hurt no one, are still not allowed to leave.... Sharon Wiggins...came here when she was 15. She is now 60. Male officers here touch our private parts and smash our breasts like they belong to them.” —Geraldine Lucas, Muncy Prison (From Leon Williams’ Journal, December 1, 2011. Pg. 22.)
“Solitary confinement...can be as clinically distressing as physical torture.”—The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
“It is a crime under Pennsylvania law for a corrections officer to see assaults or be aware of assaults, and not stop them or report them.” —Stephen A. Zappala, Jr., Alleghany County District Attorney (Associated Press, September 2011)
Mrs. Lucas is 79-years-old and has been imprisoned over 40 years. Mrs. Wiggins is now blind and was sentenced to death by incarceration as a child. She has been jailed for 45 years.
At the tender age of 17, on May 4, 1981, like the biblical Joseph, I was falsely accused and convicted of a crime (homicide and robbery) I did not commit. Not only am I actually INNOCENT, but we have the evidence to prove it.
Upon arrest, I was sent to the Youth Study Center (USC)—commonly called “the center”—which is a county jail for children. The center had a special wing for children that were to be certified and tried as adults.
I hadn’t been at the center for a full week when I walked into the bathroom showers, toilets and sinks) and a large fifteen-yea-old was sexually threatening a much smaller, and very frightened, fifteen-year-old. The smaller boy had just arrived like I had, but I don’t think he’d been there for a month. The taller boy was about to sexually assault—if he hadn’t already—or rape the shorter one. He was so engrossed that he didn’t even turn towards me. The smaller boy who was trapped in the corner by the showers, was facing me, “Yo! what da fuck you doin’?” I confronted the aggressor. “I’ma break this little bitch down,” the bully replied without even tuning around to see who I was. The smaller boy was frantically trying to make eye contact with me, asking for help inaudibly. I moved on his cue, “Get da fuck out of here with that ’mo shit cuz.” The bully turned around immediately realizing I was warning him! “You betta not touch ’im.” “What if I do? It ain’t none of your business!” I took a half-step forward and as if I were spitting my words into his eyes, “Touch ’im and find out.” He backed up and stepped to the side in order to let the victim pass by, freeing him from his corner. At first the shorter boy was afraid to move. I tilted my head towards the door and told him to leave, “Main man, roll.” “Thanks cuz.” “It’s nothing,” I replied, never taking my ayes off the bully. Once he was completely out of the bathroom, the bully tried to cop a plea “All Cas, I wasn’t gonna do nuffin’ to ’im. Carp’ and Bennis told me to fuck ’im up and they would give me some extra snacks all week. I wus just scarin’ the lil’ nigga.”
Just like the children we were, the staff would give us snacks at night, but some guards would use snack time as leverage to bribe some of the boys to do their dirty work against stand up prisoners, especially those of us who stood up to the violent guards. Carp’ and Bennis were two such brutal guards at YSC’s security unit. “What chu think I’m a nut? You was tryna fuck that boah!” “Carp’ and ’em wanted me to fuck ’im up. But I was just gonna scare ’im. I swear to God cuz.” “Then what happens next week when Carp’ and ’em pay me to fuck you up?” The look of bewilderment on his face told me that he was clueless and had never contemplated that inevitable betrayal by the guards. “You trippin’ cas, I ain’t got no beef with you, I’m just tryna get some extra snacks.”
“We have to recognize that incarceration of youth per se is toxic.” —Dr. Barry Kirsberg, President, National Council on Crime and Delinquency
After being sentenced to Death-by-Incarceration (DBI) and then shipped up state to the maximum security prison at Graterford, the fourth largest prison in the country, three jails since then, I’m now at Houtzdale; still in prison 30 years later. I’m just learning that the practice of staff “hiring” inmates to attack fellow prisoners has a name: the guards call it “Nigger Gladiator Games.” Some staff often make bets, like a sporting event, as to whether the hitman will be successful in carrying out the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections brand of Amerikkkan cannibalism.
Corporate U.S. media represents the height of hypocrisy when it does in-depth stories on prisons of foreign nations like China, but is mute, deaf and blinded by color when concerning prison torture in America. China and the U.S. are nearly the same when it comes to prison violence, abuse and torture, etc., by staff. Some could even call it a parallel universe. But if we are truthful—and we must be—America is worse because she espouses all of the lofty platitudes on human rights and moral conviction about being a world leader in these areas. But it cannot explain—in plain English—how American prison guards have so much blood on their hands and boots, one would swear we were Red China and the big communist Republic was merely pale pink in comparison. The series of broke, battered, brutalized, traumatized, terrorized, tortured, and dead bodies don’t lie.
