Chaos and Noise: One Man's Harrowing Stint in Solitary Confinement

Locked in the hole without explanation, Christopher Blackwell tries desperately to hold onto the pride and positivity he’s worked so hard to preserve.

Illustrations by Molly Magnell

Without further ado, we’re beyond thrilled to share with you the Grand Prize-winning essay of our 2023 Memoir Prize, Christopher Blackwell’s piece about the routine horrors he witnessed during a spell in solitary. Christopher is his own words: “This story was written before I had even published a single piece of writing. It was a story based on frustration, anger and pain. Throughout the years, I’ve written it over and over as I continue to learn and grow as a writer. It was a story I simply couldn’t let go of — a story I knew one day would live in the world. I use my writing to highlight inequalities and harm, and I use that to humanize those of us who reside behind these towering walls and endless rows of razor-wire fences. Winning the Narratively 2023 Memoir Grand Prize lets me know just how important these stories are — and that everything we do to highlight them matters. It’s an honor to be in community with other writers who’ve been recognized for their work on such an incredible level.”

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“Let’s go, you know the drill!” a guard yells.

I’m sitting in a tiny concrete cell as two guards begin the intake process of placing me in the hole, in solitary confinement. I know they will take everything in my possession, but I’m desperate to keep my phone book and photos of loved ones.

I remove my socks and shoes. My naked feet come into contact with the cold and filthy concrete floor, bits of dirt and grime and other prisoners’ bodily fluids sticking to my skin.

Though I have no choice but to comply, I hate myself for it. I strip all the way down. Once I’m fully naked, the guards look me up and down, and it takes all the strength I have to hold my head high, but I do. All I have left is my pride.

One of the guards looks at me and says, “Run your hands through your hair and shake it out. Now bend your ears so I can look behind them. Open your mouth. Run your finger through your gum lines. Now lift your arms, now your nuts. Turn around and bend over, spread ’em and cough. OK, let me see the bottoms of your feet. Get dressed.” The guard barking at me is emotionless in his commands.

Through the slot, the guard throws a worn-out orange jumpsuit and a roll of pink underclothes into my cell. I get dressed as quickly as I can, brimming with frustration and loathing, all the work I’ve done to transform myself into someone positive feels as if it might be erased. No one will tell me why I’ve been brought into solitary. I was simply cuffed and taken without explanation.

Next comes the so-called mental health exam.

“Am I OK? Do I feel like committing suicide?”

The staff member questioning me is flat, lacking any sense of compassion. This process is simply a formality. No one who works here would lose any sleep if I were to take my own life.

I have to be very careful as I answer these questions. If they believe I’m so much as thinking of hurting myself, they’Il send me somewhere even worse, a cell isolated from all other prisoners where I’d be stripped of absolutely everything. Even the orange jumpsuit and pink underwear would be taken away, replaced with a thick green cloth draped over me like a dress with a slit down the back. A suicide cell is not where I want to be.

I answer the questions as fast and honestly as I can. It’s not as if I want to hurt myself anyway. Unlike on the prison main line, in the hole, prisoners aren’t allowed to move anywhere without being handcuffed and escorted by two guards, attached to one of the guards by a dog leash. After the exam, I’m told to back up to the cell door so they can cuff me yet again.

The cell where they take me is empty. Two very thin pink blankets, two pink sheets, a pink pillowcase and a two-inch thick gray mattress. The shock has started to wear off, and reality has begun to set in. I have a long road ahead of me.

I sit on the thin mattress in disbelief. I struggle to find any logic in what’s happened. I work with other prisoners to make sure they don’t make choices that will lead them to this very place, helping build their confidence through education and self-improvement programs. Yet, here I sit. I examine the dull, concrete walls and floor, the metal toilet. All the same body fluids that I noticed in the holding cell are present here, too, streaks of spit running down the walls.

I tell myself to make the best of the situation, but it’s hard when I don’t even have a cup for water, no paper or pen, not even a book to read. Finally, a guard brings me some basic supplies: a paper cup, a few sheets of paper, a small pen, but no book.

Writing always calms me down, and so I write until my hand hurts. I write until I can write no more. I remind myself to be thankful that I have loved ones to write.

