$1 per day plus extra trays of prison food is what they’re paid, and they are called #orderlies in the Multnomah County Inverness Jail — other places often call them #trustees, but they’re slaves gaining extra-freedom from torture in “compensation” for their unpaid labor.

It’s payroll — to prisoner accounts. No secret at all. 6 of the 70 guys (two tiers of 35 men each) in #MCIJ #Block15 at a time get one of the (coveted?) “orderly” slave jobs - there’s a waiting list. All cleaning, food service, cell changes, cell cleaning and maintenance is done by slaves. Two guards at a time walk the block or sit on their fat nasty asses. Daily life — nothing unusual at all.

One particularly stir-crazy and mentally-tortured fellow inmate whom I knew fairly well, two cells down — got to be an orderly just two days before I bailed out. He’d been in solitary for about 17-months and he literally could no longer contain his rage and claustrophobia. I told him I was happy for him and we fist bumped over his new slave job — as I left for transport out.

The rest of the slaves survive in 24/7 solitary confinement, but for a max of 3-hours of total “walk time” via a maximum of two daily “walks” within the block — or in the approximately 20 x 20-foot cinder block subgrade “yard” — 20 feet below a chain link fencing “roof,” with Portland International Airport planes taking off directly overhead.

The two tiers of prisoners alternate walk times — one early, one late — 35 prisoners each time. These men don’t see a tree or the world outside for weeks, months or even years. As my health and sanity strategy, I never stopped standing or moving during my time out-of-cell.

Everyone involved in torturous solitary confinement goes, and IS insane — guards too. Being inside was easier than coming out. Upon re-entering society, I felt like a wild animal — dangerous and explosive. This system defiles one’s human psyche.

Demographics of the county jail and state prison populations in overwhelmingly white Oregon are impossible to miss. Black men go to jail in disproportionately massive numbers. #PPB‘s “Gang Enforcement Team“ is infamous for racist and unconstitutional policing. #ClickHere to Read the full “Gang Enforcement Audit” report.

Mentally ill men don’t get their needed meds. Court appointed attorneys don’t call back. Calls to the outside world come with a mind-numbingly long introductory prerecording (you’re being recorded, too) and cost the recipient $3 each plus 17 cents a minute — making a PROFIT upon separating families with slavery is the business of Oregon’s Multnomah County Sheriff’s Department. When they’re short on guards, the prisoners lose walk time to pay for it. This happened frequently and on weekends when reaching family outside the jail was the greatest hope of many slaves.

My cell was one-over from two secluded pay phones in Block 15 of the #MCIJ. I couldn’t help overhearing some dialog, with NO other sound, electronics or noise in our 21+ hour-per-day solitary confinement. Calls home on #FathersDay2019 were heartbreaking societal and family carnage.

There’s neither music, nor electronics of any kind. One single small TV on a pole in the common central area tuned to whatever the orderlies and guards choose — Battle Bots, old movies, ultimate fighting and the 2019 NBA playoffs were going when I was inside for 20 days in June. It’s a perfectly almost silent, solitary hell — for all. The guards hate their lives — and don’t hide it.

No lights out — ever. Lights are dimmed at night — then undimmed around 7:00 AM each morning, with no visible clocks for most prisoners and no signals of time outside of meal-times or the twice-daily medicine dispensation line calls to the visiting jail-nurse’s wheeled cart.

Everyone and everything is under control at all times and prisoners even eat in their solitary and silent cells . Only a few inmates at a time are let out to get their food trays and a drink, before a return to lockdown. After about 15 minutes of eating time, prisoners are let out again in rolling-shifts to return the trays and food waste. Men lose massive weight — on the order of a pound a day. 40–60 pounds for some guys in a couple months.

Prisoners are fed a luke-warm, flavorless, thoroughly disgusting and at least partially-inedible starvation diet. Daily, there’s a “loaf” of “stuff” so dry it’s like wood chips somehow loosely-bound and baked. Literally, you can’t and no one does — EAT it. Cell Block 15 has no microwave, so any commissary items will be eaten cold — just like the meals the slaves get. Prison cooking is basic —you can “heat” a plastic mixing bag of whatever commissary items are combined by kneading it with your hands or by using the warm water from a shower during walk times.

Most incidents with guards that result in getting thrown in “#TheHole” with only 1 hour out per day — with a worse and smaller “yard” — are over food trading, scavenging and conservation. Guys LOSE IT over food — they spit, fight and throw trays — and cuss out guards, too. Everyone is starving and miserable at all times. Trading coffee packets is big — any “luxury” is beyond imagination. Block 15 WAS The Hole in MCIJ at one time. There’s not much difference. It’s all solitary confinement and torture.

A #JailNurse claimed retaliation in The Oregonian. “After staff found out about his complaints, they refused to let him into the jail to treat inmates until he ‘apologized.’ They… went as far as posting his picture along photos of criminals stuck to a wall behind the jail’s check-in desk.”

You think you know HOW BAD it really is?! You don’t. Men stay here for months — years, while awaiting “justice.” The innocent and the guilty — same slavery. Want some? NO — you most certainly DO NOT ever want to be there.

p.s. — We’re all on the same “side” — it’s called survival.

A black fellow-prisoner worded it perfectly to me during my twenty-days of heinous solitary confinement and slavery in the vile, disgusting Multnomah County Inverness Jail.

“All gang rivalries are off — inside these walls, we’re all we have.” One could say this quote applies to all of us and our United States of America now, too.