by Johann Hari
Harry Anslinger employed Joe Arpaio in 1957 to be an agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and he rose through the bureau over decades. Since 1993, he has been the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. He was eighty when I met him, and about to be elected to his sixth consecutive term. His Stetson, his shining yellow lawmaker’s badge, and his sneer have become national symbols of a particular kind of funhouse-mirror Americana, and his hefty chunk of Arizona, home to nearly four million people, is now Harry Anslinger’s last great laboratory. Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his “concentration camp,”6 and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were “lepers” who needed to be “quarantined,” and so Arpaio has built a leper colony7 for them in the desert.
I watch Gabba and Candice and Michelle and their fellow addicts march back into it in lockstep. Again, they have to chant:
We’re in a state of shame
Couldn’t get our lives straight
We’re headed back to intake
We’re here without our kids
We lost our hope
We gave up dope.
The women look at me while they chant, then look away quickly. They have been ordered to look only at the back of the head of the person in front of them on the chain.
It takes a moment for me to register what they are singing now. The guards have also ordered them to chant warnings that they will be given electric shocks if they dare to talk back:
We’re in stripes
They’re in brown [meaning the guards]
We walk in chains with them close by
We dare not run, we dare not hide
Don’t you dare give them no lip
’Cause they got tasers on their hip.
This isn’t an idle chant: in the jails and prisons of Arizona, several inmates have been tasered to death. As we stumble back into the bus and then back into the prison, the women are unshackled and strip-searched to see if they have any drugs in their vaginas or anuses.
They live in tents that Arpaio got the military to donate for nothing. Many of the tents are from the Korean War. At night, you can hear the low scuttle of scorpions and the squeak of mice venturing out from the nearby trash dump. In the winter, it is freezing. In the summer, the heat hits you like an unimaginably vast hairdryer pointed at your face. Inside the tents, the temperature hits 140 degrees. The women go into the shower fully dressed to get soaked and then go lie on their beds. It takes an hour and then you are bone-dry again, but that, at least, is an hour in which you feel some relief.
The first time I enter Tent City, the prisoners crowd around me, trying desperately to explain what is happening.
“This is hell!” one of them shrieks. They are given two meals a day, costing fifteen cents8 each. It is referred to by guards and inmates as “slop”—a brownish gloop of unspecified meat9 that Arpaio boasted to a reporter contained “rotten” lumps, and costs at most 40 cents a meal. People from the outside can give you money to buy small items from the commissary, like potato chips, but there are plenty of inmates who have nobody willing or able to give them money, so they live in a state of constant hunger. The prisoners are never allowed to touch their visitors: it all has to be done by video. Your children can be brought into a visiting room, but you will be handcuffed to the table and not allowed to touch them in any way, no matter what age they are. Even when the child cries “Momma, Momma” and asks for a hug, the prisoner cannot reach out, and has to watch her child crying, helpless. The guards, the women say, openly mock and abuse them: “They think it’s funny,” one woman says, “to see us down. To see us without our children.” Another tells me: “It’s like they’re trained to be brutal.”
As I walk through the tents a cacophony hits me from all around—a diabetic twenty-year-old, imprisoned for drinking alcohol, saying he’s not being given his insulin; frightened cries from everywhere about being dispatched to some place called the Hole.10
The next day, I return to take down more details—but something has changed. The prisoners who hurried to me yesterday, full of pain, face away from me now. When I approach them in the tents, they are mute, and simply shake their heads. I walk from one to another: they all refuse to talk, and when I keep asking, they try to shoo me away. The cacophony has been replaced by a perfect silence. One woman grabs at me as I pass and says that she’s sorry she can’t talk to me but she’d like to shake my hand. As she does, I realize she is passing me a tiny folded note.11
I open it later. “If I speak the truth to you I will go to the Hole and it’s awful, you have nothing. Please understand, I’d like to talk to you but I can’t. They are watching us,” it says. “We all got in trouble yesterday after you left. Please don’t let no-one see this note.”12
I assume I will get no more information from Tent City. But—to my surprise—when I ask to see the Hole, the officers agree to show me. Everybody gives it this name, including the guards, although technically it is called an Isolation Unit. As I walk through the tents into the concrete heart of the prison itself, I see the Hole consists of a series of tiny concrete solitary cells laid out in rows, on two different levels. The cell doors have a tiny slit in them, and as the guards unlock them, eyes peer out. When they see an outsider, they immediately start yelling for help, and their voices have a cracked quality, as though their throats are too narrow to let out their words. They are not allowed to communicate with the guards: they have to put anything they have to say in writing and slide it under the door. They are trying to talk to me.
The first thing that hits me as I approach these eyes is the stink, literally, of shit: it is so overwhelming it makes me retch.