Hours go by, and the sun sets. I can’t actually see the sunset, but I see a sliver of reddish blue sky through my small slit window at the top of one of the walls.

Hours later, when the graveyard staff come on shift, I rush to the door to ask for a book. I also ask for some cleaning supplies, which have started to feel more important than air.

The guard on shift looks at me as if I’m dumb and says, “We don’t do cleaning supplies till Friday.” It’s Monday. “I might be able to find you a book, but no promises.”

I tell him that I just got here, hoping this will help my case. It doesn’t seem to move him.

“I’ll try, but again, no promises.”

I retreat from the door like a kid who didn’t get the new PlayStation he asked for on Christmas morning. On my flimsy gray mattress, I finally drift off.

I awake in the middle of the night to the slot on my door opening. I hear something fall to the ground. The slot slams shut with a bang. On the ground, I find a book.

I wake up to silence the following morning, something rare in the hole. Based on the color of the sky through the window slit, I suspect it’s still early. I grab the book that was dropped on my floor in the night, interested to see what I’ll be reading today. I can tell from the summary on the back that it’s a murder mystery, the kind of book that’s always so predictable. I’ve read hundreds of books like this over my decades of incarceration. I now prefer books that expand my mind toward growth and development, as opposed to books that glorify crime and retribution.

My life of confinement started at age 12. I remember sitting in the police car that first time, handcuffed and afraid, knowing I was in a lot of trouble. I had just been caught in a stolen car after taking the police on a high-speed chase that ended in a very bad accident. The car was completely totaled but somehow, thankfully, no one got hurt. I was sentenced to 52 weeks in the juvenile system, which seemed like a lifetime. 

They warehoused me until my sentence came to an end, then released me right back into the environment from whence I came: an overpoliced community consumed by poverty. I started smoking weed and drinking whenever I could afford it, which mostly led to my friends and me stealing to keep up with our new habits.

By 15, I started to give up on my education. I’d get frustrated and act out whenever I fell behind in school, going into class clown mode, making fun of the teacher and anyone else in my vicinity. I was eventually expelled from every school in Tacoma, Washington, and the surrounding areas. I was then placed in special education classes taught by overworked teachers who were only there to focus on our behavior, not our education. When these classes didn’t work out, my only option was alternative schools, which were even worse. Students were actually given smoke breaks at these schools, even though we weren’t old enough to buy cigarettes. A third of the girls in my class were pregnant, and it was clear that the teachers didn’t care about what we did.

This was when I decided I was done with school. I committed myself to a life of crime, drug dealing mostly. The money came fast, and for the first time, I felt like I was in control. What I didn’t realize is that this type of life never lasts long, and once you get caught up in the system, you lose everything and remain part of the system forever. By 18, I’d been locked up at least 20 times and had nine felonies.

Then, one night when I was 22, I committed an act I would never be able to repair. I took a young man’s life during a drug-related robbery gone wrong. Not only would I never be able to repair it, I would never be able to forget the pain and harm I caused. And so here I sit today, 20 years into a 45-year sentence in a Washington State prison. Forty-five years is an awfully long time to be away from family, but unlike the young man whose life I took, I still wake up in the morning, still have my family and my family still has me, albeit locked away in a cage.

When a guard finally passes my cell, I ask when I can shower or use a phone to call my mom, who is probably starting to worry about me after not hearing from me in a day.

He informs me that I’ll have to wait another 24 hours to call my family and take a shower. I look around the grimy cell once more. If it’s a fluid produced by the human body, I’m sure it’s on these walls.

Sitting on the concrete stump — the only chair in the cell — I remember the three photos in my address book. I flip through the cherished images of my mother and goddaughter and place them on the concrete desk. Though I love looking at these photos, after a few minutes, I sink into my own mind, which feels like a dangerous place, filled with sinkholes of anxieties, regrets and despair. I wonder how I even allowed myself to cause the harm that brought me to prison in the first place. In the outside world, and even on the main line, life offers distractions from these sorts of thoughts. But in here, I have all the time in the world to process every single one of them, 20 years’ worth. I try to distract myself by reading the murder mystery. It’s about a woman who solves crimes as a private investigator.

