There is an alternative version of reality I have witnessed that I cannot get out of my head. It is a secret world ruled by robotic creatures dressed in black, wearing plastic face shields and black metal helmets. And hidden within these costumes they do inhuman things I thought no normal human being could do . . .
As soon as I stepped off the van at Huntingdon following my last trip to court, I found I had other things to worry about besides DNA testing. Years of packing America’s prisons with double the number of people that were supposed to be there meant they were about to explode. Pennsylvania’s two dozen or so prisons were so overcrowded that violence was erupting on a daily basis. And that violence had reached boiling point. In October 1989, two of the state’s prisons, Camp Hill and Huntingdon, were taken over by rioting inmates. This led to two back-to-back blood baths, both of which were to end in misery and death.
Over the usual noise of shouted conversations and banging radiators that I was used to hearing from my cell at night came the calls from other prisoners housed on the level above me. Through the outside windows facing their cells they could see there was some sort of disturbance going on in D-Block, a general population block housing over 400 men which faced B-Block. The Death Row men above me started yelling that they could see lights and movement and men fighting and running. Then smoke. Something big was happening.
Soon there were shouts from other men, reporting that they could see inmates fighting with staff. Someone heard screams for help from some guards out in the hallway. Next thing, we all started to smell the smoke coming in through the door at the rear of our block. Panic soon overtook the voices of the men yelling out above me as they saw fires being started, and more and more. Fire is the worst fear for men locked up in solitary. We all knew that in the middle of a riot no one was going to evacuate a hundred-plus Death Row prisoners. The staff would rather let us die than set free condemned men who might possibly join in the violence. The only people who would let us out were the rioters. But I dreaded that just as much, because as a so-called sex offender I could expect to be raped and beaten or even killed by these men.
I stood by my cell door picturing the faces of family and loved ones as they saw on their TVs that there was a prison uprising at Huntingdon. This was going to be big news, I thought aloud. Just then, the prison emergency siren, used to warn the local community, blared out overhead. If it blasted once there had been an escape; a continuous sound meant a state of emergency like a riot. But the locals didn’t need a siren to tell them there was a riot going on. By now they could see the flames clearly over the prison walls as police and firefighters from all over were called in to help contain the spreading violence.
Meanwhile, back inside, the inmates had completely taken over D-Block. Having overpowered the guards, they had piled up some wooden furniture in one huge indoor bonfire and set fire to it in the hope of burning down the building’s wooden roof, put there in the 1800s when the prison was first built. Less than an hour later the state governor ordered a rescue operation for the guards who had been overpowered by the rioting inmates.
State police, heavily armed and specially trained, were sent in to ‘retake’ D-Block, and they went about their task in a ruthless fashion.
As my cell was located on the ground floor I had some relief from the smoke that was seeping into B-Block in increasing levels. I covered my mouth with a water-soaked towel and sat on my cell floor just waiting for whatever might happen next. I had already wrapped all my best books and prized possessions in sheets and placed them on my bed, hoping to protect them. From my cell I could not see the fires, nor could I see the violence that was unfolding, but hearing the noise and smelling the smoke scared me no end. There are two long-standing jokes on Death Row: ‘Never choke on your food while eating, as the guards are not going to come into your cell and do CPR on you’, and: ‘Never start a fire, as they will let you all burn to death before they try to rescue one killer locked up on Death Row’.
I don’t know how long I sat there before I was drawn away from my cycle of thoughts by the distant sound of something being dragged along the cement floor at the other end of the block. In all my years of being locked up here on B-Block I had learned to recognise nearly every sound. It wasn’t a mattress, as that made a kind of high-pitched hiss as the plastic coating scraped along the cement. But as it came closer, I realised I had indeed heard it before. Then I heard it again and again, coming closer and closer. And accompanying it was the rumbling crescendo of footsteps. No one was yelling out of their cells all of a sudden, I noticed. I stood up and looked out of my cell window as far as I could, just as some figures’ back views came into sight. But these were not men wearing the grey uniforms of the prison guards; they were wearing black riot gear.
The first two figures were dragging the unconscious, bloody body of a prisoner. A white male, with several tattoos visible on his back and arms and wearing only a pair of brown prison-issue socks and white prison-issue boxer shorts, was being pulled along face down, his hands cuffed behind his back. His unconscious head was bouncing on the concrete floor like that of a deer I remember watching my father and brother drag through the woods on a hunting trip when I was a boy. In the next ten minutes, another twenty-five to thirty unconscious men were dragged by their ankles past my cell, a few completely naked. Some of them had blood pouring from open wounds on their heads and bodies; they looked horrifyingly dead as they bumped along the floor, their feet held together by giant plastic ties.
It was so eerie how all the macho yelling and calls for blood had suddenly died in the throats of my loud-mouthed companions on B-Block. It was so shocking to hear all those men on Death Row silenced by this gory procession. The bloody, urine-soaked trail it left was about four feet wide by the end of the night.
We all soon realised why the riot officers were dragging these men through B-Block. They had decided to lock them in the Death Row exercise cages. These first ones had been overpowered, knocked unconscious and then stripped before being dragged by their heels through our block. Next, as the entirety of D-Block became overwhelmed by thick, heavy smoke, all the remaining 400 or so men were just as efficiently collected up and dragged to the exercise cages.
I do not know what started the riot, other than the usual guard–prisoner conflict due to hundreds of men being locked up for too long in overcrowded conditions.
What I can tell you is that I rolled up my mattress on the floor by the door and sat astride it like a child sitting on a rolled-up taffy and watched, mesmerised, as one human being after another was dragged through the river of urine, blood and water that flowed outside my door.
