Shakespeare Saved My Life by Laura Bates

Author:Laura Bates
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc

CHAPTER 36

Extraction

One day as I was about to enter one of the ranges, I heard a sudden commotion behind me. Before I could turn around, I was nearly knocked over by a team of officers running onto the range—as many as eight officers, most of them wearing body armor, helmets with visors, and heavy leather gloves, and carrying shields. It looked like some sort of medieval duel, only more frantic. I was about to witness my first extraction.

Extraction is the forcible removal of an inmate from his cell. The specially trained team consists of at least five officers, accompanied by a supervising sergeant, a video camera man, and a medical assistant. Each team member is assigned a body part to subdue and place in restraints: right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg, head. In its early years of operation, the SHU averaged several extractions per week.

Newton was involved in a group demonstration at WCU that had ended in a cell extraction of each of the prisoners involved. The hostage incident in the SHU was his second experience with forcible removal by an extraction team. By then he knew what to expect when the officers arrived at the range in which he and his accomplices had been sealed off following the stabbing of Sgt. Harper.

“They suit up and come and get you,” he told me. “They come in with all this gear. It’s really intimidating.”

And then he described the conditions he endured after the SHU extraction.

“I’m not claiming the ‘victim’ issue,” he said, “but this is no joke: I was stripped out for like sixteen days in my boxers, that was it. Sixteen days sitting like that on a strip cell.”

A strip cell is an empty cell in which a prisoner sits in nothing but his underwear. I once got reprimanded for handing a prisoner in a strip cell a single sheet of paper (a Shakespeare speech).

“And they would bring me these sacks,” he continued. “I didn’t get trays. I’d get my meals in sacks. And they would spray OC into my sack. You know what OC is? That chemical they use [pepper spray]. Aw, man! That stuff’s terrible! They would spray it in my little coffeecake sack, and it’s not a hallucination, you know when your eyes start burning. Like, ‘What the—!’ And I don’t go around making issues like, ‘I got treated bad!’ But the point is, what do you do? You buckle down and you freakin’ eat it. For two reasons: on principle and you’re hungry, you know what I mean? On principle, I’m not gonna let ’em win, I’m not gonna let ’em get to me.”

It’s understandable that the officers would harbor resentment against any prisoner who had attacked one of their own, and published reports such as Cold Storage: Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Indiana suggest that officers in the unit were more, to use Newton’s term, “rowdy” in the past than they are today.

“They’d sit outside my cell and just stare at me all night,” Newton recalled.

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