“Guards get prisoners to beat other prisoners—they called it ‘playing hide and seek’ and someone gets beaten to death.” —Wife of Qi Chenghuai (Qi Chenghvai is a prominent Chinese who who was beaten and threatened by guards during his four years spent in jail for allegedly exposing corruption and government malfeasance.) —Newsweek, July 4 and 11, 2011, pg. 50
The Houtzdale attacks-for-hire are deadly, and always end in a prisoner being maimed, scarred (physically, mentally and spiritually), handicapped or dead, How they have managed to keep the murders silent is a testament to both the public ignorance and the Staff at Houtzdale’s ability to lie with a straight face, and bury truth, as the enemy, and have absolutely no regard for human life of the prisoners in their charge. This reality has me existing in a constant state of fear and paranoia and my mental health is in a perpetual state of disease. This state sanctioned savagery is overwhelming for adults, but for children it is beyond instant devastation.
The DOJ under the Obama administration released a 2010 report on children in prison, which revealed that, “More than half the suicides at juvenile detention centers ‘occurred within six days’ of a juvenile’s commitment to the facility.”1
As Mrs. Lucas indicates, for girls and women it gets even more torturous. “Women represent seven percent of prison population but accounted for 32 percent of victims in prison sexually assaulted, raped or harassed by staff. Women make up 13 percent of the jail population but 56 percent of the victims sexually assaulted or raped in jails by staff.” —Department of Justice report on “Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails,” January 2011.
These are the reports we’ve been getting from girls and women at Muncy and Cambridge Spring, female prisons, crying for redress but to no avail. The PA DOC just sweeps it under the rug each time. Currently at Cambridge Springs, the women are drowning in the midst of a mass food contamination outbreak, and battling to fend off staff-sanctioned extortion rings and sexual predation by prisoners and staff. In 2009, a report entitled “Hidden Injustice” told us that. “Facility staff sometimes instigates or facilitates fights or sexual abuse between youth.” Two years later the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report titled, “Sexual Victimization Report by Adult Correctional Authorities” was summarized by an independent legal watchdog group that, “The unfortunate conclusion one must draw from BJS report is that sexual victimization of prisoners—especially female prisoners—is still widespread in U.S. correction facilities.” Yet the violence, threats, coercion, harassment, abuse, degrading, inhumane, and other cruel treatment continue unabated.
“Take them away into the hole.” —September 1, 1670, City’s Chief Criminal Judge, London Court of Sessions
That was the order to the guards to take William Penn, Jr. and his codefendant to the hole because they spoke out against corruption. The judge had just charged and threatened the jury to convict young Penn who had been brought down from Newgate Prison. That was the seventeenth-century England, eleven years before Penn, Jr. crossed the pond and founded this state and named it after his father, Admiral Sir William Penn. Unfortunately, 341 years later, it is still called “the hole” and very little has changed. Correction; technology has changed, but the same basic spirit to torture, silence dissent and the fledgling principles of democracy, abuse, oppression and degradation not only still exist, but have gotten worse. The offspring of this mindset have become, to paraphrase U.S. Justice Thomas, “high-tech” at “lynching;” a level of sophistication where they rarely, if ever at all, leave finger or footprints, scars or evidence of their addiction to torture.
I’ve been in Houtzdale’s hole (solitary confinement) for more than a year now, and have been subjected to, as well as witnessed, multiple acts of torture, retaliation, threats, coercion, violence, abuse, degrading, inhumane and other cruel treatment by guards and staff (e.g., medical, maintenance, mailroom, “legal aid,” kitchen stewards, etc.) Prisoners call it “Hellzdale” (the valley of Hell). If this is true, then devils indeed operate, control and profit off this prison pit of fire. I was locked in the hole this trip—not much different than before, as retaliation for exposing some of the white supremists staff. This time I exposed Kenneth Hollibaugh, Major of Unit Management and other like-minded staff. Major Hollibaugh’s retaliation stems from the fact that I found out that he had secretly excluded all Black prisoners—in a predominantly Black population—from a meet and greet session with a law professor and his students to discuss prison law and getting out of prison. The Major picked an all-white group of convicts to pow-wow with the law professor. As soon as I found out, I cited the Major for it—that an “all white anything” in this age of Barack Obama is unacceptable. Then Warden Britton, agreed with me.
