EDITOR'S NOTE: Dennis Durant, a guard captain at the Frackville prison, disliked this article so much that he seized it in an effort to censor its publication. Guards often violate Constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press. Self-important, they don't respect either law or Constitution. It took a law suit to shake this article loose again. Durant didn't want us to opine that pussies were pussies. [BK] The Frackville Bullies From what I've seen of them, the cells at the State Correctional Institution at Frackville in East Central Pennsylvania are larger than those at SCI-Smithfield. The food is a bit better (it could hardly be otherwise) and the setting is more mountainous, but, by heavens, much of the staff are trembling pussies! Most of them are the strapping offspring of coal miners. Miners are some of the bravest people on the planet. How did they produce such gutless wonders for their kids? The Retaliation For about four years I was imprisoned in the Smithfield prison in Huntingdon County in Central Pennsylvania. I was pretty well adjusted to the place and the people. When you've struggled to 62 years of age in spite of a bad heart, lungs and numerous medical problems, the last thing you need is stress. Aggitation and stress are killers of older people. It's not uncommon for the prison system to use stress to kill off its senior citizens. Prison officials don't care anything about a prisoner's health. If they cared about making things better, they'd be in a different line of work. These are social parasites, vindictive and petty. At the Smithfield prison I'd started to agitate about the staff budget. Do you know that you're paying to build a gymnasium/health spa for the guards on the prison grounds? Or that you're giving them taxpayer supported feasts from crab to ice cream? You are even paying for some guards to have television cable service. (Prisoners of course pay for their own.) I'd criticized some of the worst elements in the staff. There are some real jerks working in the prison system. One lush has got a PhD in jerk! I started to demand the costs and documents for some of the abuses. Taxpayers may think that prisoners get those expensive benefits, but it's the staff that's raking it in. Articles about a few of these misappropriations of funds and other abuses appear on this website. The upshot of my agitation was official retaliation. Because of my involvement with this website and my criticism of the prisons, officials at the Smithfield prison first found an excuse to throw me into the hole over some innocent reference books. A security lieutenant who fancied himself the legendary detective, Miss Marple, had punished me for a month. He pretended not to believe that my son operates an Internet book business. But Miss Marple's strategy didn't work. I didn't become timid and silent. Instead, I was determined to expose more of the corruption, graft, waste and abuse. I made inquiries about budget and security irregularities. I made "Right-to-Know" requests for critical records. What was even more impertinent, I criticized prison officials. In their official complaint they said: [They] "reviewed articles submitted on an Internet [sic] titled, The Prisoners Website.1 These articles contain the names and nicknames of many employees at SCI-Smithfield... continous [sic] attempts to degrade, demean and portay [sic] negativity about [the] staff at this institution2 to the general public, other inmates3 and [their] families via the website." 1 If you check our homepage, you'll see that they even have the name of the website wrong. We are www.prisoners.com. 2 Of course what they were really fretting over was criticism of Rodney Painter and some of his cronies. 3 Inmates don't have access to the Internet. They should. You may notice that they didn't claim that anything we said was untrue. Similarly, they never made any effort to contact the website to ask to have a name expunged or corrected. What they didn't like was having their conduct exposed. The Transfer Without warning the administration took its revenge. I was hijacked from my place at Smithfield and bussed off to Frackville. Of course, a prisoner has no say in what prison he'll be housed. We are nothing but commodities shipped from warehouse to warehouse to provide employment for the staff of the MANY state prisons. In general practice, however, a prison counselor or someone discusses a transfer with a prisoner before it happens to prepare him and hear his preferences. This is even more true where health is or should be a primary concern as it was with me. I was not consulted. Transferring me was a matter of retaliation and an obstruction of my legitimate inquiries about corruption. The staff knew that I was/am in bad health. If the various stresses killed me or harmed my health, so much the better! The thorn would be out of Smithfield's side and hopefully out of the side of the whole corrections racket. The Secretary of Corrections, Jeffrey Beard, was personally involved in the transfer. He wanted me in Frackville, a dump known for its thug mentality and contempt for propriety. The Trek One rainy Tuesday morning I was commanded to pack my scant possessions and report to the transfer office. In Pennsylvania all prisoner transfers take place through Smithfield. Because it's centrally located, bus loads of prisoners from the 25 other prisons in every corner of the state stream into