This essay discusses sexual abuse against adults and minors in the prison system. It also describes instances of suicide and self harm.
I have called The Hell inside Hell home for eight of the 17 years that I've been incarcerated. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) adult women's solitary confinement on Lane Murray Unit has many aliases: Administrative Segregation, Alternative Housing, Special Housing, The Hole, The Box. This is so they can deny the existence of solitary confinement. Don't be misled: solitary is alive here and virtually absolute.
As physical and sexual abuse scandals have become routine in girls' and women's prisons nationwide, the pivotal role solitary confinement plays is often ignored, concealing a host of rampant abuses from grooming to sexual violence. In prisons the state designates as female, officers don't just use the threat of solitary to extract sexual favors. Once someone is in The Hole, guards use the isolation as the perfect place to predate uninterrupted.
I'm not suggesting all abuse would magically cease without segregation. But isolation has always been a key tenet of abuse. The threat of solitary forces us into a sick game of "Would you rather." Would you rather be ordered to flash your breasts in General Population? Or ordered to masturbate with a bottle of water in segregation?
Our Life in The Hole
People on the outside are usually surprised to learn that incarcerated women and girls fear staff, not each other. In General Population, there's safety in numbers; there are places to hide, ways to avoid the sexual predators on staff, and allies to enlist as distractions. In The Hole, we depend solely on security staff to eat, shower, and receive toilet paper and tampons. No place to run or hide.
We spend 23-24 hours of the day with only bright lights, loud noises, and smells of unwashed bodies to accompany the complete isolation. This is barring the rare excursion to the medical building, which involves a strip search, handcuffs, ankle shackles, and a belly chain. As we're escorted, our peers in General Population are ordered to "Catch a wall!" That's prison lingo for demanding everyone turn their backs to us. Per policy, making eye contact or speaking to us is punishable as a disciplinary infraction. Breaking this rule often results in the person joining us in The Box, effectively criminalizing all human emotions, concern, contact, and love for other prisoners, especially those in isolation.
Collectively, we resist by establishing community and chosen families. To overcome communication barriers, we talk through shared heating vents. To communicate across floors, we make sweeping large letters to spell words using our entire hand. We also pass written correspondence known as kites.
We are so desperate to feel a friendly touch, see people wearing non-uniforms, and hear different voices. Texas doesn't offer personal televisions to purchase for any incarcerated person. For a while, we were allowed to watch one hour of mandatory Fox News only during caged indoor recreation, but not anymore. Before 2023, phone access was limited to one five-minute-long call every three months. During our one hour of recreation twice a week in an enclosed metal cage, we climb up the toilet onto the sink, then balance precariously on a thin concrete ledge, just to see each other's faces and graze fingertips. Severe mental illness is so endemic that it's a rare treat to experience a vent neighbor who doesn't bang her head open. These are the times when bonds are forged and tears are shed.
TDCJ's spokesperson insists Restrictive Housing is to prevent "gang members from recruiting." We don't have gangs in Texas women's prisons. Adult women are placed in solitary for a range of reasons: refusing to work, "extreme hairstyles," phone sex, contraband possession (even if you were set up), assaults, or writing escape letters to the warden (to get out of working in the brutal fields). The average stay is seven years. Conversely, any history of assault while incarcerated in a youth prison is also used to justify transfer to adult solitary for juveniles as young as 16.5 years of age.
Replicating Abuse
In a building of 228 isolation cells, I am one of only five women over fifty. I arrived at segregation to find an overwhelming representation of LGBTQ+ Black and brown youth.
I was perplexed to see teenagers, who were not old enough to buy beer and cigarettes, treated as grownups here. The majority of my neighbors were transferred from the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) as teens to an adult prison. TJJD imprisons children as young as 10 years old. There, the innocuous euphemism for solitary confinement is "Security." Don't be fooled by the name. It isn't to protect an extremely vulnerable child. It's used as punishment.
The reasons children are placed in isolation stem from immaturity, rather than deliberate so-called criminality. Youth swearing, disobedience, lying, being argumentative, insubordination, and "sexual deviancy" (being caught in bed together) are all major violations falling under the umbrella of "disrespectful behavior towards staff," which, along with assaults on staff and peers, are punishable with 30-45 days in Security at state youth prisons. Sometimes, youth return to The Hole after less than 24 hours to begin a fresh 30 days.
Reports suggest that in county youth facilities, isolation is even more widespread. In 2017, reports about abusive conditions in a Dallas County facility described youth spending months and sometimes more than a year without going outdoors. Harris County's juvenile detention has also faced legal action for confining youth to their rooms for 23.5 hours per day. Numerous studies show the irreparable harm isolation does to fully developed adult brains over 25 years of age. No studies exist measuring the long-term, irreversible damage of locking youth—with still-developing brains—in cages for 23-24 hours a day.
Over the years I've heard unbelievable sordid stories of abuse from young women who had never met one another, but all told me similar tales of rapes, arbitrary beatings, and sexual harassment in juvenile solitary confinement by guards, which continued once they transferred to this adult solitary prison.
It wasn't long before they made a believer out of me. The first new young girl draped in too-big clothes was escorted past my door with badly swollen wrists. The black box vise we're forced to wear for long trips covers our handcuffs, pinches our wrists nonstop, and leads to swelling. That's how I knew she was a new arrival. They placed her in the cell facing me and ignored her request for water. She removed her shirt and bra. Once she was topless, this sexual survival tactic immediately got her some cold water.