I also filed a grievance against Correction Officer Clavenstein for threatening me that he was, “The Hangman of Houtzdale.” This was right after he had been caught making a black hangman’s noose and using it to terrorize other Black prisoners, CO Clavenstein was fired because of my grievance.
However, in less than a year, he was rehired at the coercing, allegedly, by his union that filed a complaint to get him rehired so he can continue his hate crimes along with several other staff.
Once Warden Britton left the prison, via promotion, Major Hollibaugh began his campaign of retaliation. First, he secretly took my z-code (single cell status that forbids them from putting someone in the cage with you). He didn’t tell me about this, which set me up for “Nigger Gladiator Games (NGG)” by one of the Major’s hires to be physically assaulted and or sexually preyed upon. Then the Major ordered one of his subordinates to threaten to cut my hair—which he knows I would not do, because it is sacrilegious. I have been growing my hair natural for nearly 15 years because it comports with my spiritual persuasion. This sent me to the hole, where the Major has tried, six or seven times, to NGG me. Upon my reception at the hole, Hollibaugh had another subordinate confiscate five boxes of my law work, which I cannot fight my case without, to prove my actual innocence and be exonerated.
Nigger Gladiator Games is exacerbated by the fact that it is common knowledge that staff put prisoners in cells with known homosexuals, some who have diseases. Shortly thereafter we see both convicts going to the dispensary to be treated for their disease. It is not known if the sex is consensual or rape, but either way it is illegal for the PA DOC to do that.
However, they engineer and facilitate it on a weekly basis, This is not a statement against homosexuals, because whatever two grown people consent to is their business. But rather, heterosexuals, being endangered in this manner, is another clear example of what is condoned and orchestrated as a practice and custom by the DOC, but is unlawful in this state. This is to keep prisoners in fear, unsafe and insecure and running through a unending, torturous, gauntlet of degradation, destruction and death.
This first day I got to the hole, I hadn’t been back here for an hour when Corrections Officer (CO) Long and another CO, who is semi-rookie-ish (Cinko,) came in and got some linen for a prisoner and CO Long takes out two towels and throws them on the floor and begins to step-on and kick them. The nameless rookie starts doing the same thing. They both laugh as if it’s their little inside joke. (Both of them leaned forward to stay out of the views of the security camera. Neither of them noticed me squatting at the bottom of the holding intake cage.
When I heard their laugh, I knew it was more to it than just two hateful people. Softpedia confirmed it for me with an article titled: “Why Do We Laugh.” “Psychologists and philosophers distill laughter down to ‘three basic theories’” and the second of the three, “the superiority theory” is a propos here. It “dates back to Aristotle,” thus speaks volumes on European culture. “We laugh when we see somebody else doing something stupid or having some kind of misfortune, and we feel superior to this person. When we feel such superiority we laugh.”
This is one of the telltale signs of white supremacy and it is rampant here. It is also an indication that those who hold these views and practices are very comfortable with their surroundings and their ability to get away with it and not be punished by their supervisors.
The first week or so in the hole I was assaulted with a pair of handcuffs by CO Rowles and needed medical treatment. The physician’s assistant who saw me did nothing to heal or lessen the extreme pain I was in. I filed a complaint against RowIes. Major Hollibaugh is in charge of Rowles, and everyone in the hole, so it was covered up and my grievance ignored. The first month in the hole I watched in horror as the same CO Rowles brutally beat a prisoner named Edward Solimini because he was Puerto Rican and rumored to be gay. The beating was savage for several reasons, not the least of which was that Mr. Solimini was handcuffed behind his back and had a dog leash attached to them while he was slammed to the ground by CO Rowles and pummeled while three other guards stood by and did nothing to stop him.
The entire ordeal was captured on the security camera and the new Warden, Steven Glunt and Major Hollibaugh were notified about it, but did nothing but cover it up, or ignore it, as if it were legal. But as Alleghany County DA, Stephen Zappala has made clear. “It is a crime under (PA) law.” The Office of Special Investigation and Intelligence (OSII) was notified about the Solimini beating but did nothing. The OSII is the PA DOC’s internal affairs but functions more like an internal “who cares.” They don’t do anything until the media or public officials (things outside their control) get involved and start probing.
“The use of solitary confinement increases the risk that acts of torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment will go undetected and unchallenged.” —Juan E. Mendez, U.N. Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council. Interim Report, September 2011, GA Resolution 65/205.
