🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
The cell I which I live is about 8 feet by 16 feet with a ceiling about 9 feet high. In that cell are two beds (bunked), two steel cabinets, a desk with two attached stools, a shelf with 5 coat hooks, a toilet, a sink, and a stainless-steel mirror. The beds are 6 feet long by 3 feet wide. The desk is 20 inches by 30 inches with a stool that is 12 inches in diameter attached to two sides. The cabinet is 18 inches wide by 18 inches deep, it is 3 feet tall, and two of them are bolted to the wall, side-by-side next to the desk and 18 inches off of the floor. The shelf with 5 hooks is on the same wall as the bunk beds. This all leaves about a 3 foot wide walk-space from the front of the cell to the back. The floor is bare concrete, the walls are a light beige while the beds, desk, door, cabinets, and shelf are a darker shade of the same color. There is one light fixture, which is a metal box encasing 2 extremely bright, white LED/halogen bulbs: you know the office building type.
Two men live in this cell. I offer such a detailed description to set the stage for how close one has to live next to another man you hardly know. I fully understand hat such discomfort is seen as part of the punishment of being in prison, but I want to offer some nuance to the understanding. Nothing in life is absolute, after all, so I want to see if punishment can become torture when it is pursued to an overzealous extreme, and it that manufactures evil. For now I am going to set aside that I have spend about 32,5 years in prison and nearly every day has been in such a cell with another person. Since I am professing an understanding of the overcrowded conditions as part of my punishment, I will gloss over the mundane, every day experience of such unrelentingly close quarters. In such an average day of my life in this prison I am forced to be in this type of cell for at least 16 hours a day altogether. At least there are the 8 hours I can occupy myself away from this other person.
Right now I want you to remember the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m aware that different places had different restrictions, recommendations, and mandates due to fear of imminent death. I even consider that my particular state of life leaves me with, if not a longing for that imminent death, then at least a lack of fear of it. I want you to judge if I am in error to think the damage to a person’s psychological well-being was overlooked in the response to that fear in here.
For nearly one year every inmate in Pennsylvania state prison, amounting to approximately 40,000 people at that time, were forced to remain in their cell, with their cell mates, for 32,5 hours a day. Every day. The only exceptions were the few inmates who had cells to themselves due to segregation or those inmates the prison realized were needed to run the facility. Out of 2,000 or so inmates in my prison, that left about 1,800 locked down all day. At some point, the fear began to subside and the prison began to loosen the restrictions. For about 6 months we were allowed out for one hour a day. That time was to be used for recreation, telephone calls, use of the email systems, showers, and anything else needed to be done outside of the cell.
After this period came another loosening of restrictions that saw only 2 hours out of cell time. This brings it to a period of about 2 years where people were forced to remain in a cell with another person for almost every moment of their lives. Living in close quarters with someone is not easy. Doing so with a complete stranger is more stressful. Realizing that the person you live with may be capable of literally any heinous act, while he is thinking the same of you, is tense beyond what normal life could ever prepare you for. And all of this on top of the fact that they closed the dining halls and forced everyone to eat in their cells. I have had to sit on my toilet to eat for almost 5 years now because the dining halls are still closed.
If you have never heard of the Stanford Prison experiment, please look it up. Setting aside the lack of objectivity on the part of the man who ran the experiment, it raises a very pertinent point that I see in here every day. I see the evil that exists within this system. The evil in the inmates who committed unspeakable horrors, including me. The evil in sadistic guards who revel in authority that is absolute. That isn’t the worst, though. I can forgive a person their flaws and weaknesses. I cannot forgive the system when I witness how it manufactures the evil I am forced to accept. Creation implies intent. A current example of this occurred to me about a week ago. I was sitting in a chair on the block where I am housed. As I read a book I looked up at this sound of a door slamming and saw an inmate striding aggressively away from his own cell. There is no comparison to the slamming of a reinforced steel door set in a concrete block wall. There is no more satisfying of an angry slam possible!
These things are common, so I went back to reading. A few minutes later I heard some loud, angry words being exchanged and I looked up to see the same man now arguing with his cell-mate on the block. The officer who was supposed to be on the block was not. These things are common, so I went back to reading. Within two minutes, before I read even one page, the chairs next to me went flying across the floor away from me. I looked up to see the man who had slammed the door now being slammed on the ground by his cell-mate. The sound of an elbow, a knee, or a hip-bone hitting a linoleum tiled-concrete floor is unmistakable to me now. It’s almost a cross between a wooden bat hitting a baseball and an axe splitting a log. It’s not at all like a head hitting that surface. No, that’s different.
After this man was slammed to the ground his cell-mate leaned over him and started punching him in the head as hard as he could. This had an odd, heartbeat-like rhythm to it. Odd because the atrial beat had the sound of the thwacking of meat on meat as his first hit this head, while the ventrical beat sounded like a watermelon being hit with a stick when his head bounced off the tile. I moved from the chair I was sitting in because they were only a few feet away from me. I saw at a table about 10 feet away. Since these things are so common, I went back to reading. The officer later returned, but the fight was not caught. However, the cell-mate who perpetrated the violence went to the guard when he returned and reported himself. He informed the officer that he would not return to the cell because he was afraid he might kill his cell-mate. This officer actually laughed at him and did nothing.
My point in recounting this occurrence is to show different aspects of how I believe this system manufactures evil. One is in light of how the people who were incarcerated through the pandemic were caged like animals with another person. It created a psychological aversion to being in a cell with someone if there was tension because of the fear of not coming back out for a year! That actually happened.
I sat 3 feet away and watched the aggressor lean in to beat a man who was offering no resistance. The look of pure hate as he landed those punches was the face of evil. Yet, he only landed 4 to 5 punches and stopped. He then reported himself to try to prevent a continuation of the fight later, when they had to return to their cell. This shows me that evil is an ephemeral thing. It exists as a potential and can arise anywhere. It can also pass as if it never existed.
Just as it arose in the guard who laughed as a man who was trying to prevent evil from using him as a conduit for a second time. The guard did not care because he did not have to care. As long as he doesn’t see it, it didn’t happen. A blind eye is evil’s best friend. And I admit to the part I played. I sat an arms length away and watched a man I know beat a defenseless person and all I did was move away. I justify my actions by noting that involving myself in any way would have brought consequences upon me as if I participated in the fight. That is true. But is it any different than what got me my life sentence?