12 Jul2016
Installment 6:
PCDC; waiting for charges and bargaining
PCDC (Pitt County
Detention Center) is a regional facility located in Greenville, NC,
that holds approximately 900 inmates for both state and federal
courts. It also serves the surrounding counties so that they do not
have to enlarge their facilities. I arrived there on the weekend of
the 23rd of October, 2010 and would remain there for 16 months, until
finally sentenced and moved into the Federal prison system.
PCDC is about the
same as all the jails I went through. In-take of new prisoners
followed a pattern of intimidation and degradation so consistently it
had to be part of correction officer (hereafter CO) training and
general prison management. Staff seeks to break any inmate resistance
through various shock treatments, forewarning what could happen if
you arouse CO wrath. There is a period called 'shock days'; a blur of
dehumanizing treatments, psychological torture and physical abuse
intended to soften one up, strip away all self-esteem while warning
just how bad things could get in this new home. At PCDC, it started
with a cold shower for 'disinfection' after which you are left naked
in rooms chilled to 60F for a half hour or more, this is called
getting the 'cooler' and it works well as a day to day punishment
too, and at PCDC it was just one of their many games played by the
COs.
For example,
throughout the prison there were cages and closets just large enough
for one person to stand in. They were designed to be used to hold one
prisoner while another prisoner that the first prisoner is not
allowed to have any contact with passes through the same room or
hallway. They were, though, also used at any COs’ discretion to
“tune up” an inmate. Men were put in the cage in full restraint
which prevented any slouching or leaning. They were then left in a
cage to consider their sins and they were often "forgotten"
for hours. When the new arrival, having been tuned up, finally
arrives at a bare cell he is happy to be there, or such is the
theory.
I spent 24 hours
in maximum security while they 'classified' me, determining what
security level I would be housed in. I was then placed int the 'Low'
security section that was comprised of eight pods of 24 bunks each,
single large rooms with no radios or TV's, but with a dirty window
through which one could view the forest beyond.
PCDC had no
library and the only reading material allow in the jail had to come
through the US mail - if an inmate was lucky enough to have someone
to send them anything. Typically all bunks were filled and another 20
men slept on the floor of each pod. For the 44 residents there were
three toilets, one shower, and two sinks.
The low-security
pods were in an older section of the jail perhaps 20 years old and it
showed its age. Pods extended off a central corridor with Plexiglas
walls facing the hallway so COs could monitor the pods without
actually entering them. In reality, the Plexiglas was there so that
prisoners could practice their sign language to their co-defendants
and friends from one pod to the next while the staff ignored us.
Whenever violence erupted among the prisoners, a group of prisoners
would run to block the glass as there were no cameras in the pods.
Every night there would be bare knuckle boxing tournaments. Then
there were the predatory attacks which occurred in the early morning
hours while sleeping men were easy prey. Sometimes inmates would take
a break from the violence and have a pop culture trivia quiz. It was
a surreal and sometimes sublimely unreal environment.
When staff wanted
to go violent on an inmate, they would move into the pods to be off
camera and also so as to make an example in front of the other
inmates, or they would remove the inmate to a closet off the corridor
where there were no cameras or witnesses.
My pod consisted
entirely of men facing violent charges, (murder/rape/attempted murder
were the most common charges). Most of these inmates had already
served multiple sentences and got their earliest jailhouse training
in North Carolina's “gladiator schools”at the Hightower and the
Polk, state facilities for violent youth. Almost all were either Crip
or Blood affiliated, and of the 40 odd men, there were three of us
who were federal inmates. I was the only 'white boy'. (The Feds are
not supposed to house state and Federal inmates together, but they
are given a waiver to do so by the courts when it is 'unavoidable'
which means everywhere and all the time in actuality. But I learned
this sort of lore, later, when I continued my education in Federal
prison . There I found after surveying the other inmates in the
system that co-housing state and federal inmates is a prevalent
practice.)
We spent our time
watching the violence, listening to the screaming (the dumber the
man, the louder he talks) which was incessant - and that wasn't even
from the visibly mentally ill prisoners - and watching prisoners
decompose as the torpor of hopelessness got to them. (According to
the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, New Yorker
pg. 5, 20 Jun 16; "...56% of state inmates and 45% of inmates in
federal prisons have mental health issues.") Treatment of any
condition, but particularly of mental conditions, at every jail I
went to was minimal. If treatment existed at all it never involved a
doctor, and usually was limited to a constant dosing of Seroquel or
similar antipsychotics to induce sleep and reduce psychotic episodes.
