EXTREME PREJUDICE: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq

by Susan Lindauer

  Over the weeks, I would watch their transformation from happy and confident to something terrified and confused. Then zombie-like. It was the most God awful transformation that you could imagine only in your worst nightmares. You would be heartless to wish this sort of violence on an enemy.

  None of the prisoners on M-1 showed signs of schizophrenia or hallucinations. That turned out to be another joke about court psychiatry. Almost none of these prisoners qualify as mentally ill. Not until the prison got hold of them! Most of us suffered “post traumatic stress” after the abuse— but nothing else.

  In the schism of prison society, we were the Most Normal. We were not the murderers or thugs. We were not predatory towards other inmates. We were the “guests” who shouldn’t be in prison at all. We were strikingly out of place in prison culture.

  All of that makes the abuse by prison staff more ugly in that, by all rational assessment, it was totally unnecessary.

  Instead of getting abused by hard-core inmates, we got preyed on by vicious, self righteous psychiatrists, who sought to double punish us through crippling dosages of drugs. It’s a great tribute to the strength of these women that despite our lowly legal status, the brutality of the psych department prompted every one of us to discover extraordinary personal resources to survive the damage Carswell tried to inflict on us. Some of these women are truly admirable in how they persevere every day, with graciousness and stamina, through years of prison trauma.

  One of my cellmates kept a haunting poem by Maya Angelou taped to her locker.

  “And still I rise.”

  She stood in front of it every day to read it— like a prayer.

  On M-1, Maya Angelou gained fresh significance that would dismay the Poet Laureate herself.

  A lot of inmates on M-1 got drugged so badly that they slept 15 to 18 hours a day. Throughout the unit, beds would be full by 1 o’clock in the afternoon every single day.

  We ate lunch at 10:30 in the morning, and dinner at 3:30pm. Then everybody on M-1 would take their afternoon drugs and go back to sleep until about 6:30 pm. They’d get up to microwave a snack before the evening count. After the inmate count, most of the women would sleep until the next morning, when prison staff required us to report for in-door recreation. A striking number of inmates would collapse on the floor of the recreation rooms. Drugs knocked them out cold.

  Black women always got drugged the worst.

  They could not walk. They could not speak in sentences or answer questions. Typically, a response would be “what?” “dunno,” “huh?” Like that.

  Eating took tremendous effort for a lot of women on M-1, white or black. They could not lift a cup to drink without shaking hands. They would spill juice all over their clothes. They could not lift a fork to put food into their mouths, without intense concentration.

  They wet their beds at night, because they could not coordinate their body movements to climb out of bed to use the restrooms. There was such sympathy that inevitably one of the other cellmates would get up in the middle of the night, and wash their sheets, if they got diarrhea and couldn’t make it to the toilet.

  Urine could wait until the next morning, except for the stink.

  Nobody complained about washing their sheets. We grieved for these ladies.

  Most hideous of all, they could not bathe themselves. Staff and fellow inmates had to take these women to the showers, strip them naked, and wash them. Every time they bathed, they required help. It was not an occasional thing.

  I can still hear those voices in the shower room. They are the stuff of nightmares:

  “Raise your arms. Lift your titties, so I can wash you. Let me see your back side. Spread your cheeks for me. Good girl. Can you stand up? No? Let’s get the chair. Sit on that chair now. I’m going to wash your hair. Lean your head back. Don’t get soap in your eyes. Let me towel you off. Let’s dry you off, so I can get your clothes back on you.”

  “Do you want me to pull up your underwear? Let me pull up your pants. Can you do that? No? OK, I’ll do that for you.”

  Showering in a nearby stall, I would sob for these women. I mean it, I would turn on the water, and weep as I listened to the humiliation they suffered. These adult women had become infantile, like very small children, totally incapacitated.

  I would cry for them. It was grotesque and humiliating.

  These were young women in their 20s and 30s. They weren’t old or handicapped. They’d been normal until Carswell got hold of them. I cannot emphasize sufficiently that nothing in their outward behavior justified such heavy overdrugging. But Carswell used psychotropic drugs as a form of punishment. Drugs offered another way to inflict suffering, and degrade women who’d already lost their families and freedom anyway. It was sadistic and abusive.

  One black woman in her 30s had been tortured like this for years. She suffered all the worst side effects of Haldol, and whatever drug cocktail Carswell kept feeding her. She was docile like a baby. She could no longer speak in sentences. Or eat. Or dress. Or bathe. She slept 18 to 20 hours a day, and wet the bed frequently. All family ties had been lost, since she could not talk on the prison phones.

  But she could sing gospel like an angel. Her name was Priscilla, and she could sing beautifully. We’d have to start the lyrics for her. Then something in her memory would kick in, and she’d start singing. The whole room would go silent to listen. Her voice was so melodic and pure, and it accentuated our grief for her daily suffering.

  Her prison life was the stuff of nightmares.

  Another black woman, about 32 years old, could no longer speak properly. She had trouble eating. Very slowly she would raise a fork, and stare at it for a long time, before putting the food in her mouth. But she made a special promise to the other women on M-1 that she would go to the showers by herself every night. She wanted no help undressing or washing herself. She would persevere in cleaning herself, no matter how bad it got. And it got very bad.

