A California prisons tactic called “Contraband Surveillance Watch,” also known as “potty watch,” intended to control contraband seriously abuses prisoners’ rights, a human rights group says.
“The practice is the worst I’ve seen of prison abuses,” said Laura Magnani of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).
Hundreds of California state inmates were forced last year to defecate into a receptacle while chained and shackled, and surrounded by guards, some of them female, according to a June 2014 article in The Guardian. The author was Shane Bauer, who was imprisoned in Iran for about 18 months for allegedly spying.
Inmate Michael Bloom is one of more than 20 inmates who described their experiences to The Guardian.
Bloom said while incarcerated at California’s High Desert State Prison in 2009, he was put inside of a small holding cage and told to strip naked. Then, two correctional officers put his boxer underwear on him. They were placed on backward and taped to his body. Layers of tape were wrapped around his waist and thighs.
An additional pair of boxers was put on him and also taped to his body. Bloom was dressed in a jumpsuit and shackled in ankle chains and wrist cuffs, which were chained to another chain that wrapped around his waist.
The practice has been carried out this way for at least 40 years, and is in accordance with the state’s official guidelines for the procedure, said Jeffrey Callison, spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Termed “dry cell,” it’s a procedure commonly used in prisons around the country, Bauer reported. Suspected inmates are made to pass stool a number of times before they are released back into the general population, Bauer wrote.
California may be the only state that keeps the inmates chained and shackled during the process, the story stated.
Bloom, 33, who said he was imprisoned in 2007 for two violent felony offenses, said he remained chained and shackled for eight days.
“By the second day, I was already getting sores on my ankles since the leg cuffs were cutting into my skin,” he wrote.
Callison told The Guardian Contraband Surveillance Watch is justified because “contraband can undermine the safety of the facility and the community.”
Other claims, also made by Bloom, were similarly made by other inmates, some of whom have sued to challenge the practice, claiming it violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Bloom says that some nights he was forced to stand every 15 minutes, which prevented him from sleeping. He says that at mealtimes, chained and shackled, he was forced to bend over and eat directly off the tray with his mouth, the way a dog would eat.
He also says that he was not allowed to bathe for the entire eight-day period.
He recounts how, when he had to defecate, he was taken to a small yard where the tape was cut off his body. His clothes were brought down to his ankles, and several guards, male and female, surrounded him as he made attempts to defecate into a receptacle.
Once successful, the guards would dig through his feces in search of contraband.
“As I would be standing there naked I felt violated, and at times I could not even go to the bathroom,” said Bloom.
At the end of his eight-day ordeal, he said he was not found to have ingested any contraband.
One lawyer fighting against alleged prisoner abuse commented, “The world seems to universally decry these practices as unconstitutional, but with respect to Americans at home in our own prisons, the courts continue to uphold them. I find that troubling.”
Indeed the courts have upheld California’s procedure. Concerning the issue, 9th Circuit Judge Jay Bybee said that acts only constitute torture if they produce the sort of severe pain associated with organ failure or death.
Bauer wrote that CDCR records show that last year “Contraband Surveillance Watch” was performed on at least 524 occasions. According to records, less than half of California inmates who underwent Contraband Surveillance Watch last year were found to have ingested illegal substances, most of which were drugs.