The Cameras Watch Everything but they Don’t See a Thing: A Day in the Life Behind Bars

The alarm bell rings at 7:00 AM. A sound that marks the beginning of another day inside Attica Correctional Facility.

Attica, a maximum-security prison, opened in 1931 and houses approximately 2,000 inmates.

I stand at my cell gate, light on, waiting for the officers to pass. If I’m not ready, I might miss my chance: a meal request, a phone call, medical attention.

The correctional officers move fast. If they don’t hear me, I wait another day.

The first group of inmates heads out. The bell rings again, and we line up for breakfast, forty at a time.

Birds have found their way inside the mess hall, circling, landing, leaving droppings on the floors, tables, and sometimes in the food.

The food is the same every morning: overcooked, cold. Toast is on the state’s menu list, but it’s just plain bread.

My cell is six feet wide, nine feet long. A metal slab with a thin mattress, a toilet and sink bolted together, a locker barely big enough for what little I have. I can stretch my arms out and touch both walls.

The paint is peeling, rust in the corners. I drink from the sink because there’s no other option.

Noon brings another round. I stand at the gate again, light on, speaking my needs. They nod; they move on. Lunch is served at 1:00 PM, followed by yard time. For an hour, maybe less, before the bell calls us back inside.

Showers are three times a week, or at least that’s the rule. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t.

Commissary requests are met with a shake of the head. Yard time, denied without explanation. The law library? If I ask, maybe twice a month. Maybe not at all.

Work is mandatory. Thirty-one cents an hour, no exceptions. At Attica, work is a requirement of confinement. Thirty-one cents an hour. Not enough to buy a bar of soap, let alone a meal from the commissary.

Some are in the kitchen, waking before dawn to cook lukewarm, bland, often spoiled meals. Others clean the halls, the bathrooms, the showers, pushing brooms down corridors, scrubbing floors that will be filthy the next day.

Laundry is an option. Sorting, washing, folding the uniforms of inmates. The machines run constantly, the heat stifling, the smell of bleach thick in the air.

Then there’s clerical work. Filing papers, pushing pencils, typing up reports that will never be read by anyone but the officers who don’t care.

The best jobs are in the law library, the infirmary, the chapel.

Work assignments are handed down by officers who can revoke them on a whim. A single infraction, a single wrong word, and a man can go from clerical worker to cell block porter overnight.

They don’t hit prisoners like they used to. A guard could walk past a cell, open it, pull a prisoner out, and put him back in a bloody heap on the floor.

Then the cameras were installed in the hallways, the yards, the mess halls. The beatings stopped where the cameras could see.

Now the cruelty is more calculated.

A transfer that sends you hundreds of miles from your family. A missed meal tray. A medical request that never gets processed. A letter from home, torn up before you can read it.

A too-cold cell in the middle of summer from air conditioning never shut off. You need a coat and jacket in July.

And a too-warm cell in winter because the heat never goes off. Men in their underwear in their cells in February from stifling heat with no fresh air.

The violence didn’t disappear. It evolved.

The cameras watch everything. But they don’t see a thing.

And the morning bell rings again. Morning is at 7, but all is not right in this world.

This is part of a series “inside the walls”, you can check out my first post here.