“(As revealed by) the war on terror...with little concern or demurral we have consigned tens-of-thousands of our citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war.” —Professor Atul Gawande, Harvard University
Many Staff here use this prison as a personal fiefdom for amusement by cruelty, abuse, violence and torture. Basic human, civil and Constitutional-rights denial is the standard practice at Houtzdale: the mandated one-hour yard, law library, food, legal and paralegal mail, competent, or any medical treatment. Just recently, I was denied ten consecutive meals. I was starved for three-days-and-a-third. On the second day a guard gave me a bag with feces in it for breakfast. I have lost over 30 pounds. I now have that Nazi Germany hollowed out face and eyes concentration-camp zombie look. You can see the bone structure in my face and body. The attacks against one’s being while in prison are multifaceted in general, but in the hole those attacks are accelerated. The cells are brutally cold...constantly! The heat, or lack of it, is controlled by staff. My hands and feet are always like ice cubes, numb and with very little or no feeling. According to the New York Times harsh coldness is just one of many other devices of torture used in prisons across the country, “We’re freezing. The air conditioner is blowing full blast.” —Ronald Yandell, Hunger Strike leader at Pelican Bay State Prison.
Extremely bright florescent-like lights are left on all night. “Light at night suppresses production of the hormone melatonin, and this could have caused the brain changes.” A new study gave one more reason for humans to shut off even the blurry light at bedtime. That it, “caused hamsters to show signs of depression.” That “autopsies of the animals revealed physical changes to the hippocampus, a region of the brain linked to mood.” —Time Magazine, November 29, 2010, pg. 17.
It is no accident that most of the men here in the hole are Black and of color. Princeton’s Dr. Cornell West had it absolutely right when he said, “We’re talking about something that is somatic. It’s at the level of body and it’s sonic, at the level of sound. We don’t even like the sound of your name. You see that’s white supremacy at a deep level.” My spirituality takes the brunt of the attacks by staff. Though the denial of having spiritual services like many other men of faith, and constantly being threatened to cut my hair are huge violations of my rights, none are bigger for the Noose Crew mentality than my name, which was legally changed by the courts nearly 20 years ago. Their attack on my name, Muti A. Ajamu Osagboro, denies me multiple in-camp services and anything else in my life that is connected to my name—which is everything—visits, phone calls, mail (legal and paralegal, education programs, mental therapy, showers. physical outdoor exercise, law work access, etc. All of these things are at one time or another, and still are denied arbitrarily because of the systemic hatred of my lawful name and its use. As well as the spiritual persuasion it is connected to. Professor Molefi Kete Asante’s words ring loud and true, “For some whites our rejection of white names will be dramatic.” The professor punctuates with unassailable ancient truth, “the essence of psychological health is that one deals and is capable of dealing with his identity.”
At the beginning of Summer I watched in terror as Hellzdale guards denied a prisoner eighteen meals in a row. They did it because they said he’d been convicted of sex offences against minors and he was basic white trash. After the eighteenth meal denial, I filed a grievance that night after dinner. The very next morning the guards came and moved him off the block so we couldn’t see them starve him to death. Lieutenant Groce did nothing when I asked him was he alright with the starving? When the count was at 12 or 15, Warden Glunt came by on one of his rare tours. I asked him, “Are you alright with the fact that your guards have denied 12 cell 12 or 15 meals in a row?” Without hesitation the warden said, “Yup! It’s all his choice.” How do you choose to let someone starve you? That type of sick logic is typical PA DOC illogic.
This brand of lawlessness is practiced in the prison’s general population and the hole, with cosmetic changes to fit the particular environment. Guards—sometimes openly—pay informants and hit men with ice cream, photo or concession tickets, free TV and/or radio and cable, packs of cigarettes or bags of loose tobacco. They grant extra visits or return visits that were taken for a jail infraction. They allow the continuance of selective extortion, gambling and prostitution rings and other rackets and graft for which particular guards get a percentage. Guards from so-called security use these confiscated items to pay off or bribe hitmen and informants, various Black males, labeled as Security Threat Group (STG), who are friends, associates, religious brethren or litigators as a pretext because these men regularly expose human, civil and constitutional rights violations within the prison.