It went on for hours. The sickening, wet-sliding sound of bodies being pulled along the floor which, combined with the harsh artificial light, the smell of smoke and the deep moaning of the siren, made it seem as if some crazy alternate reality had suddenly been flipped open or we were on the set of a horror movie. It was completely unreal. I sat there. I ate and I drank. I listened to music on my headphones. I cried and I laughed and I waited for another body to come by. What else do you do as near-naked human beings are dragged past your door for hours on end?
I was not being facetious previously when I described how I ate and drank throughout the night. It was not in celebration; I just wanted to stay awake and keep my strength up. I cried so much I made myself thirsty. But I wanted to be strong enough to handle whatever might happen next. As the cold daylight seeped in and made the images around me now seem all washed out, I too felt nothing.
I had met a madman with no soul in his eyes named James. I had seen the switch of insanity flip in Ted Bundy as he was lost to rage. But none of that had prepared me for this. I watched as these helmeted ‘riot-bots’ carried out their task in complete silence. They showed no anger, no hatred. They were just faceless creatures cleaning up after the mayhem of a riot with professional efficiency. And seeing how they could shut themselves off in order to do that also robbed me of my own ability to feel.
At the start of the incident, when I was not sure whether we would be burned alive or overwhelmed by rioting inmates, I had felt emotionally frayed and worn out. Now I had nothing left to feel; I had finally shut down.
Nonetheless I willed myself to stay there at my cell door, hoping to feel some emotion as I stood and watched the final scenes unfold. All I could think of was, what next? I knew for certain that I would be taken from my cell sometime in the next seventy-two hours and ‘searched’. It was standard operating procedure following a major incident like this for guards to search the entire prison, cell by cell, for contraband. This was the only thing I could think of that made me feel anything. It worked. You can act like you are not afraid most of the time, but when you know there is violence coming your way and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, you get scared.
I knew that I would be taken out of my cell by four guards who would then rip it apart. What they did to me while ‘extracting’ me would be determined by whoever was in charge of them; also, whether any staff had been killed or seriously hurt during the riot. I knew that, having checked my prison records and found I was a convicted rapist and murderer, they would be merciless. I had had guards act as if they actually saw me kill Mrs Craig themselves, the way they hurt me. I had seen what hatred combined with moral righteousness could do to them. My body still bears the scars, even if I have allowed my mind to let go of the pain I suffered for what they thought I was.
Before the guards arrived, I tried to memorise as much of my legal work as possible in case they tossed it all into the trash heap. I made lists in my head of which books I would beg them to let me keep.
I tried to work out my best strategy for what they would likely do to me. Run at them fast as they opened the door and hope it was over quick, or oil up the floor of my cell with soap and lotion, put up a long battle and wear them down? Either way, if I attacked them I would just end up being beaten up once again. So I decided to be passive, not put up a fight. I would take my chances and hope that the team of guards who came to search me was under proper supervision.
Guards having their eyes ripped out by inmates armed with deadly glass spears made out of four-foot-long fluorescent lights wrapped in bed sheets. Others being knocked unconscious and then sodomised with objects, or being stabbed by out-of-control prisoners. This is the violence we read about in the newspapers. What they call ‘prison uprisings’ or ‘riots’. But then there is the violence that is only half talked about, that the public hardly realises goes on. This is the ugly truth for which that terrible word ‘aftermath’ is used, which is what goes on in marched procession as soon as the press have packed up their cameras and notepads.
In the 1990s Pennsylvania held criminal trials for the guards who had killed prisoners in the ‘aftermath’ of the Camp Hill and Huntingdon riots. A few of them went to prison themselves and a whole lot of prisoners had years added to their sentences for their parts in the uprisings. There were endless investigations and news articles written about the riots, their causes and effects. All the usual coverage.
But for me there was something missing from it all. I could never have imagined the guards’ removed-from-it-all robotic manner that night if I hadn’t witnessed it for myself.
My own response had also been to blank out emotionally. I wish that somehow we could have that riot played for us again on the big screen, translated into pixels and images, so that we could all judge our reactions to it better. Once, that is, the voice of some off-camera director had yelled, ‘One riot at a time, please!’ That way, maybe we would not be quite so numbed by the awful reality of what humans can do to each other.
It turned out that the day the ‘search party’ came to my cell, a young Hispanic guard named Ezekiel – known to everyone as ‘Z’ – was on duty. Z was not like so many of the other guards; he was somewhere between being regarded as an outsider by his co-workers and as an uneasy friend by the prisoners. I had grown to respect and like him, and he knew from handling my mail every day that I was fighting for DNA testing – sometimes he even asked me how I was getting on with my efforts to prove my innocence.
So when the other guards were just about to enter my cell, Z intercepted them. He muttered a few words and they stepped out of sight for a moment. As they did so, he turned to me and said in an urgent whisper, ‘Nick, turn around and put your hands out through your pie hole so I can cuff you. Don’t say anything and don’t look at them as they search your cell. They won’t do anything to hurt you if you say nothing.’
Tears welled in my eyes in gratitude for this kind gesture. I submissively turned my back, bent down and put my hands out through the five-inch-high, twenty-inch-long opening in my door so that Z could handcuff me. He then waited for my door to be opened remotely before guiding me by the arm out on to the walkway to wait by these huge bins full of inmates’ property.
Mounds and mounds of debris – newspapers, magazines, shampoo bottles, deodorant roll-ons – lay strewn across the floor, having been tossed out in the search of the 145 cells on B-Block that day. Guards were filling up laundry carts with trash as the four officers went into my cell. I did not like to see my belongings ripped apart and I lost things that day that angered me, but, in truth, I was just glad I was spared from being beaten senseless. Many men endured far worse things than me that day. Thank God for a man like Z, who spared me one more day of pain.