I eat a few bland meals, stare at the wall, feel the hours roll past. No one comes to tell me why I’ve even been brought here in the first place. I start talking to the prisoner in the cell next to mine, who, it turns out, pities me. He’s been in the hole for over two months, waiting to be transferred to another prison.

“Everyone that comes in here for an investigation doesn’t get out anytime soon. Most likely a month or two and, even if they find you not guilty, you’ll probably still get moved to another prison,” he says.

This news fills me with dread. My college degree. I’ve been studying to earn my degree through a privately funded program at this prison, and this program is not at other prisons in the state. If I’m moved, how will I ever finish? If I’m moved, will my mom, who comes to see me regularly, still be able to visit?

I lie down on my bed and stare at the overhead lights, which remain on 24 hours a day. I pull the thin blanket over my face and fall deeper into my worries. Yet, instead of keeping me awake, my anxiety does something else: It sends me into a fitful slumber.

It’s been three days since I’ve had a shower or been able to call my loved ones. And I still haven’t been able to clean this nasty cell.

Eventually, a guard looks through my window and asks, “You want yard or what?”

Of course, this requires me to be handcuffed. The yard here is extremely different from the one on the main line. There are no people, no grass, no views of the sky above. Just a cold concrete box where your only connection to fresh air is through a metal-screen covered 3-by-5-foot opening in the side of the wall. I refocus on what’s most important in this room: the phone. I fumble as I dial my mom’s number. It rings and rings. Finally, I hear her voice.

I ask if she’s gotten any news about my situation. Regretfully, she has no news to report.

“Everything will work out, Chris. You just need to relax and not let this over-stress you,” she says. “You’ve done nothing wrong, take comfort in that.” 

While my mother always tries to be understanding, I can hear in her voice that she’s frustrated, that my incarceration is wearing on her.

After what feels like less time than the hour I’ve been promised, the guards come to get me. They cuff me up, then offer me a shower.

For my shower, I’m locked in a very small room, about a third of the size of my cell. The guards have me bend down and put my hands through the slot so they can relieve me of my handcuffs.

The shower room is covered with peach-colored tiles, and a small shower head projects through the wall in the corner. The door on this room is a thick piece of plexiglass, so you can see right into the whole shower. No privacy, not now, not ever. Worst of all, the plexiglass door faces the main area of the hole, so anyone walking through the building can see me.

The guard hands me a very small bar of soap, the kind you’d find at a cheap motel.

“Is it possible to get some shampoo?” I ask the guard. My hair feels greasy.

“No, you have to buy stuff like that on the offender store.”

I undress and try not to think about the fact that I’m fully exposed. I turn on the lukewarm water.

The next morning, I wake to the sight of a man staring through my cell window. He tells me that he’s my counselor, here to do an initial review on why I’m here.

Maybe I can finally defend myself.

The counselor stops me when I start to ask questions and instead begins to read from the paper in front of him. He sounds like a robot, and I realize this is just another formality.

“Mr. Blackwell, you have been placed in administrative segregation under investigation for suspected gang activity.” He looks at me and asks if I understand what that is.

“I do. But why? I’m not a gang member.”

The counselor goes on to tell me that he doesn’t know any details, that he’s only here to inform me of what the paper says. I lose all hope of anything productive coming from this conversation.

“Your next two reviews will be on July 26 and August 23,” he says.

I look at him with shock. It’s June now.

“I could be held in here till the end of August under investigation, for nothing?”

“That’s quite possible. These investigations can move slow, as staff are busy,” he says. “Just relax and let the investigation run its course.”

I stare at him in shock, wondering why he even came to do a review at all.

BANG… BANG… BANG…

The next morning, I wake up to the sound of someone banging on their cell door. It’s been another night of restless sleep, and my mind is drowsy, my body fatigued. I look out my window, where a few guards are telling one of the prisoners to be quiet.

“This is why you were moved to this unit. You keep causing issues. And as long as you cause issues, we’re going to keep punishing you, so the choice is yours.”

“Fuck you bitch,” the prisoner yells.

