Endless Nights

This essay by Taylor appeared in The Gateway Pundit 1/24/2024

Many people know how long a dark night of the soul can be. Wrapped in anxiety, loss of personal control over any given situation can rob a person of their rest. In the quiet of the night, one's thoughts of doubts can drive one deeper into the mental darkness.

     The federal contract that jails like the "DC Gulag" have, I believe, contains a requirement that inmates receive 6 hours of undisturbed time for sleep. Yet, in this facility, that is rarely possible. Let me describe a typical night for an inmate at the "DC Gulag". The 'Pod' has essentially no acoustic dampening. Voices, clanging keys, radio beeps, telephones ringing, guards talking to other staff on the phone (or occasionally a girlfriend), pod doors slamming as errands get run in and out of the pod, TV volumes, etc all echo and reverberate to a degree that, unless you are locked in the box of the cell, it is hard to appreciate.

     On a typical night, with detail on cleaning duty until close to midnight, there is little chance of real sleep till then. Often detail wraps up at 11:30 pm or thereabouts, and when the new guard comes on duty, each shift, the guard yells "shift change!".

     Allow me to describe the events of the endless nights along with challenges of the cell. 

In the "DC Gulag" we have steel bunk beds, probably 28-30" inches wide, with a 3” cot pad.  There are two flat sheets provided, which the typical inmate learns to knot onto the pad. The pad has a plastic liner so it sweats. It's cold in the winter and hot in the summer.  Pillows are contraband, so MOST inmates use extra clothing to improvise a pillow. The blankets are a wool/synthetic fiber mix (we joke, but are half serious that the 'synthetic fiber' is dryer lint). In fairness to the DC DOC, most new pads have an elevated area for the head. The pads are thin enough that all the inmates complain that with a single pad, their butts, hips, and sometimes shoulders push through to the metal cookie sheet tray we lay on top of. The length of the bed is 6'3" (an estimate). Our 6'4" and 6'5" inmates complain that they hang off, because their feet climb the concrete wall. Getting comfortable, except for the easiest of sleepers, is a challenge.

   Every 1/2 hour the guards make their rounds. They walk to the end of each hall with some contraption that they tap on a steel plate on the wall which chirps loud enough to hear in EVERY cell. There are 6 chirps for the 3 walls they touch, once on the lower tier, once on the higher tier. There is never total darkness in the pod, and each door has a window half the length of the door, 4" inches wide, that keeps the cell fairly well lit. As the guard walks by once every 1/2 hour he casts a shadow into your cell. Often they linger, peering into the cell at night with a flashlight. They will tug on the door. The steel doors have some play in them. They do this to get you to stir, so they can see signs of life. On cold nights the outer concrete wall, which our beds back up to, is not insulated. It can get to be frigid to the touch and create a down draft of cold air across one side of your body. On super cold nights, a strategy to stay warm is to hang an extra sheet, blanket or even all your shirts, pants and underwear across the open end of the bunk, to catch and hold what heat you can. If you do this, at some point it is likely a guard will unlock your cell, come in and pull the “'drapes” aside and put a flashlight directly in your eyes. Usually this is on their first or second round at 12:00 am or 12:30 am, but I have seen it happen at 3 am. The guards also have a 'night light' switch outside the cell. The sound of the heavy switch clunks in the cell, and illuminates the cell pretty well. Guards will regularly forget to turn them off when they use them. Last night, the inmate I share a wall with, had the guard unlock the door (all this makes a lot of noise, waking me and my  neighbor up), walk in and put a flashlight in his face. This was at 2am! Then he forgot to turn the 'nightlight' off when he left. My neighbor waited 1/2 hour for the guard to come around at his window (he didn't want to wake others banging on his door). When the guard walked by at 2:30am he walked by so fast, he had to bang his door anyways, to get the guards attention The guard came back and loudly and accusatively asked "what do you want?!",  to which my neighbor replied "turn off the light!". Clunk, off went the light.

     Many times a "white shirt" or other guard will come in during the night. The pod entrance doors can't help but slam, you can literally feel this sound when laying in your bunk. They don't seem to possess volume control and greet the guard and will carry on loud conversations. I often wonder if they know we can all hear them as if we were out there with them!  

  Sometimes the guards watch TV and turn the volume up. These are usually substitute guards. Someone will inevitably bang a door and yell for the guard to turn the volume off.

      Breakfast can be really early, it's "room service", but can range from 5am to 8am. I pray it's later, but often isn't. Some guys are so exhausted by the time breakfast comes they are finally sound asleep. I am always woken by the unlocking series of doors leading up to mine, when I meet breakfast at the door.  Little secret, breakfast isn't usually EVER worth eating and inmates head right back to bed.

      The guards have radios that chirp and have radio chatter literally all night long, and the phone can ring at any moment. We have a couple large fans that create enough white noise, that we leave on all night. This will usually make it so we can't understand what the radio says, but we still hear it. There has been multiple nights I wondered if I ever actually fell asleep, rather just dozed off over and over again as the noise made me stir. Some nights you pray and become almost desperate to lose yourself to sleep, only to have your mind return to thoughts of home as the guard’s heavy footsteps and clanking keys make their rounds. Even though, in theory, there is plenty of time to sleep, few if any inmates ever feel the rejuvenation of real rest. It’s easy at night,  alone with your thoughts, to sink into despair. There’s a hopelessness, the full weight of the federal government bearing down on you, longing for home, feeling forgotten and trapped in these walls. We pray all night, every night, we won’t be forgotten,  trapped inside these walls. We pray all night, every night,  we won't be forgotten by history and that our story ends well. It's you,  "The People", who must end the endless nights.

-Taylor Johnatakis