The inmates let me peer past them into the cells. There is a steel bunk bed that would fit a ten-year-old child, and that’s it. No radio; no life. The prisoners inside cannot see the sun or the sky or another human face. Some inmates are given a cellmate, and even though they can barely move with another person in there and have to shit in front of each other, they consider themselves lucky.13
As an inhabitant of the Hole, you get one hour out of your cell to take a shower and stretch your legs; you can’t communicate during that hour, and no phone calls are permitted. This is where you go if you break one of the rules Sheriff Joe has laid down, or if one of the guards takes a dislike to you. For example, he has banned cigarettes, so a woman is here, for a month, for being found with one.
In one of the cells, on the top level in the corner, a woman is screaming—hysterically, poundingly, her voice like a car alarm in the night. I can’t make out what she is saying except for scattered words, but then I am told who it is: a young woman from Saudi Arabia. Strangely, she is the one person I spoke to the day I arrived who said something positive about Tent City. “It’s making me not want to come back,” she said. “Do you know what I mean? That’s why they’re hard on us. People can bitch all they want but that’s why they’re hard on us.” She is trying to tell me something now. The guards surround her cell. They tell me I can’t speak to her and that they have phoned a doctor.
The other women shout to me that somebody tried to commit suicide here last night. “We heard the whole thing,” one of them says. “She said to the DO [Directing Officer, through the slit in her cell door] ‘Take the razor away,’ but the DO didn’t listen . . . [Then later] we heard the DO say ‘Holy shit.’ ” The girl has been taken to the medical unit by the time I arrive. They say I can’t speak to her.
This use of solitary confinement is a standard punishment in American prisons. Not long before this, a mentally disabled man in another Arizona prison called Mark Tucker was kept in solitary for so many years, with his pleas for a cellmate refused, that he eventually set himself on fire. In the hospital, with 80 percent of his body burned, he was informed that the Department of Corrections was charging him $1.8 million to pay for the medical care14 to treat his injuries.
In an office away from the te
nts, in the middle of the prison complex, I find a psychologist named Jorge de la Torre. His job is to provide some counseling for the women here. He has a weary air about him, as if he has misplaced something and can’t quite find it. Some 90 percent of the inmates, he tells me, “are here because of a drug-related problem,” and virtually all of them are from traumatized backgrounds. “They grow up with no alternatives,” he says. “They start with family problems they cannot manage.” At any given time, Jorge can treat one in a hundred of the prisoners. The rest are left with the guards and the Hole.
There is a properly built air-conditioned prison near Tent City, but Joe Arpaio has thrown these prisoners out of it and turned it into an animal shelter.15 Now dogs and cats relax in cool rooms while addicts ache in the heat and dust storms outside. The animals, he believes, deserve it.
When I explain Tent City to the people I sit next to on Greyhound buses as I travel across the country, they say this must be a freakish outlier—a ghoulish parody of the wider prison network. But the more I traveled, the more former prisoners I met, and the more studies I read, it slowly became clear to me that this is in fact quite typical of how addicts are treated across the United States and around the world.
I keep looking at the statistics. The United States now imprisons more people16 for drug offenses than Western European nations imprison for all crimes combined. No human society has ever before imprisoned this high a proportion of its population. It is now so large that if all U.S. prisoners17 were detained in one place, they would rank as the thirty-fifth most populous state of the Union.
From the liberal state of New York to the liberal state of California, the jailing and torture of addicts is routine. To pick just one kind: the Justice Department estimates that 216,000 people are raped in these prisons every year. (This is the number of rape victims, not the number of rapes—that is far higher.) As the writer Christopher Glazek has pointed out, this means that the United States is almost certainly the first society in human history where more men have been raped18 than women. The rape of Chino’s mother was not, it turns out, an unusual event in the war on drugs—and it happens to both genders.
Nor is the United States alone. In China, addicts are often sent to hard labor camps, where they are forced to do backbreaking manual work as punishment. In Russia, Thailand, much of South America . . . the list goes on. This is all standard. Europe is slightly softer—and one ray of light has broken through, as I would see later.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio is the corporate logo for this cruelty, but there is a whole range of cheap products lined up behind him, and they are bought by everyone. The drug war has turned the United States into a shining tent city on a hill, inspiring the world to imitation.
As I tried to understand what is really happening to drug users in Arizona, I talked with the handful of people who are working on improving prisoners’ rights in the state, including Donna Leone Hamm, the head of a group called Middle Ground Prison Reform.
I asked her one of my standard questions: What in your work, over the years, has most shocked you?
She started to reel off a long list—and around the middle of her litany, she referred in passing to a case where a woman was cooked in a cage, before continuing on.
Sorry, Donna, I said—can we go back a moment? Tell me about the woman who was cooked in the cage.
Donna sent me to the archives—and the archives sent me on a journey across the United States, to discover who this woman really was.
Prisoner Number 109416 woke up in her cell in Perryville State Prison Complex, Arizona, and said she felt suicidal.
She was a small blond woman in her forties with rotted teeth and sunken cheeks whose thoughts often dissolved into a long stream of paranoid incoherence. She was here because a year ago,19 a man had approached her on the street in Phoenix and said he would give her a bag of meth if she gave him a blowjob. She said yes, and so she was detained close to death row prisoners. All her life, she had been periodically caged, either for being addicted to drugs, or for selling her body to get them.