Smithfield. There they are processed and sorted like so many errant parcels. Around a central processing room are a dozen windowed cells. Each cell is marked with the name of one or more prison(s). As the hapless prisoners arrive, they are escorted into the cell of the prison of their destination. The men come in in yards of chains and shackles, handcuffed and clad in gaudy jumpsuits. Each one is stripped naked, searched, given a bologna sandwich and harangued into a cell. Since I was imprisoned at Smithfield, I was the first head of cattle corralled into the cell marked for Frackville. In dribs and draps over the next 4 hours the cell gradually filled past capacity. There were 20 of us when, about 1:30 I and five other guys were summoned out, stripped naked again, chained up and paraded out to a small van. Three of us were slated for Frackville. The other three lucky dogs were to be dropped off on the way at the Coal Township prison. One of the men bound for Coal Township was being extradited from Florida. He'd been chained up for nine days! Another was a pathetic crazy person who appeared to be brain damaged, who knows from what abuse. The last was a boy of 18, his life ruined over drugs. A little more than three hours of careening around back roads, racing through small towns and mindless speeding, and we were finally at Frackville prison, a dingy, crumbling dungeon perched atop coal country tailings in Schuylkill County. The prison is small, just over 1000 convicts. Although it's relatively new, its cheap construction already shows. The prison buildings enclose an irregular square. In the center is a steep grassy campus of several acres traversed by macadamed paths which are in ruin. Gloomy, wooden roofed buildings are managed by a staff from the lowest echelon. After being stripped and searched yet again, Frank, the parole violator who came with me and I gave urine samples. Next to nakedness prison officials are fond of piss. It's bizarre! They have a regular team assigned to golden showers. For an older prostate like mine, it's always an effort, but I managed to dribble out a few ounces. That seemed to please the guard. Arrival Without even our essential personal property, Frank and I were escorted up the hill to "B-Block." The third man who'd been traveling with us, a 23 year-old drug victim, was rushed straight to the hole. They must have really been terrified of him. I'd join him soon enough. with only a little of my nitro heart medication and an asthma inhaler, I spent the night in a frigid cell. Each of the cellblocks at Frackville is composed of three finger-like wings radiating from a central sergeant's post. The wings are two stories high with steep plywood roofs. Twenty-eight noisy cells line the outside walls on each story, 56 cells to the wing, 168 cells to the block. Of course most cells are occupied by two men, but, as I say, the cells are slightly larger than at Smithfield. There are sliver windows which open for a trace of ventilation because in the summer the cells are 100+ degrees stifling. In the morning, after getting some medications and a coffee- like liquid for breakfast, I was summoned to see the doctor. I wasn't expecting the plot that was hatching in Lieutenant Kneal's security office. It seems that Miss Marple has a cousin with the dialect of a semi-literate immigrant. Into the Hole With You, My Bucko! I was more than an hour with the doctor. I suffer from numerous medical problems, but I'm not dead yet in spite of the best efforts of Jeff Beard's minions. When the doctor was finally finished with me, Lt. Kneal was ready to pounce. In fairness, he's just a lackey and was probably put up to it by one of his superiors. Robert Shannon is the prison superintendent. I was summoned before the so-called "Reception Committee." Supposedly I would be interviewed assessed and oriented. After 25 years in prison, do I really need this? The committee was eleven junior bureaucrats plus the guard who hovered behind my chair as, handcuffed, I answered questions. At the end of 10 minutes, I was ordered into the hole. The excuse was that it was for my own protection. The esteemed Lt. Kneal ordained that I had some mysterious, unnamed enemy in the prison. This phantom was supposedly unknown to Central Office when I was transferred to Frackville. Of course, it was a lie and as with lies, the story mutated over time. First some prisoner was a threat to me, then it was a prisoner plus a member of the staff. The last version was that I was the threat to someone. Good old Lieutenant Kneal put his version into writing. It was a marvel of punctuation errors and capitalization inventions. Literacy is not a requirement to be a guard. There I was, old and sick, but I was still pretty scary to the Frackville pussies. With a video camera humming away and a guard lieutenant watchfully supervising, a third guard stripped me naked again..."bend over, spread 'm!" A guard sergeant lurked nearby and reinforcements were ready to swoop down on me. After all, I was being held for my own protection and there was no one brave enough to process me on his own. [Official Strip Search Video] Why Are They So Afraid of This Old Man? Why Hasn't He Been Paroled? One of the first things to impress me at Frackville was how timid the guards were, not everyone of them, but most of them. Like everywhere, a few guards seem to be a cut above the others, to be their own men. For example, while