“C4, lock down!”
On a compound with almost 1,300 women, we hear this command often because of perpetual staff shortages. But that night the officer was sending us to our cells not because there was no officer for our unit, but because he’d found a girl out of bounds.
She moved to the unit downstairs a week ago, but she snuck upstairs to hang out with her smoking buddies. She thought she could get away with it because so few officers walk the tiers, but she was wrong. She was caught and sent to the lieutenant’s office. She would probably receive an incident report — nothing major — but the unit she was found in? We got locked down.
This is the new policy here, thanks to the incoming captain, who joined us from a men’s federal penitentiary, where the men were locked down at the drop of a hat for hours at a time.
That might be the default response at a men’s facility, but it shouldn’t be at a low security women’s prison like the Federal Correctional Institution at Aliceville, in Alabama. And yet we are locked down for many reasons. Sometimes it feels like we have been locked down for any reason they could find.
When lockdown was called in this instance, the women in C4 scrambled, some of them literally running to get hot water or ice or a shower before the doors were locked. The old heads who had seen the officer making his rounds started moving before the officer even discovered the girl. They knew what was coming.
Other women were not so lucky. This officer was not nearly as patient as some of the others. A lot of the officers would allow people to finish their phone calls, to stand in line for ice, or run into the showers and rinse off. Not this one. He’d been here since before the pandemic, and he wanted people behind their cell doors within minutes. Those who were not behind their doors by the time he arrived to lock the door were written up in an incident report and lost privileges.
With new laws and other changes aimed at sentencing reform in this country, life in prison has in some ways become more humane. We now have more possibilities for spending less time in prison for low-level offenses or being sent to diversion programs.
But people actually running the prisons are slow to change their minds. The senior administrators running the federal prisons don’t train their people on the differences between confining men and women.
At Aliceville, if the people in the commissary lobby are not quiet enough, everyone is sent back to their unit. If the doors of the rooms in the units are not kept open, the entire unit is locked down. If the women are not quiet enough in the library, they shut the library down.
The U.S. Senate last year passed a bipartisan bill that established an independent ombudsman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, following a report by the Associated Press that uncovered abuse, neglect and leadership problems in the system.
But its sponsors, Sens. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Mike Braun, R-Ind., are not here with us when the officers call lockdowns. None of the members of Congress who want to improve prison life are here to enforce their mandates. And so, we go on lockdown.