JUICE
CHAPTER THREE
Isolation in Arkansas prisons exists on a spectrum and can look a lot of ways, but the most extreme means 23—and sometimes 24—hours a day locked in a cell with a slit through two layers of doors for guards to slide in meals. People can talk to each other only by yelling through the vent, and often the voices of people in crisis reverberate through the vents all night.
Sometimes there’s no escape from the silence. Other times there’s no escape from the noise.
In the summer of 2021, prison administrators assigned DeMarco Raynor to work in the restrictive housing unit where he’d been locked up the year before.
Restrictive housing porters help meet needs that prisoners can’t meet since they’re locked up all the time, like collecting trash and dirty laundry from people’s cells and helping serve meals.
Letter from DeMarco Raynor:
I didn’t ask to work [as a porter] nor did I want to at that time. However upon going back there and witnessing what the guys were going through, I felt obligated to help those guys as much as I could. The way “Restrictive Housing” is run at Tucker Maximum Security Unit, it’s basically 24 hours a day lockdown in a one man cell...
Guys would flood for not receiving their showers, not receiving their commissary, or not being fed on time.
If you have a video visit at 8:30, you have to wait on two staff to come and shackle you and bring you to the visitation area. In some cases the cell block would become hostile because the staff would cause a guy to miss some or all of his video visit [to see his family]. Staff bringing guys late to their video visits was one of the things that I saw most.
The majority of the issues start when prisoners are trying to get a need met and the need isn’t being met.
Meals across the Arkansas prison system are notoriously small. People typically supplement what they’re given with food they buy from commissary (the prison store). But people in restrictive housing can only spend $10 a week on commissary. People in punitive isolation can't buy food at commissary at all. Many people report being hungry a lot.
The Arkansas Department of Corrections (ADC) is required to serve three meals a day within 14 hours, (except on weekends and holidays, when people often only get two meals). But meal times within that window can be very odd.
Correspondence between DeMarco Raynor and Anna Stitt:
Raynor:
I would come to work around 2am and help officers feed breakfast and that was when most arguments happened. One of the main arguments at breakfast would be about the amount of juice or milk. Officers would only give the guys 4 oz’s of juice. I’ve seen officers and inmates get into cursing matches about the juice to where, in some cases, inmates were maced and taken to isolation [from restrictive housing, going further on the spectrum of solitary confinement].
Stitt:
Why wouldn’t the guards give people more juice?
Raynor:
They try to use one container to feed four barracks. There are 54 people in each barracks. So that’s 216 people in 4 barracks. The juice is around 5 gallons. So that comes out to about ⅓ of a cup per person.
If they run out, they have to go back to the kitchen supervisor and petition them for more juice. So they use that as an excuse [not to give people more juice].
The food, the juice, the video visits, getting things signed like grievances or request forms. Anything you need from staff—it’s always a hassle. The three prisons I’ve been to have a control booth that oversees three barracks. The majority of the staff members have in their heads that they’re there just to sit in the booth and watch the barracks. When you come and ask them a question, they feel like you’re overstepping your bounds or it isn’t their job.
Growing up, many of us are taught by society that things are running in a way that makes sense at a basic level.
Letter from DeMarco Raynor:
A person that’s in society now—you can feel my pain, empathize with me for a moment, but then you’ve got to go on to your regular life. That’s kind of how I was as a porter. Something would hit me—like damn, that’s wrong. But I didn’t feel like I should get too invested because I didn’t know the full extent as to why certain things were taking place. Being a porter gave me a chance to look at it, but I didn’t fully see it.
Kind of like when I’m reading comments on DecARcerate’s social media posts. You have some people who assume working on the hoe squad [prisoners doing unpaid forced labor outside] is voluntary. They think we [incarcerated people] are getting privileges behind it.
I equate that to how some guys who are in restricted housing or segregation, the administration passes it off as, everybody back here is in trouble or has done something bad. But actually the majority of people back there really haven’t done anything that’s worthy of being locked down for 24 hours a day.
Being a porter back in isolation, the mentality of the staff is to make you feel like you are something different from the people who are locked up there, when in actuality, you’re all incarcerated. They want to influence the porters to be okay with treating the people in harmful ways, but I’m not okay with that.