I waited to be marched to the hole, a sergeant possessed of both wit and personality, took time to inventory my personal property. He wasn't even afraid of the old fat guy! The neat young officer working on B-Block was also pleasant and personable, but the vast majority of the guards were pure cowards, much more so than at Smithfield where the worst you have are jerks. While I'd been waiting to see the doctor, for example, I had to sit on a table far away from him and shout with a guard handy. When I saw the "Reception Committee" I was searched, handcuffed and a guard stood behind me. The next day when I saw the "PRC," the precautions were even more elaborately ridiculous. The Program Review Committee On the Thursday following my commitment to the hole, I was allowed to have the matter reviewed by a panel of middle-management honchos, the "Program Review Committee" or "PRC." Obviously, it was all smoke and mirrors, a phony review typical of the workings of the prison system. still, I signed up for the privilege. Before one can go to court, he must endure all the nonsense aimed at wearing him down. A guard appeared at the steel door of the cell. Through a small wicket in the door he watched as I again stripped naked. More folks had looked up my naked butt in three days than in the previous three years. I mean, what can be the fascination with and old man's wrinkled asshole? The guard required me to pass each article of clothing (which wasn't much, God knows) out for him to inspect. I might have built an Uzi over night, right? After he enjoyed watching me undress, another guard showed up with a sergeant and a lieutenant. One thing about Frackville, it's got a terrifically bloated staff, perhaps three times what's really necessary. We taxpayers are the primary employers in the region. It's a kind of welfare program. I think the Frackville workforce (and I use "work" very loosely) is even more padded that at Smithfield. My hands were cuffed behind my back (a difficult accomplishment with arthritis) and the mob of guards allowed me to step out of the cell. While one of them wielded a 20 inch club ready to pummel me should I become too frightening, the sergeant ran a metal detector over me. This was after a strip search and a search of my jumpsuit. He must have figured I swallowed the Uzi and would shit it out and mow down the poor PRC. With this high-priced and well armed escort, the sick 62 year-old man was marched to a room to meet the trembling Program Review Committee. At the far end of a narrow room, behind a safe table barrier, was the committee, a major, a deputy supefintendent and one of the guys who'd been at the Reception Committee interview the previous day. To put it plainly, these guys were pussies. I was require to sit so far away from them that I couldn't hear some of what they were saying (not that it really mattered). I was handcuffed. A guard stood behind my chair and the club swinging brute stood between me and the committee about 20 feet distant. I must be a lot more dangerous and strong than I realize. At other prisons I've never seen a major with a body guard. Typically, the prison superintendent and his deputies have enough courage to mingle with the prisoners unescorted. It's pretty damn dumb, it seems to me, to let prisoners see you're so afraid of them as the staff does as Frackville. Maybe there's something in the coal mine water. It got me to thinking that maybe Lt. Kneal (him of the sophomoric punctuation and capitalization) wasn't inventing the danger to me. Perhaps he was simply exaggerating it as a paranoid might do. Of course, the committee didn't release me from the hole. They decided I had to be transferred again. Boy, I wish that transfer had stuck, but within a month, I was back at Frackville. From across the room the deputy superintendent shouted that I'd be kept in the hole and shipped to someplace else. True, that might take a few months. In the mean time I'd be kept in the hole being punished. Certainly my health was at far greater risk in the hole than in the regular prison. They didn't care. My only real danger was from guards. They could do a lot more to me if I was hidden in the hole. Of course that wasn't really the point. The point was that the administration at Frackville was afraid, not of my sword, but of my pen. Much later the Program Review Committee doctored the report of the "review." I wasn't in danger after all, they decided. It was me who was a threat to someone's safety. The "someone" was not identified. They really didn't like my wife's article about the transfer. It wasn't too long before the scheme unraveled. Prisoners who don't have loved ones on the street are in a lot more danger than I was in. Prison administrators are like cockroaches, they maraud in darkness. They don't like being exposed. EDITOR'S NOTE: Rebecca was astonished by all the gratuitous strip searching. She wondered if the guards were queer. While it's certainly true that many prison guards have an abnormal taste for peeking at naked men, only a small percentage are actually practicing fags. Usually the strip searching is done to degrade and humiliate the prisoners; to make the guards feel powerful and superior. Many persons who seek employment as guards have serious personality disorders. [BK] A follow-up article is available: The Frackville Pussies Tantrum Against Free Expression.

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