Dostoevsky famously said, “The degree to which a society is civilized can be judged by entering its prisons.” If you visited most Florida prisons during May through October our society would fail this test.
During my reading of “Ghost Soldiers,” a true accounting about the Bataan Death March and American POW camps during World War II in the Pacific Theater, I found that one of the most common and feared torture methods was being put into “the heat box.” This was a small enclosed space where the temperature reached well over 100 degrees with suffocating humidity — the only relief the prisoner found was to try and find a spot of shaded concrete and lay on the floor to capture any of the shaded floors’ relief. Please keep the key terminology “torture method” in the front of your mind as you continue reading this.
I found this story particularly touching because as I read the story of the heat torture the Bataan Death March POW soldiers endured, I was laying on the concrete floor of my Florida prison dorm trying to find some relief from the extreme Florida heat and humidity. I thought to myself how terrible and embarrassing it is, 80 years later, with all our technological and societal advances, that we as a civilized society still feel that heat torture is acceptable treatment of prisoners.
Multiple times over the last few weeks I have been attacked by ants in my sleep. The ants arrive with the heat — with windows that don’t close, in come the ants. We tell the staff, we file grievances, but nothing is done from the Department of Correction to help. Currently I have tried to block the window with toilet paper and dental adhesive gel, anything to try and slow the relentless attack from ants.
Recently DOC added five wall fans to our dorms. These do a great job of moving the sweltering heat around the dorm but very little for heat relief and no help with humidity. One of the most common fights or arguments are about where the fans point and even if the fans should be on or off.
One place that would actually benefit from a fan is the one place they don’t put one — over the phones. All my calls in the heat months last only two of three minutes and end with, “I’ve got to go, it is too hot, I’m sorry.” The phones are in a tiny 5-by-7-foot box that is shared by three phone callers and no ventilation or air flow. Our loved ones have to literally hear the pain we are in while on the phone and when they ask us “how hot is it, exactly?” we can’t tell them because DOC covered our thermometer display with black paint so we can’t know exactly how hot it is.
With the rise in temperature also comes a rise in emotions. Altercations and fights are at their most frequent during the hot months for both inmates and officers. I feel for the officers who have to stand in the sun in their heavy uniform and equipment for hours. If the dorms were cooler, the officers would be able to have more of a presence (their “bubble” has air conditioning). During the hot months, I don’t blame the officers if they don’t come into the dorms often. I wouldn’t want to walk into a heat jungle with 70-plus irritable sweaty men and then have to go through their stuff to search lockers full of ants, mold, and bugs.
I just want to show the human side of this place. Many of the people who make the rules lack the empathy to run this place. We ask for simple mercy: turn down the lights in the dorm (alleviate light heat), let us shower at anytime (instead of only after 4 p.m.) and actually do something that helps us. Stop subjecting U.S. citizens to heat torture every day of the week for months at a time.
I wish everyone who had the power to change things would imagine their son, father, husband in prison, maybe they would not be so disconnected. We agreed as a society that there would be no cruel or unusual punishment, yet we are enduring this punishment of heat torture: The same torture delivered to our POWs by our enemies over 80 years ago. Let’s show the world that we are a civilized society. Please help us and do something to end the constant suffering that tens of thousands of us are enduring. Let us pay our debt to society like humans that live in one of the most advanced societies in history.
Daniel White is an inmate atTomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach.
