Whatever you think hell is, you’re wrong. You think fire and brimstone, but hell is actually white paint, stainless steel, and a cold that settles into your marrow and never leaves.
I became the nucleus of a concrete cube. It didn’t matter if I was 15 or 40, innocent or guilty; once the door slammed, I was just meat in a box. The room was 60 square feet of psychological warfare. Sometimes the walls were stark white, illuminated by a white light that hummed 24 hours a day, erasing the memory of night. Other times, it was a dungeon of filth—shit stains on the floor, nut stains on the mattress, and a smell that hit you like a physical blow: a cocktail of old urine, vomit, and fear.
They strip you of everything. Your clothes, your dignity, your sense of time. I was left in nothing but “community boxers” or a thin gown, shivering against the artificial winter they pumped through the vents. If I got sick from the freezing temperatures, they’d toss me a U-Haul blanket that smelled like dust and indifference. You learn quickly that time doesn’t move here. There is no sunset, only the shift change of the guards.
The routine was designed to break men. I’d wake up at 3:00 a.m. for breakfast—if you can call it that. A cold egg, a biscuit, maybe a carton of milk that expired a week ago. The kitchen head once admitted they spent $0.91 a day total to feed us. You are constantly hovering on the edge of starvation. It’s a shock to the system; your stomach eats itself. Sometimes, the guards would offer extra trays, but only if you agreed to stay in your cell and forfeit your one hour of “recreation.” Most guys took the deal because the hunger was louder than the need for fresh air.
When I did go out, it wasn’t freedom. It was a humiliation ritual. Strip naked, bend over, cough. Handcuffs behind the back, tethered to a dog leash. They walked me like an animal to a cage—literally a chain-link kennel littered with bird droppings. You stand there alone for an hour, shivering, just to say you saw the sky.
But the worst part wasn’t the cold or the hunger; it was the noise and the silence battling for your sanity. You sit on a steel slab with a mattress as thin as a yoga mat, staring at the wall for 15, 16, 23 hours a day. You try to read a Bible or a single magazine, but eventually, you run out of words. Then the vents start talking. You hear the guy in the next cell screaming for hours. You hear the thud of bodies throwing themselves against steel doors.
I watched men go insane in real-time. There was a guy down the hall who spent ten hours covering his entire cell floor with soap, just to lure the riot team in so he could throw feces and cups of piss at them. The riot team would slip in the muck, eating shit while spraying pepper spray that choked the whole unit. You smell it, you hear the violence, and you think: Is that my future? If they treat me like an animal long enough, will I become one?
The isolation plays tricks on you. The anxiety is a heavy weight on your chest. You start to panic that the world has ended outside, that a hurricane like Katrina has hit and the guards have just left you there to die in a locked box. You cry when you wake up because you didn’t die in your sleep. I’ve seen guys tie bras or sheets around their necks, desperate to check out, only to rip them off at the last second, weeping because the survival instinct is a curse.
You hold on to tiny fragments of humanity. A three-minute phone call once a week becomes the center of your universe. A commissary delivery feels like Christmas. But mostly, you are fighting a war in your own head. You mask your depression with anger, building an army in your mind to fight the walls closing in. You try to keep your dignity like a prized possession because it’s the only thing they haven’t physically taken yet.
Whether it was three days or eighteen years, the box leaves a mark. It’s a dead man walking routine where the walls chip away at you until you are nothing but a hollow husk with black circles for eyes, praying for the mercy of darkness.