BANG… BANG… BANG…

He kicks his door again and again. The banging is followed by swearing and yelling, all sounds multiplied as they travel through the concrete and steel space. I rest my forehead against the cold metal of my cell door, lamenting the ways that things can always get worse in here.

I eat my lunch to the sound of the new prisoner, the yeller. He’s bragging to another prisoner about how good he is at singing and rapping. Making noise seems to be his way of coping with solitary confinement. For the next two hours, the whole unit is blessed to hear him sing. His voice is broken and raspy from hours of yelling, and I try to block it out and write a letter, but it’s impossible. The yeller sings the same song over and over and over.

I try to be understanding. After all, not everyone writes letters to friends and family or reads books to pass the time. Truth be told, some people here probably don’t know how to write or read at all, and some of these guys have no one on the outside.

Finally, a guard comes to ask me if I want my yard time. I run to my cell door like a dog who’s been eagerly waiting to have their needs met for hours. 

On the cuffed and leashed walk to the yard, shame, hate, anger and frustration burn inside me like a hot fire. I can’t believe this is the treatment I must endure to talk with my loved ones and take a shower.

I finally get to the phone in the yard and dial my mom’s number. Eagerly, I ask if she’s heard anything from the administration about why I’m in the hole. Reluctantly, she reads me the email she received from the Department of Corrections.

I know you are concerned about your son. But we will have to let the investigation run its course.

This is the same line the counselor gave me.

I change the subject and ask my mom for some photos, books, anything to keep my mind busy, anything to keep it from sinking back into despair and racing thoughts of everything that could possibly go wrong.

At 1 a.m. the sound of a guard yelling wakes me up.

“Cleaning supplies. Wake up if you want cleaning supplies!” he shouts.

I stumble to the cell door, half asleep, desperate to clean this filthy cell where I’ve already been for five days.

I receive several torn-up rags and a few small Dixie cups filled with a cleaning solution. I take off my orange jumpsuit, as I don’t want to dirty it, and I go to work in my pink boxers and T-shirt.

It takes me two hours to get everything clean, but eventually I’m satisfied with my work. They may treat me like an animal, but I don’t want to live like one.

I’m tired and ready for bed, but I now have to clean myself, which is not all that easy with only a tiny metal sink. I take a birdbath, first removing my pink boxers. I fill my small cup with water, stand over the toilet, which is attached to the sink, and pour the water over my head. I do this a few times until I’m wet enough to soap up. Once I’m soaped up, I refill the small drinking cup and pour more water over my head until the soap is washed away, and with it the filth of the cell.

The next morning it’s the sound of three young prisoners yelling at the top of their lungs, telling war stories about the crimes they committed on the street, that wakes me up. Down the hall, another prisoner pounds on his door.

In an attempt to preserve my sanity, I splash some water on my face and brush my teeth, dreaming about how nice it would be to have some dental floss. I wet and comb my hair, and for a moment, I feel good and clean and normal. I decide that I’ll make my bed instead of lying in it all day. Maybe this will help boost my spirits.

After the novelty of making my bed wears off, I begin pacing from one end of my cell to the other, stopping to do push-ups when I reach the corner. When I can’t muster any more push-ups, I start shadow boxing, trying to distract myself from all the noise. Before long, I tire of working out and return to reality.

Malcolm’s been yelling at the top of his lungs for hours now. No one is even talking to him, yet he continues to recount his life story in great detail. Malcolm is 19 years old and has been in the hole for the last year. In other words, he’s losing his mind.

Annoying as Malcolm is, I feel sorry for him. Isolation is dehumanizing. Solitary is designed to punish and break a person. And no one who works here is taking the time to understand why he’s acting out.

I try to clear my mind, knowing that soon I’ll receive my time in the yard, and I don’t want to call my loved ones with a negative attitude. Finally, the guards fetch me. While I’m on the phone, Malcolm starts to make noise in his cell at a volume so loud I can hear it in the yard. Through a thick plexiglass door, I see him bang at his cell door.

The guards grow preoccupied with Malcolm, and I’m left out in the yard for longer than my hour, which is fine with me. More time for phone calls.

Malcolm bangs on his door for over an hour.

