Sakran may be large, but you’d never know it from behind your locked and bolted door. Each cell is a self-contained duplex. Bunk beds fill a sleeping area upstairs and downstairs ten people can crowd together around two small plastic tables for meals. There’s a single shower, a single squat toilet, and a single door that opens onto an inner courtyard with thirty-foot-high walls crowned with razor wire. This is where prisoners wash their clothes in a bucket and hang them out to dry.
Sakran was designed to keep prisoners away from society and away from each other. So there are no communal spaces, no daily program of activities, no common dining area, and no time in any day where you can leave your cell and move around.
You’re locked up 24/7. Once a week you’re allowed out to make a ten-minute phone call—although for political prisoners like me it was once every two weeks. Once a week you receive a thirty-five-minute visit in person, though you’re separated by thick glass and have to speak through a telephone. And once every two months you hit the jackpot: an open visit where you can finally sit in the same room as your visitor. If the bars and the crowding and the lack of sunlight don’t get you, the fact that you are only allowed to hold hands with your wife six times a year is guaranteed to cut deep.
If your lawyer comes, you’ll be allowed an hour each week, but every moment of your meeting will be recorded on video. Apart from that, for every minute of every day, you’re trapped in your cell. You could spend year after year there and never meet a prisoner from another cell.
If you have money the prison will sell you items from their list, like plastic tables and chairs, fridges, and TVs—though naturally they control the channels that are available. You can buy extra food—like the cookies I was offered on my first night—and certain approved newspapers. Each cell has to pay for its own faucets, light bulbs, electricity, drinking water, plastic eating utensils, and plates. The prison provides the room and the locks; everything else has a price.
When it’s time to deliver food, the guards come to the door in pairs and slop the meal into the communal bowls that inmates pass through the hatch in the door.
Sakran does not do rehabilitation.
What Sakran does is isolation.
MY ARRIVAL that Friday night pushed the number of occupants of the cell made for eight up to twelve. Although it was already crowded, my cellmates welcomed a new person to interact with. But I was falling apart. I didn’t want to talk and I didn’t want to listen to stories. I could not engage much, and yet had nothing with which to occupy myself. I had no Bible, no books, no certainty. I spent most of that first weekend on my bed crying, desperate and totally confused.
Here and there I asked questions, bit by bit learning the rules and restrictions and how awful it was.
I learned that our cell’s visiting day was Monday and resolved to hold on until I could see Norine. I was sure she would be at the prison gates, figuring out how to get in to see me—and I so needed to see her.
Monday was also the day when my lawyer would appeal my imprisonment. This was a face-saving opportunity for the Turkish government—a judge could order my release while the investigation continued. After all, there was not even a case against me, just unofficial allegations.
And, Monday was the twelfth. Maybe—just maybe—God was still going to move at the last minute.
ON MONDAY the cell door opened and the guards announced that it was time for people to have their weekly visit with their family members. I stood up and filed toward the door.
“No, not you,” said the guard, his arm out across my chest. “You don’t have a visit.”
“Why not? They’re all seeing their wives, so why can’t I see mine?”
“Because you’re a foreigner. You have no visitation rights. Your wife can apply to Ankara for permission, and they will decide.”
That was all there was to say.
The door slammed and locked.
FOR A MINUTE I was just stunned, then the panic began to build. I tried walking upstairs and sitting on my bunk, but that didn’t help. Every breath left my chest feeling tighter. I wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go.
I burst out through the door downstairs into the courtyard. I paced the rectangle full of angst. Seven paces. Turn. Five paces. Turn. Seven paces. Turn. And then I stopped. I was facing the wall that towered up so far above me I could only see a tiny rectangle of sky. I was at the bottom of a pit.
Suddenly the words came up from the deepest, the darkest, the most angry part of me.
You’ve betrayed me! You’ve turned me over! Why?!
How could you do this to a son who loves you, a son who has obeyed you?
Do you even care, or have you handed me over and walked away?
Did you deceive me? Did you lie to me?
BEING THROWN IN PRISON had been such a drastic, unexpected change—it simply hadn’t happened to any missionaries in Turkey, so I had never prepared myself. I couldn’t cope with the horde of questions plaguing my mind. And there was no one I could go to.
Not to my cellmates who were Muslim and would not understand me at all—to them the idea that I would question God was inconceivable.
Not to the God I loved, whom I addressed as Papa. He had turned me over to be savaged.
Not even to Norine, whom I was desperate to see. I needed her to hear my terrible thoughts and to speak truth to me, to persuade me that I was wrong.
But I could only talk to myself. Or to God—I had to keep talking to him . . . and WHY was he so silent? I yelled at him, not out loud but in my heart: I may as well talk to this wall!
All I heard was silence.