Men would save their doses to sell to others as it helped you sleep
through the constant screaming. Others saved theirs to overdose; the
final way out of jail. Some worked hard to get hooked so they might
be able to get a disability check from Social Service when they got
out by claiming prison induced dependency and who is to say they
weren’t telling the truth. (Most drug dependency results from
self-medication using whatever comes to hand.)
For three months,
over Thanksgiving, Christmas and my birthday 2010, I stayed in in
that pod. During this period there were a few visits from Attorney A
('AA') in a room adjacent to the pod. I had been indicted, but the
governments practice, as I previously described, is to maximize the
number of indictment counts to compound the cost of defense., so we
were now in a period of superseding indictments, where the prosecutor
would go back in front of different grand juries and tell them what
they 'believed' occurred so as to get more and more counts added to
my charges. Though some were deemed ridiculous, and easily beatable
in court, the sheer number charges eventually defeated any prospect
of a defense in court. Over the holidays it became increasingly
obvious that I was well and truly screwed.
Federal
prosecutors develop plausible if not true 'narratives' by which they
"win" indictments and later convictions. The DOJ will not
speak on camera about this as demonstrated on the US TV program "60
minutes" on the 15th of May 2016. These narratives do not have
to be fact based, they need only be “expressed belief” based. It
is these expressed beliefs prosecutors publish to besmirch defendant
reputations and poison any possible jury pool. Whether charges are
dropped later, or a person is exonerated, the DOJ never apologize or
in any way corrects the public record. In short, there is no
accountability. CBS reported that the minimum cost of defense in the
face of just ridiculous charges, such as mistaken identity, that are
quickly dropped in the face of adequate legal representation, is
$200,000. One can extrapolate from that the likely cost to inmate
families. The cost to careers and reputations is incalculable but
equally horrible.
Though in the US
legal system, it is the prosecutions responsibility to protect the
rights of the defendant and the integrity of the 'justice' system (no
one in the system except the prosecutors call it the "justice
system", for everyone else its just the "legal system"),
the reality of their employ is that their job is to get convictions
and their promotions and careers are based on how many they get, how
many cases they close, and the total number of years they get
assigned to a conviction. Ideally, judges would recognize the reality
of prosecutor over-reach and the failure of prosecutors to imbue
justice with truth but such is the exception as a large percentage of
federal judges are former prosecutors and old school ties will tell.
There is a scene
in the film 'Training Day' where Denzel Washington's' character, the
dirty cop, tells his superiors in the restaurant that he has "over
10,000 man years in his jacket", i.e. the number of years
sentenced to men he's arrested and testified against, this being
reason for them to retain him & promote him. It is the job of the
police to get arrests, not to get the truth. It is the job of the
prosecutors to get convictions, not justice. A very lame theory holds
that the process of adversarial argumentation before a judge will
produce “truth.” Given equal resources that theory might work.,
but only the 1% have equal resources so most simply yield to the
inevitable and thus DOJ criminal prosecutors have a nearly 100% win
rate.
During the autumn
of 2010 Julian Assange released hundreds of thousands of classified
communications of the US government through Wiki-leakes. Since making
that act of suicidal defiance he has sheltered in the Ecuadorian
embassy in London to avoid extradition to the US. Like Chelsea
Manning who is doing thirty years in a Federal prison, he tried to
induce an element of truth into the government narratives.
The material
released by Assange included State Department communiques that showed
that the US government was involved in the very project that I had
described at length upon my arrest and subsequently to authorities.
Namely, armed maritime security was being provided for commercial
vessels without the knowledge of governments that hosted these
vessels in their ports.
In one cable the
US was asking Kenya to allow a former NOAA ship renamed the 'Douglas
MacArthur' which had been purchased by the PMC (Private Military
Company) “Blackwater” and then armed with naval weaponry to dock
and be serviced without interference.. This Wiki-leak revelation
began the process of verifying the classified information I had
provided to the US government upon my detention. It’s verification
continues to be validated by whistle blower disclosures.. Knowledge
that in July 2010 I could not possibly have had if I hadn't actually
been involved in the business and been cleared to have came out
before any charges were ever filed against me and it was suppressed
by the DOJ.