What surprises me most is that no one attempts to address Malcolm’s grievances. They just leave him to bang, leaving everyone else to suffer the consequences. Since the banging doesn’t get Malcolm the attention he’s looking for, he adds another element to the scenario: water. Water starts to pour out from under his door, which can only mean one thing: Malcolm has intentionally clogged his toilet and is flooding his cell with toilet water. From my spot on the yard, I watch with horror as toilet water floods through the unit and creeps under the door of my cell. I imagine the putrid sewage smell that must be filling my cell at this very moment.

Some of the other guys even start to flood their cells, and toilet water rushes through the unit. After almost two hours, the guards retrieve me from the yard. Of course, there is toilet water all over the unit, and I’m forced to walk through it with only my shower shoes on, toilet water spilling over my feet.

“Will I still be able to take a shower?” I ask, horrified.

“Probably not,” the guard tells me.

“It’s my day to shower and I just had to walk through toilet water.”

“Well, you can blame your buddies for that.”

They take me to my cell without a shower. I use the bathroom, but when I try to flush my toilet, I discover that my water has been shut off. I’m stuck in my cell with dirty feet and a toilet full of urine that I can’t flush, a cacophony of yelling and banging all around me. Having memorized the schedule, I realize that I won’t be able to shower for two more days.

The banging continues for hours.

I hear a guard tell Malcolm, “We’re going to come in there and spray your ass if you keep all this shit up. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“I don’t fucking care. Come in here if you want,” Malcolm yells.

I stand at the window of my door and wonder how many times this has happened to Malcolm. I also know that if Malcolm pushes the issue and they come in and spray him, the whole unit will suffer. You can’t administer pepper spray in an environment like this without it affecting everyone. The ventilation is all connected, so it will travel from one cell to the next.

Dinner finally arrives. A guard pushes the food cart through the inch of toilet water covering the floor, so it’s safe to assume that the water has sprayed onto the meal trays. I don’t want to eat, yet I’m hungry, so I tell myself that my tray was closer to the top and was probably spared. What choice do I have?

As I watch the cart go past, I notice that the guard skips Malcolm’s cell. Other men in the unit start encouraging Malcolm to go all out and get into it with the guards. They’re probably thinking that if they get him to go off bad enough, the guards will move him to another unit.

The guards return shortly, suited up in riot gear.

Malcolm is banging his head against his door.

THUD… THUD… THUD…

The guards just stand there. Every once in a while, a guard asks Malcolm, “What are you doing?”

Malcolm never replies to this meager attempt at concern. He knows they don’t care about him. The guards only seem to be lying in wait for him to push the situation so they can do what they came to do with all their toys of harm and destruction. They will apply shock shields to Malcolm’s tiny, 130-pound body and cover his skin with pepper spray. I can see it on their faces, that nothing would make them happier than to inflict more pain on this young kid.

“Go ahead. Just keep banging your head. It’s only going to hurt you,” the guard says.

Another guard butts in with his professional assessment of Malcolm. “You’re a dumbass,” he says. 

The sergeant who oversees the guards enters and tries to talk to Malcolm. While the other guards may be interested in doing the extraction, the sergeant doesn’t share the same interest, as he’d be the one filing the paperwork from the incident.

To my surprise, the sergeant actually calms Malcolm down, another clear indicator that Malcolm just wants attention. From my cell, I can see the disappointment on the other guards’ faces, their frustration that they had to suit up in riot gear for nothing.

Medical staff show up to inspect Malcolm, as he’s bleeding from his head. The sergeant continues to talk to Malcolm.

The night ends without another bang or scream, the ultimate relief, the quiet as precious as treasure after this endless day.

I wake up to my neighbor, Reggie, yelling at two guards, arguing with them about the orange jumpsuit he’s wearing. Apparently, his jumpsuit has a zipper on it, which is forbidden. How he got it, who knows, but the guard wants it back.

Reggie refuses to give up the jumpsuit. He continues to argue with the two guards, claiming that they gave it to him after his shower. In his eyes, this is their fault, and he will not relinquish the jumpsuit.