My tears blinded me. Where are you when I most need you? You have wounded my heart. How can I ever recover?
I was having a faith meltdown.
All the progress I’d made in my final weeks in Harmandali—where I prayed many times a day to surrender to God’s plan—had vanished.
THE GUARDS CAME to lock up the courtyard. It was 5:00 p.m.
My watch had stopped working in the early morning hours of December 12. When I saw in the night that the hands were frozen on the ten and two—which I immediately noted added up to 12—I had felt an ominous chill go through my body. The twelfth was over now. Clearly my appeal had been denied. I was still in prison.
Even my watch was mocking me.
I FOUND OUT that all my cellmates were new to Sakran. They told me they had been transferred from a freezing, decrepit prison in the mountains called Buca. According to them, Sakran was an improvement.
I also discovered that the director had only shared part of the story when he told me that they were teachers. Some of them had worked at schools run by the Gulen movement, but six of my cellmates were from the police, and two were chiefs.
In the aftermath of the attempted coup the atmosphere among the public in Turkey had been tense. Among the police and judiciary it had been frantic. Not only was Erdogan taking advantage of the opportunity to lock away political opponents, but ambitious prosecutors, judges, and members of the police were also accusing colleagues of being Gulenists in order to secure their own status. Others were doing it to save their own skins.
Someone who had been arrested would be offered a deal: tell us who has been involved with Gulen and we will let you go—if you give enough names. Some desperate men would list all their colleagues, who would then be rounded up and thrown into prison. No evidence was necessary—being on someone’s list was enough.
One of my cellmates had been accused of attending a picnic with Gulenists ten years ago—at a time when Erdogan himself was praising Gulen. We had even heard that the former director of Sakran was now a prisoner in his own prison. One day you could be doing your job, arresting suspects and helping track down the plotters, while the next day a secret witness could accuse you of being disloyal, without submitting any evidence, and you’d be hauled up before a judge.
This is what happened to another of my cellmates. He had been taken before a judge he knew well, begged for his freedom, and protested his innocence. “I know,” said the judge. “But it’s either you or me. If I don’t send you to prison they’ll send me there instead.”
One by one I heard stories just like this. Some of the men knew the identity of the colleague who had deliberately stabbed them in the back, while others could only guess.
One of them, a man in his midthirties called Emin, stood out. His family was wealthy and well known throughout Turkey. His father knew Erdogan but was accused of employing Gulenist teachers in the university he’d established. They’d arrested the father first, then had gone after Emin, accusing him of taking money to Kazakstan to fund Gulenist schools there.
Emin smiled when he told me how the prosecutor had listed the dates that he’d believed Emin was in Kazakstan. “I showed them my passport, proving that I was not out of the country when they said I was, but they locked me up anyway. Okan Batu had decided to go after my family.”
“Okan Batu?” I said, remembering the wolfish prosecutor who’d stared at me with such hatred in the courthouse.
The cell hummed with murmurs of disgust, but there was little surprise in their voices. I stayed silent. I had had a lot of time to think about my case. As a first step, some official in Ankara made a decision to deport us. But then someone, somewhere, at a higher level, made a choice: “Let’s keep him and see how we can use this.” I was an American, a Christian, and a missionary—three categories that combined to make me an attractive target. That’s how I ended up in Harmandali. They also wanted to make an example of me in order to intimidate other missionaries.
But now what was being done to me had reached a much higher level. It was Okan Batu who demanded I be sent to prison. But thanks to Senator Corker I knew my case had gone to the top of the Turkish government. Just days before my arrest seventeen senators had asked Erdogan for my release. Sending me to Sakran was his response.
EVEN THOUGH OKAN BATU was not ultimately the man keeping me in prison, this did not keep him from harassing me in a dream.
The sleep troubles that had worn me down at Harmandali continued in Sakran. When I was finally able to fall asleep I was frequently tormented by terrible nightmares where I was surrounded by an evil darkness. One night, creeping out from the shadows, I saw Okan Batu approach me. He climbed onto my chest and pressed down on me with all his might. “We’re going to keep you here for months,” he said, his wolfish eyes piercing mine. “And then we’re going to convict you.” Even when I slept I couldn’t rest. I was exhausted all the time.
I HAD NOTHING TO CHANGE INTO. I had been wearing the same smelly clothes for days—since I was taken from Harmandali. Maybe somebody noticed, because the same young man who had traded bunks with me loaned me a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. Another cellmate gave me a towel—and within a few days I had developed a nasty yeast infection on my inner thighs that became raw. I could barely walk, and I wrote to Norine, “Now I really have become Job.”
I had written a letter to Norine every day since I arrived in Sakran, pouring out my heart. I was only allowed to write in Turkish, which just didn’t feel the same. Still it helped me to know that Norine would eventually be able to read about my struggles, and respond.