In the hole, the currency is an extra piece of chicken, a biscuit or watermelon (another one of their sick inside neo-Nazi jokes,) a piece of cake, hamburger or tuna fish, early release from the hole or the stoppage or lessening of some form of cruelty, abuse or torture; the denial of a desk and a chair to hamstring or chill your ability to litigate, a false positive on a urine test; give your mail to other prisoners who work for them so their agent can harm your family and friends; put litigators in the exercise yard next to one of their hirelings so they can throw urine and defecate on you with nothing or nowhere to wash it off; put you next door to one of their minions, who have been driven insane by the Restricted Housing Unit toxicity, so he bangs on the metal doors, tables or sinks, toilets or walls, constantly, to assure that you get no sleep at night thereby totally destroying your circadian rhythm. Sleep deprivation causes organ failure and weakens your immune system which opens the door for disease and keeps you sick.
Around the same time they starved the white dude, I watched the guards prepare to “cell extract” two young Black men because they reported that unknown guards had come into the cell while we were all in the yard outside and left a hangman’s noose with a threatening letter using white supremacist anti-Black slurs in it. The young men demanded to see the chain of command and know which guards had been in the cell. It came out the CO Cinko had been one of the two. CO Cinko was one of the same guards I’d seen stomping the towel the first day I arrived here. The ordeal, like most, was caught on tape.
Both of the men filed grievances and it was covered up. One of the young boy’s grievances was dismissed because a staff member concluded that he was not personally affected by the ordeal. What many don’t know, is that the culture of torture and campaign of terror, violence, abuse and dehumanization that the entire country was supposedly appalled by on the news from overseas, in prisons at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantánamo Bay were led by soldiers who were also prison guards in their civilian jobs. The ringleader and most ruthless of the torturers was a PA DOC guard, Charles Graner. Before deploying to Abu Ghraib, Granar walked fresh out of the cellblocks of Greene County State Prison in western PA. As I explain in a letter to President Obama, Charles Graner merely honed his torture skills in the PA DOC and simply outsourced them when called up for military duty. Many staff here are current or ex-military personnel, which is why I call these prison-sanctioned torture chambers. These atrocious acts usually fall under the heading:
- Human and civil rights violations.
- Hate crimes/crimes against humanity.
- Causing a threat to public safety and health.
As a poignantly discerning sister once pointed out to me, “Hurt people, hurt people.” Particularly when they have not gotten the necessary help or healing. A sage jurist warned the nation about torture, violence and abuse against prisoners: [From a] society’s long term perspective there are sound reasons for prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment; “people who are abused and treated with violence, are those more likely to treat others abusively and violently.” Confining people under conditions of extreme violence, fear and hostility “and releasing them back out into society is like throwing a ticking time bomb into a crowd.” —LeMaire, V. Maass 745F. Supp 623
Sadly, the judge’s warning has not been heeded but rather covered up like termites assuring a certain accelerated destructive process in our society, which weakens daily public safety and health. The book, Black Pain, by Terrie Williams does an excellent job in identifying the countless ways the seeds of this destruction reveal themselves in our everyday lives and in this society.
The more defenseless the person, the more brutal the torture. I’ve been at Hellzdale for nearly seven years. For the entire time that I was not in the hole, I was working with men who are mentally ill, co-facilitating a support talk therapy group between men who have been sentenced to Death-By-Incarceration and those with mental disability. The program is called “Friends Helping Friends” and I was recruited for the project as soon as I got here by Francis Schuster, head of the Psychology Department. Timidity notwithstanding, he is a good man, and a rare being in the PA DOC. We get to interact with the mentally ill on the Special Needs Unit (SNU) block in a way that brings the men out of the isolation their block seems to create. Schuster started the program after a rash of suicides on that block—we later found out because of mistreatment by block guards. It was here that I experienced firsthand that the torture, harassment, coercion, threats and retaliation against the mentally ill, in general population is second to none. When you put them in the hole, the cruelty only multiplies.
Because of our efforts to empower, prison staff constantly sabotage our writings and reading material, legal and otherwise, incoming and outgoing. It is destroyed, withheld, lost, denied or given to one of their hireling inmates. Anything that educates the prisoner on how to better oneself relating to having a coherent thought even after the DOC’s mental butchering about what was and is being done to torture you, and most all others who fight against the injustice, is tacitly outlawed. This is why the quotes at the very beginning of this report come from two publications that were both banned by the PA DOC at one time or another. Still we dare to write, dare to struggle, dare to win. Prison terrorizes even the most active imagination trying to fathom the magnitude of cruelty in governmental barbarism. America the unbeautiful, merely begins the depths of depravity which is prison construction.
1 “Characteristics of Juvenile Suicide in Confinement,”