The longer this standoff goes on, the more the female guard gets worked up. Finally, she opens the slot on Reggie’s cell door and tells him this is his last chance to return the jumpsuit. He bends down so he can plead his case through the slot. After a minute or two, the woman attempts to shut Reggie’s slot from the outside, but Reggie sticks his hand in it to keep it open and keep the conversation going. This is when the guard slams the slot door shut on his fingers.

“You stupid bitch!” Reggie yells. “You slammed my fucking fingers in the door.”

The guards walk off in the direction of my cell, and I can see a smile on the female guard’s face. Reggie starts to yell down to Malcolm.

“Nigga, I ain’t lettin’ these white people take shit from me!”

“Yeah, fuck these dumbass pigs. Don’t give them shit my nig. If they fuck with you, we’ll set this bitch off,” Malcolm says.

This continues for 40 minutes.

Eventually, an older white man down the tier snaps, yelling racist slurs at Reggie and Malcolm, which sets them off on another yelling and banging spree. Through my cell window, I see a couple guards arrive at Reggie’s cell.

“Come to the door,” one of the guards says. “Now listen to me. You are going to take that damn jumpsuit off and give it to me, or we are going to pepper spray your ass and come in there and cut it off your body.”

Reggie trades out his jumpsuit without another word. Once the guards leave, Reggie starts to bang on his door, screaming that he is going to kill himself.

Afraid that he means it, I call out his name and try to talk him down. I’m not able to get much out of him. He says he wants to kill himself because the female guard who started all this drama over the jumpsuit won’t come and talk to him. He’s fixated on the female guard.

“I am going to kill myself,” Reggie yells repeatedly.

“Shut up motherfucker,” someone growls.

“You’re not going to do it, so stop crying around or just kill yourself and save us all the drama,” another heartless person adds.

I try to talk to Reggie, again, over all the noise. Malcolm tells Reggie that if he doesn’t stop saying he’s going to hurt himself, Malcolm will bang on his door until the guards come.

Malcolm makes good on his promise.

BANG… BANG… BANG…

We’re right back to where we were yesterday, a never-ending cycle of chaos and noise.

Reggie continues to threaten suicide. The guards begin to mock him, stopping by his cell to ask him taunting questions.

“Are you going to make it through the afternoon?”

“Why say you’re going to hurt yourself and not do anything about it?”

“I will starve myself if you don’t bring that female guard over here,” Reggie says.

Again I try to talk to Reggie, but when I realize that my attention is not the attention he wants, I give up. Reggie and Malcolm start in on another round of banging.

I’m standing at my cell door with my forehead pressed against the cold steel when I hear the sound of water. Right away, I realize what’s happening. Someone is flooding their cell again.

“These motherfuckers don’t want to talk. Then fuck it. They can clean up this water, and I pissed in that shit, too.” Reggie announces this as if it’s a great triumph.

I run over to my bed and pull the sheets and blankets off as fast as I can and stuff them under my door. It’s the only way I can attempt to keep the toilet water from spilling into my cell.

The blankets don’t hold up very well, and water starts to soak through them and into my cell. In a last-ditch effort, I remove my clothing all the way down to my pink boxers and add them to the sheets and blankets.

A guard comes to Reggie’s door and tries to reason with him. It doesn’t go well.

“You tell that bitch guard she better come and apologize to me right now.”

“That’s not going to happen,” the guard says with a laugh.

Another round of banging starts.

I use the bathroom in my cell and realize that, once again, my water has been shut off.

Both Reggie and Malcolm decide to cover up their windows. Eventually, everyone’s water is restored, and the real problem comes when Reggie and Malcolm realize that they, too, have water access. This time, they hatch a plan to block the bottoms of their cell doors with their clothing and blankets so they can hold in as much water as possible. Once they reach their desired amount, or the guards come to shut off their water, they’ll pull everything away from the bottom of their doors, sending water rushing out.

Thankfully I still have my door blocked. Suddenly, Reggie and Malcolm’s toilets stop flushing, and they’re not able to amass any more water within their rooms, but they have enough water to create a massive flood.

“On the count of three pull all the bedding from under your door and let the water out, my nig,” Reggie says.

“Yep,” Malcolm says.

“One, two, three,” Reggie yells.