Before I was incarcerated, I was a nurse. I still do what I can for the young women trying to survive the conditions of The Hole. I'm known for my confidential, nonjudgmental advice—people call me Mama Detroit. After witnessing my first sexual transaction for water concerning a minor, a deeply ingrained instinct kicked in. I mistakenly thought I was legally mandated to file a report for suspected child abuse. For a short while, I forgot I was in prison. After I remembered, I still thought, Who the Hell am I supposed to tell? My front-row seat frequently proved this to be the norm. I wrote a friend providing detailed descriptions of what I witnessed. She replied with copies of several decades of old newspaper articles. One headline from the Dallas Morning News stood out: "STAFF ARE BEING PAID YOUR TAX MONEY TO RAPE YOUR CHILDREN." My friend circled "2007" and wrote beneath it, "They already know!"
The Hole, the building that collects severely mentally ill and developmentally challenged people, is where problematic staff who "don't play well with others" are assigned to work. Whether they're former military men who spontaneously punch our metal cell doors until their knuckles bleed or the very young male guards. Both usually have been banished from working in General Population by their colleagues—the former due to fear, the latter due to their frat boy culture.
I've witnessed young guards cheering for the young incarcerated women in adult solitary to "Sho something! Fo something!" The women performed strip dancing contests in rec cages for the prize: a stick of gum.
Pimped by the State
A recent transfer from juvenile to adult solitary was 18-year-old Alexis Lester. She was relentlessly teased by security as a toilet feeder due to her eating disorder. She apologized and begged officers to stop while simultaneously declaring her love and suicidal thoughts. She was ignored and dismissed as attention-seeking. The guard played her against her friend by encouraging both to compete for his attention by performing sexual favors. He chose the friend. The day after Lester died by suicide, her tormentors held a strip contest in her memory. These are the types of guards assigned to maintain safety and security over extremely vulnerable people.
Lester's friend, 22-year-old, DaJna Brown, wasn't surprised to learn of her suicide. They met in TJJD, but Lester transferred to adult solitary a few years before Brown. Shaking her head, Brown explains that Lester was prone to "loving too hard, always falling for men she gotta prove her love to. [Alexis] had cut herself over men in TYC (former name of TJJD). She was always in security."
In youth segregation facilities, guards who engage in sexually inappropriate acts against minors avoid the cameras by preferring to commit their crimes in vans, cleaning closets, laundry, and property rooms, according to Brown. The general consensus among transferred youth is that "Security" is usually reserved for girls who "say yes today but no tomorrow." In adult segregation, our cameras are manned by guards' allies who turn a blind eye to abuse. During triple-digit Texas temperatures without air conditioning, we survive by wearing a "prison bikini"—bras and panties. This is often misinterpreted as an invitation to violate.
Murray unit, like other women's prisons, has a long history of sexual assault: The State of Texas, in 1997, passed a law criminalizing any sexual relations between prisoners and prison guards. This happened after prosecutors were unable to have a prison guard at Murray convicted for coercing inmates into sexual interactions. The prison guard stated that the sexual interactions were consensual.
Brown recalls several others who were "in relationships" with guards at TJJD. Most of them were her friends, 14 or 15 years of age. The guards were "old, probably 30." Brown's silence was bought with fast food, candy, and fear.
One day, I shared the breaking news that, after 20 arrests for sex with youth offenders, the U.S. Department of Justice had announced plans to open an investigation into physical and sexual abuse allegations in five TJJD prisons. Brown and her neighbor, 22-year-old Sametra Washington, both began guessing the names of which guards would be arrested. Washington assures me that "they treated us the worst in Security."
When I asked Brown to tell me about her first experience with abuse and The Hole, I expected her to recount a TJJD experience. I was wrong. Brown was in a county juvenile center for a static offense, something like truancy or running away. The centers also holds children for criminal offenses such as theft and assault (including playground fights). As a nurse, I am aware that many cases of the former are responses to abuse. After repeatedly being told to strip, Brown immediately thought, "I don't even know if that's allowed." But instead, she answered with false bravado: "Make me." Her last memory is being slammed against a wall, then waking up cold, nude, and alone in her first closet-sized box with a knot on her head. She was ten years old.
Washington and Brown are among many who have told me about how the abuse in solitary in youth prisons is like the primer for adult solitary prisons. "All they do in Security there and solitary here, fight or fuck you," Washington said.
For the past three years, I've watched Washington grow increasingly more desperate to leave The Hole. She cries aloud to the warden, imploring her for release from seg and declaring her love. She offers sexual acts to staff in exchange for a promise just to talk to the warden on her behalf. Her mental state has crumbled. Murray transferred her to a smaller, better solitary confinement prison. The windows there were painted black from the interior. People desperate for sunlight scraped the black paint with their fingernails. Then, in an exercise of cruelty, they painted the exterior of the windows black.
The state is using the same sexually abusive methods that have, in most instances, been responsible for the girls leaving home. I've had front-row seats to mentally ill women so fed up with abuse that they sliced their clitoris, nipples, and neck. The Hole is hard enough to survive without staff manipulating vulnerable, isolated girls and women for their entertainment and sexual gratification. This normalization of sexual voyeurism and assault makes it clear that those charged with our care feel no responsibility to act in our best interest.
Society should be careful not to fool itself into believing that it can reform solitary confinement. You don't reform torture, you end it.
In the past year, more than 100 bills targeting LGBTQ+ communities were introduced in the Texas legislature under the guise of "Protecting Children." In reality, the state itself is the actual groomer, and solitary confinement in both youth and adult prisons is its hunting grounds.
This article is supported by a grant from The Ridgeway Reporting Project, managed by Solitary Watch with funding from The Vital Projects Fund.