  Her ability to shower by herself was the only dignity left in her pride. In all other ways, Carswell had utterly destroyed her. To help her out, other inmates kept a chair in the shower room at all times, so she could sit down. By this stage, it had become an arduous task to look for a chair, or carry it any distance. Those simple actions were beyond her skill level.

  Understand— this would continue for years, throughout their sentences. It was a thousand times worse than prison itself. You can survive prison. It’s not pleasant. But this stuff qualifies as actual torture. It’s cruel and unusual—and grossly unnecessary.

  The greatest irony was how Carswell quickly screened prisoners in the pre-trial phase, according to whom prosecutors wanted to take to trial, and those they wanted to block from going to trial— like me.

  If a pre-trial defendant arrived at Carswell, toying with a psychology angle at trial, Carswell took an entirely different approach.

  Let’s say the Defense wanted to prove “diminished capacity” on the basis of a long-time bipolar disorder, a common ploy for leniency from the Courts.

  The first thing Carswell asked was whether the new inmate used anti-depressants or mood stabilizers? Almost nobody arrived at Carswell on harsher drugs than that.

  If the answer was yes, Carswell would pull back the drugs to test whether the condition was authentic.

  Taking defendants off prescription drugs was the number one method for restoring competence to stand trial— or otherwise proving a defendant suffered no true diminished capacity. (Mostly Carswell rejected claims of incompetence.)

  Guess what? After a few weeks of detox, most prisoners would be just fine without drugs. They’d show their true personality. Low and behold, there would be nothing wrong with those women. Carswell would argue in Court—and I would have to agree, based on their behavior— that they’d been taking prescription drugs for years without cause. Somewhere along the way these women got “mis-diagnosed,” and encouraged to confuse personal problems with mental defects. They’d gotten comfortable taking presc
ription drugs. Drugs provided a crutch for their lives. But they functioned just fine after a medically supervised detox.

  That surprised some of these women, who’d limited their expectations to fit the constraints of their so called “mental diseases or defects.”

  Some of these women thanked Carswell after the detox! They felt empowered getting off psych drugs!

  Once they got cleaned up, Carswell shipped the women right back to federal court. They were judged competent to stand trial, or plead guilty for sentencing without much leniency.

  That says a lot about how psychotropic drugs affect personal performance and self expectations—and not for the better.

  It speaks volumes about the phony medical credentials of psychiatry, too, and its propensity for inventing “disease” out of non- observable “symptoms,” or double prescribing a second set of drugs to mask symptoms created by the first set of drugs.

  But heaven protect women inmates who arrived at Carswell for a psych evaluation as part of sentencing, or those of us declared incompetent over our objections, because a prosecutor really had no evidence to support the case against us, and we, defendants refused to accommodate the Court by accepting a guilty plea.

  Women like us suffered the most. Carswell would declare us “delusional” and “lacking responsibility” for insisting on our innocence. Then they would file requests to the Court requiring obstructionist defendants to take massive quantities of drugs, usually Haldol, Ativan and Prozac, as part of their “rehabilitation.” That was standard practice. Everyone got the same cocktail of drugs. Even prisoners outside of M-1 and M-2 got heavy doses of psychotropic drugs.

  I was at Carswell long enough that I observed new prisoners upon their arrival–healthy, in good spirits, full of good conversation. None of these women struck me as violent or threatening. To the best of my knowledge, I never saw women on M-1 threaten other inmates or guards. Most of the women were guilty as charged. Very few got convicted of serious crimes like bank robbery or child killing. Some might have benefited from counseling, which ironically, was very mediocre at the prison. But 9 times out of 10, they committed crimes of stupidity, drug crimes, tax fraud, or crimes associated with a husband or boyfriend. They’re not instigators. They’re not diabolical. They are followers. They would not be repeat offenders if they got jobs after prison. Employment would be the decisive factor.

  All of a sudden, these women could not speak anymore. They could no longer read a book, or write letters home to their families, because they could no longer grip a pen in hand, or process ideas from the written word.

  Ominously, I’d hear prison staff talking about how a certain woman liked to read the newspaper—particularly black women.

  A black woman wouldn’t read newspapers at Carswell for long. Drugs would take care of that literacy problem.

  Other prisoners had to write letters home for them, though most of these women could hardly put together a sentence to tell us what to write. We would suggest greetings, while they sat next to us, mute. Sometimes tears would stream down their cheeks, nodding or mostly grunting, as we proposed messages to their families. It would take considerable effort to express a simple thought.

  Since they could no longer read a book, or process ideas in any form, most definitely they could not work at the prison law library. So they could not appeal their sentencing or assist their attorneys– who let’s be honest, did not want their help anyway.

  One woman, dragged to Carswell by U.S. Marshals on a bail revocation, could not remember her husband’s phone number, though they’d been married twenty years with an adult son. We took her to the Chaplain’s office, so she could try to phone home, and she stumbled several times trying to dial. This simple act was so difficult that we questioned if she had a husband at all.