Water flows out of their cells like a river, like a dam has just burst and the valley is flooding. Other men start to yell as water pours into their cells.

The guards let this play out. Some of the men are yelling at the top of their lungs. Almost everyone has reached a breaking point. I feel like I’m in one of the movies I’ve seen set in a mental institution, like Shutter Island or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The banging continues, and I wonder how much longer I can take this.

The banging goes off and on, mostly on, until the guards come in to serve dinner.

Suddenly, now Malcolm starts to yell that he is going to kill himself, a surprise as just an hour earlier, he was telling Reggie to not talk like this. Strange noises come from Malcolm’s cell. I can’t make out what he’s doing, but he’s up to something.

“What are you doing down there, my guy?” Reggie asks.

“You know what I’m doing,” Malcolm says. “There’s blood everywhere.”

Reggie starts to bang and yell that his friend Malcolm is trying to kill himself. Reggie is yelling louder than ever, and after about five minutes, guards rush into the unit in full riot gear, with shock shields and huge cans of pepper spray. One of the guards is holding a video camera.

“Drop whatever you have in your hand and cuff up, now!”

Malcolm does not respond to the guard’s demands.

“If you do not comply, you will be sprayed.”

Still no response. A couple nurses enter the unit and try to look in Malcolm’s cell to see if he is actually hurting himself. Malcolm refuses to show them anything, his cell window still covered.

BANG… BANG… BANG…

Malcolm starts to bang on his cell door as the guards and nurses crowd in front of it. The nurses then back away as the guards get into formation with their battle stance, preparing to enter his cell.

This sets off most of the unit. Banging and yelling ensues. There is so much noise you can barely hear what anyone is saying. Pure chaos.

“Get down on the floor with your hands behind your back and prepare to cuff up. If you do not follow these instructions, things will go bad,” one of the guards warns.

Malcolm must realize that this has gone far beyond his initial hope of getting some attention. He follows the guard’s instructions and lies on his belly. Six guards take Malcolm out of the unit cuffed, surrounding him in full riot gear.

Our unit is quiet for the rest of the night. Malcolm never returns.

As I lie on my thin pad and stare at the ceiling, I wonder what tomorrow will bring. I have no blankets or clothing except my pink boxers. Everything else is soaking wet with toilet water at the bottom of my door. I wonder when I’ll be able to get new blankets.

“Hey, get up. Someone needs to talk to you,” one of the guards says outside my cell the next morning.

I make my way to the door. They cuff me up, grabbing my hands a little rougher than normal. I almost feel sorry for these people, as they hold so much hate for us.

“Where are we going?”

The guard grips my shoulder and snaps at me. “Face forward. Don’t worry about where we’re going. You’ll see soon enough.”

Soon enough, I do see. They take me to my hearing with internal investigations, the hearing I’ve been waiting to attend for all these days. During the hearing, my ankles are cuffed to the base of a metal stool and my hands are cuffed behind my back. The shackles bite into my ankles as the investigator begins his interrogation. He reiterates that I’m suspected of gang activity and asks if I’m involved with a gang, which, of course, I deny. Never have been.

“Well maybe not what you consider a gang,” the investigator says, “but you’re involved with the Native American group, right?”

“Why would that matter?”

“Cultural groups can act as a form of gang in prison,” he says.

I don’t agree, which I tell him, adding that it’s unfair to target our group just because we’re Native American. “We haven’t done anything to be considered a gang,” I say, outraged. “What you’re doing is racial discrimination.”

The investigator assures me that since I’m not in a gang, I have no reason to worry. I should be returned back to the prison main line in about a week.

Back in my cell, it’s a quiet night. I read my book, and the only sounds in the unit come from my neighbor’s cell. He’s been talking to himself for half an hour, and I understand why. It’s easy to get lonely in here. I wonder what he’s going through. Is he fighting to hold on to his sanity? Has he moved on to talking to people who aren’t there?

The next morning, the counselor informs me that the investigation is over and that he’s recommending I be sent back to the main prison.

“Should I get ready now?” I ask, eager to leave.

“Slow down, Mr. Blackwell. I still have to file the paperwork. There’s a 50/50 chance you could get out today, but a 100 percent chance we’ll have you out of here tomorrow.”