She was taken to see20 Dr. Susan Kaz, who was on duty in the prison that day. It was on the prisoner’s files that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was so badly mentally incapacitated that the courts had appointed a guardian21 to look after her interests. When 109416 was put in the Hole in Tent City, she had swallowed a razor blade because—as her former cellmate, Juliana Philips, said—“she wanted to talk. Nobody would talk to her, and the guards treated her like shit. She just wanted a friend.” But the doctor concluded22 that 109416 was being manipulative and just trying to get herself moved into another, less restrictive cell.
So the guards took 109416 and put her in an outdoor cage in the desert. The cage was uncovered with the sun raging down. There was nothing in it: no water, no bench, no bed. It was 106 degrees.
They are supposed to use this cage for a maximum of two hours per prisoner, but in practice, people are sometimes left there much longer.
The cage was in direct sight of the guards. The prisoner asked for water. The guards mocked her for requesting it. One guard would later say the prisoner was “spacey, all she cared about was coffee and cigarettes.”23 Another would agree she was “not all there.”
The prisoner shat herself.24 Nobody came to clean up the mess.
The hours passed in the cage. 109416 was getting hotter and hotter and starting to burn up. She was screaming. The guards would say later her shouting “was something about Jay-Z25 and Beyoncé conspiring to kill her.”
At some point, she collapsed, covered in her own shit. With her face against the floor of the desert, it sustained first-degree burns, as if she was in a fire. Sixteen different guards had the opportunity to do something. None of them responded.
Here the story diverges. The guards claim they told her: “Don’t lay down on the ground, it is too hot!”26 But the prisoners say one of the guards was asked: “Did Powell really pass out when you tried to see her?” and he replied: “Yeah, it was the funniest thing.27 You should have seen it.”
Watching from a few stories up, the prisoners could see something terrible was happening. “We said—that girl’s been laying there a long time not moving. We saw guards walk past and nobody stopped,” her former cellmate Juliana Philips tells me. “She was just laying there. Who’s gonna take a nap on the cement in the sun in polyester and no shade?”
After the guards finally called an ambulance, the paramedics tried to take her temperature. Their thermometers only go to 108 degrees28: she was that hot, or hotter still. Her internal organs had cooked, as if in an oven.29
At the hospital, they were legally required30 to call her court-appointed legal guardian before making medical decisions. They didn’t. The decision was made by the prison authorities and the hospital authorities. She died, just before midnight.31
The autopsy found that her body was badly burned. Her eyeballs were, it was later explained, “as dry as parchment.”32
Three prison officers were fired33 soon after the incident. No prison officer involved ever faced charges. The guards never spoke to the media. In the transcripts of the interviews that were conducted for the official investigation with some of the guards on duty, they deny mocking her as she was dying.
This is her story as I found it in the records of the investigation into her death. The person in charge of this prison is not Joe Arpaio. This prison is run by the state, not the county: this way of treating addicts is much wider than him. It is statewide, and nationwide, and planetwide. One of the men in charge of this particular prison, and those like it across Arizona, was Chuck Ryan, who worked all his life in the Arizona Department of Corrections, except for one interlude when, he was a consultant for the Bush administration on how to handle the prison system in Iraq, a period that culminated in the Abu Ghraib scandal.34
Nobody knew much about prisoner number 109416. She was due to be buried in a pauper’s grave at the prison until Donna’s charity stepped in. She was s
tripped of an identity in death, just as she was stripped of an identity in the cage. But in 2012, I was able—with the help of the Arizona prisoners’ rights campaigner Peggy Plews—to track down Richard Husman, the ex-boyfriend who fathered 109416’s son, to Springfield, Missouri. We sit in a bar, and I hear his story. To him, she was Marcia Powell.
Richard is a huge man with tattoos of flame covering his chunky bulked-out arms, so it seems a little incongruous at first that he arrived clutching in his hand the picture of a child. He laid it in front of me. I put next to it all the records I have been able to find of Marcia—police interviews, court records, the accounts of her death. Together, we began to stitch together the story of who she was.
Marcia lived with her biological mother, he said, until she was about three. After that, she spent three years in foster care35 until she was finally adopted. Something went wrong with the family who adopted her in California. She would never say what, but her adopted mother, as Richard put it, “kicked her out when she was thirteen and she’d been on the run ever since.”
She had nowhere to go but the beach. She was sleeping on the sand because it’s warm, and nobody can throw you out. But your stuff is always stolen, you have to wash in the bathroom at McDonald’s (and only if you are lucky), and you are afraid all the time that other people will, Richard says, “rape you, beat you up, kill you.” After that, she always had “the paranoia—when you don’t have a home you’re paranoid. She had no education, she had no school.” About life on the beach, he says: “Think about it. That’s hard. You can’t go to Burger King to go to work. You got to prostitute.” She probably became a child prostitute at this point, like Billie Holiday, and tried to snort and shoot the pain away.