  It turned out that she was a former Carswell prisoner who stopped taking court-ordered drugs after her release. So the U.S. Marshals picked her up, and doped her to the levels required by Carswell, then shipped her back to prison. She was so over-drugged that she’d lost the ability to perform the most simple tasks, like dialing a telephone. Her husband had no idea what happened to her. She could not speak to anybody. She had trouble washing herself. All of the ugly things.

  Horribly enough, prior to her imprisonment, this woman worked in a bank, in a supervisory position—She was a bank manager, with no history of mental illness. She got picked up by the Feds in their sweep of an embezzlement scam by other bank employees.

  Ignoring the reality of her life, Carswell declared her incompetent over her desperate objections. Like me, she wanted to fight the charges. Suspiciously, Carswell overruled her demands, then filed a request to forcibly drug her with heavy dosages of Haldol. She lost the fight against forcible drugging, and was detained 11 months. The Court released her on condition that she take the drugs voluntarily. After about a year, she stopped.

  Now she was back in prison—but with a different attorney, who challenged the original indictment. The new attorney questioned why the first attorney argued she was “unfit for Trial” in the first place. Critically, her co-defendants filed affidavits saying that she had nothing to do with their crime.

  This poor woman wasn’t guilty after all. With the help of her new kick ass attorney, Carswell pulled back the amount of drugs that she was forced to take.

  And guess what? This poor abused woman showed no signs of mental illness whatsoever. There was nothing wrong with her. It was another case of Carswell brutalizing a woman prisoner just because they could.

  Her story proves something of critical importance to the debate on prison psychiatry:

  If you change the attorney, you change the prisoner “diagnosis.” You change the defense strategy, and all the psycho-babble goes away—It rushes away. That’s because most of the time, psychological evaluations are scripted to support the attorney’s legal strategy— not a reflection of the defendant’s true state of mental health. So when you start poking, there’s almost nothing left of a psychological profile, except in the most extreme situations of genuine schizophrenia, or severe bipolar disorder, or long term domestic violence or child abuse.

  To put that in context, in 7 ½ months at Carswell, I saw exactly one prisoner with schizophrenia, two prisoners suffering bipolar disorder to a crippling degree, and two prisoners who heard voices— which might have been caused by the heavy psychotropic drugs they were forced to take.

  The rest of the inmates were normal, but they broke the law. For whatever reason, they engaged in criminal activity. And they got sent to prison for it.

  Psychology in the courts is all about legal strategy in disposing of a case, so an attorney can get out of it. Like mine.

  Unhappily, this poor lady, once a bank supervisor, suffered through Two Tours of Carswell to prove it. The first time she served 11 months. The second time she served four months. Plus, she had time at home between Carswell, suffering the crippling effects of Haldol, which had been wrongly administered at high dosages for punitive reasons.

  Last I heard, she intended to file a lawsuit.

  It was sheer hell from start to finish, and all because Carswell abuses its authority in the courts, and advocates excessive, unnecessary drugging for all prisoners.

  That’s what Carswell wanted to do to me. And remember, this was happening in Texas. Think of every worst stereotype of corrupt Texas prison staff, and you’re beginning to get the idea.

  Without the “inconvenience” of due process, Carswell can get away with anything. And they know it. When the Hospital Accreditation Review Board shows up to survey the prison facilities, the most chemically lobotomized women get transferred to the SHU until the performance review has been completed. That way nobody on the outside is troubled to see them. And Carswell doesn’t have to answer questions about the crippling impact of drugs on their daily functioning.

  It’s a serious problem. I am not the exceptional inmate who was abused at Carswell. I am the exceptional prisoner who escaped abuse.
>
  I escaped, because I fought back as hard as I have fought anything in my life.

  For the good of all prisoners, Carswell should lose the right to perform psych evaluations for the federal courts, and all drugging orders should be reviewed with fresh eyes. Cruelty should never be part of that evaluation process. And corruption should never be tolerated when drug recommendations are imposed on prisoners, forcibly or not, in a court of law.

  My Own Private Guantanamo

  My nightmare was double-force.

  When I describe Carswell as my own “private Guantanamo,” and my status as pretty close to an “enemy non-combatant,” there are good reasons why.

  After Jose Padilla, I was the second non-Arab Americans ever indicted on the Patriot Act. There’s great irony to that. Congress approved the 7000 page law that eviscerated our Constitutional rights in a midnight vote, without reading it first, in frenzied hysteria after 9/11. The Patriot Act supposedly exists to empower law enforcement to break up terrorist cells.

  Yet one of the very first Americans to get clobbered by the Patriot Act was an antiwar activist and whistleblower—not exactly what comes to mind when Congress argued for the Patriot Act.

  Unforgivably, the Patriot Act was first used to keep Americans ignorant of national security issues, when ordinary people started asking Good Questions about White House policies. Those of us who know the truth got ravaged by the Patriot Act to silence us, while Congress glorified its performance and manipulated the public debate That’s what the Patriot Act accomplished. It has been crafted as an ideal tool for any government cover up. The government arrests the whistleblower, and politicians are safe to make up stories to protect their access to power.