As soon as the counselor leaves, Malcolm returns. The second the guards remove his handcuffs, the shouting begins.

“I am ready to set this bitch off right now!”

At this, the taunting begins, other prisoners telling him to shut up, calling him horrible names, accusing him of seeking attention, telling him that nobody cares about him.

“Go ahead and kill yourself so we can get some peace and quiet around here,” someone shouts.

My heart rate begins to rise and my muscles tense. I finally explode.

“Why don’t you motherfuckers shut the fuck up and leave the kid alone!” I yell.

“Fuck you, you nigger lover!” someone yells back.

“Of course, you cowards would say all this behind these doors,” I say, speaking at a lower volume now. “I can guarantee you wouldn’t if they were open.”

I hate that these people are able to get a rise out of me, but I’ve never been able to stand a bully. I start to pace in my cell. I try to take some deep breaths to calm myself.

Malcolm has also heard enough. He is banging and yelling so much I can’t even understand what he is saying.

BANG… BANG… BANG…

“This time you should make sure to actually kill yourself,” someone suggests.

“I don’t want to die. I just want to hurt myself,” Malcolm yells back.

At this comment, I start to wonder how much pain he has endured, how bad his life must be if this is the only way he can deal with it.

The counselor returns to my door and asks me to sign a paper to start the process of releasing me from the hole.

“They should come and get you sometime after dinner,” he informs me.

Only a couple more hours, then I’ll be out of here.

While everyone is yelling, Malcolm begins to rap at an inconceivably loud volume, perhaps to drown out the sounds of everyone yelling at him.

Dinner finally comes, and I couldn’t be happier. This is my last supper in the hole.

Malcolm has not calmed down and has been at it for hours. The guards almost refused him dinner because of it, forcing him to go all the way to the back of his cell and face the wall. Only then would they throw a sack lunch into his room before slamming the slot shut.

“Why is my food different from what everyone else got?” Malcolm yells.

Suddenly slices of bread come shooting out from the bottom of Malcolm’s door.

“Look! The monkey is throwing food out of his cage,” someone says.

Other people on the tier begin to laugh.

“Don’t stop with the food, monkey. Throw some shit out your door,” someone else yells.

They continue to mock Malcolm. Meanwhile, I eat my dinner and wait. Hours go by. Finally, around 8 p.m., when I’m losing hope that I’ll leave the hole today, two guards appear at my door. They cuff me, another reminder that they’re in control and I’m at their mercy.

They bring me to a room where I sit for 20 minutes before being stripped down to nothing. My naked body is inspected from top to bottom. I’m then taken outside through three sets of large steel doors. Oh, the fresh air. It’s so nice to inhale the fresh air. It’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve been outside, and it feels like a lifetime. I never thought I could be so happy wearing an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs, yet here I am with a huge smile on my face, breathing as deeply as I can as if the air is going to suddenly disappear.

We pass through a gate, and I recognize the large concrete steps that lead to the living units in the main part of the prison. My heart starts to race. All I can think is that this nightmare is finally over. Once we pass through the gate, the guards tell me to stop. I do as I’m told, and they remove the cuffs from my sore wrists. I wait for instructions, afraid of upsetting them. After about 30 seconds, the guards instruct me to go back to my unit. I take the stairs two at a time as if I’m trying to escape capture from an enemy combatant, as if they might change their minds at any moment and haul me back to solitary.

In my new cell, I remove my shoes and place my phone book on the desk. I listen to the silence of the unit. What a beautiful thing it is — no banging, no yelling, no toilets flooding, just the eerie silence of prison at night. I’m ready to get back to my family, to go to school again, to not let myself slip back into a pattern of disruptive behavior, while in reality I know this could easily happen again in a week, a month, a year — because in prison nothing is guaranteed. But one thing I know for sure is that I won’t let this story go untold.

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Christopher Blackwell is a Washington-based, award-winning journalist currently incarcerated at Washington Corrections Center. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, HuffPost and many more. You can read more of his work at: www.christopher-blackwell.com or follow him on X @chriswblackwell.

Molly Magnell is a freelance illustrator living in New York City.