I needed to hear from Norine. I was desperate to find out what was happening on the outside—was anything being done? And was she okay—was she even still in the country? As I wrote our address on the envelope, I sometimes feared that I was writing to an empty home.
One day a guard opened the hatch in the metal door and called my name.
The hatch was set low, about waist height, so the only way for me to see the person on the other side was to kneel and crane my neck. As I looked up at the guard, I saw he was holding a piece of paper. “We’re not sending your letters on. We deem them to be a threat to the security of the prison so we’re confiscating them.”
I was stunned. “What’s going on?”
“You wrote to your wife and talked about ‘the Lord’ and how you wanted his help. You’re obviously referring to Fethullah Gulen. You’re sending secret messages.”
“No,” I said, trying to sound calm. “I’m not talking about Gulen. I’m writing about God.”
He passed me the piece of paper. “Sign this. The prison has opened a court case against you because of your letters.” As soon as I handed the paper back, the hatch slammed shut. Discussion over.
This was absurd. But they were serious.
Over the coming days I learned how cut off I was. I needed to tell my lawyer, but I was not allowed to call her, and the prison would not contact her either. I could write a letter, and hope it would be sent sometime soon. But in the meantime, my case would go ahead, with or without a defense.
I became anxious as I waited for news from the court. On the first day the prison had given me a sheet with a list of punishments. The prison could cut me off from all contact, like visits, for months. They could throw me into solitary confinement. As much as the cell was uncomfortable, crowded, and noisy, it was better than the torture of being alone.
The first judge who reviewed the case involving my letters said, “This man is obviously writing love letters to his wife,” and threw it out. The prison director appealed to a higher court who reversed the decision, claiming that my comments to Norine were in fact a threat to the security of the prison, and that I was a bad example to other prisoners. From then on, any letters I wrote were examined by the prosecutor’s office. It was the same with any letters she sent to me.
MY LETTERS weren’t the only source of controversy. On the Monday after my first weekend in Sakran I was accused of trying to smuggle a flash drive into the prison. They had found a USB stick in my backpack when they finally processed my belongings. The stick had been in my backpack since going to the police station on October 7. But in any case, I had not touched my backpack since arriving at the prison—it had been in their possession the whole time. So how could I have smuggled it in? But they still opened a case against me, and then said there was evidence hidden on the drive.
It seemed they were trying to concoct excuses to punish me. I had done nothing, I was innocent, and they kept accusing me of things that could lead to even worse conditions in prison. And I questioned God: At Harmandali you showed kindness in providing some things for me in the presence of my enemies. Now each of them has been taken away. And every decision in prison is against me—it keeps getting worse and worse. Where are you in all of this?!
I felt completely abandoned.
TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS I received my first piece of mail. It was our most recent family picture, taken a year ago at Christmas. Norine had sent it on its own, without any writing, in hopes that it would get through more easily. I wept inconsolably.
I would not be home for Christmas.
THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS was an open visit. Everyone would get to be in the same room with their family. But not me.
By now I had gone almost three weeks without seeing Norine. I was cut off, and I was growing increasingly desperate. My letters had been confiscated, no letters were getting through to me, and I was not allowed to make the phone call the other men had every two weeks. I was isolated by my culture, life experience, nationality, and most importantly by my faith. The prison had opened two new court cases against me, and I knew that this government was set against me at the highest levels. I was overwhelmed with the sense of spiritual darkness.
And two fears were pushing me toward the edge.
I was afraid I was going insane. Emin had loaned me a Sherlock Holmes novel in Turkish. I read a chapter, and when I lay the book down I had such a surreal sense, a sense of dislocation—Where am I? Is this real?
My dreams seemed so real. Then I would wake to a real-life nightmare, disoriented at first, but then realizing where I was when the bars in the window came into focus. There were times when I could feel myself tipping over into insanity, and I had to make an effort to pull myself back to the other side. I tasted insanity, and I was afraid I would go there and not come back.
Even more terrifying was the fear that I might lose my faith. I had no desire to reject my faith—actually, I was desperately clinging to it. But I was afraid that with all my questions, doubts, and isolation from anyone who could encourage and correct me, I would in some way fail and turn away. The words of Jesus came to mind—that if your hand causes you to sin, then it’s better to cut off the hand and go to heaven than to keep both but go to hell. Wouldn’t it be better to kill myself to ensure that I didn’t lose my faith? In my twisted thinking it made sense.
WHEN THE MEN FILED OUT to meet their families on December 26, I was the only one left behind in the cell. I went out to the courtyard. I tested the rope. Yes, the clothesline was strong enough to hold my weight.
I was ready to go to heaven.