At this point in
my prosecution, my attorney asked for a Non Disclosure Agreement
(NDA) release from the Department of Justice (DOJ), so that I could
defend myself without fear of being prosecuted for violating the
NDA's that I had signed with the US governments intelligence
agencies, which were explicit in their threat of Federal prosecution
for any violation. The prosecutors refused and said that I would be
prosecuted either for the crimes they accused me of or if I was
cleared for those crimes by showing that I was exporting firearms
under orders of the government, for violating the secrecy agreements
related to those projects, a catch 22 that saw me guaranteed to be
sentenced for committing a crime. ("Official impunity is, always
and everywhere, the arch enemy of the rule of law" David Luban
21 Apr 16 NYRB pg.22)
My supporters
contacted directly, through first person connections, every single
one of my legislative representatives. Only one offered any
assistance. Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), currently chairman of the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence offered no actual assistance
but he did refer AA to a competent attorney, an offer AA did not act
on, and his decision not to seek competent co-counsel may have been
his most fatal breach of his duty to me.
Meanwhile, my
family and friends, including my wife (who had not two weeks before
given birth to our twin sons), were being braced by Federal agents
and/or their local associates worldwide and being falsely threatened
with civil asset forfeiture or criminal arrest for conspiracy. The
intent of these threats and intimidations was to subvert my support
network and get their hands on any evidence that might help me; to
deny my defense. Regardless of guilt, or evidence of guilt, the Feds
will make threats. The only defense is to lawyer-up and let the
attorney explain what they can and can not actually do.
The authorities
spoke to the press. Gossip can be ignored but, in the process we're
talking about there was authoritative public exposure and
humiliation. It is the manifest power of the state to crush someone
and its intent is, in part, to intimidate anyone who might come to a
defendant's assistance; this too could happen to you. They paraded me
through the newspapers and on TV before ever letting me into a
courtroom. They invented things about me and passed them off as true.
They used their authority to deny who I really am, to deny any and
all positive aspects of my history. Incarceration and libel are just
a tiny foretaste of what they can and will do to someone. The Feds
know that the firewalls between news and entertainment, journalism
and profit making have collapsed entirely, and it's sad to see the
4th estate straying so far from its purported function of sustaining
an informed citizenry. As noted before, regurgitation of government
press releases now passes for journalism.
Defense
attorneys, as a rule, don’t speak to the press out of concern that
they may inadvertently inform prosecutors of their defense strategy
and the expect the prosecution to deny by any means access to
exculpatory evidence. In my case, I had no idea that AA was not only
not seeking “disclosure” from the prosecution, he wasn’t doing
evidence gathering at all. He did absolutely nothing to offset gross
ly inaccurate characterizations of me by the government in the press.
Being held incommunicado, well away from media I had no way of
knowing what was being published except as it trickled in to PCDC in
letters from friends and family.
At this point, is
there anyone still speaking to me, let alone supporting me? Yes,
thanks to having friends and family that cared enough to not succumb
to government propaganda I had a small but loyal support cadre. In
this regard our lives are cumulative; what we sow we reap. I am so
grateful for the ongoing support of my loved ones I can not express
my gratitude. It is to them that I constantly pointed out the
deficiencies of AA and it is they who would eventually save me from
him. Alas, though, being tried in the press drove many away from me.
In some cases colleagues felt they had to deny any association with
me because it could hurt them professionally.
Picked up,
interrogated and imprisoned, life wrecked, is that the worst that can
happen? No, not really. In the world I chose people got killed for a
hell of a lot less than you can imagine. Thanks to my career choices
I know just how nasty and awful humans can be, thus none of the
treatment I was receiving in my various jails annoyed me. Rather,
what annoyed me the most was the very charges against me. The
ridiculous assertion that I would dump guns into the hands of
criminals in a community where I was raising a family did not
irritate, it infuriated me.
Now I am a
criminal and am in prison. My karmic bill is mine to pay. I do not
write for your pity, or for your attention. This is just to say what
was and is. My goal is precision. Some people get through prison by
counting down the amount of time that they've left in prison. I get
through by treating it as the only life I've ever known or will have.
That also is the way I have survived all my previous, some times
ill-considered avatars.
sg
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