4 Point Restraints

The following is from a mentally ill person in prison. It is a re-telling of his time spent in 4 point restraints for 3 weeks. This took place in a prison in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in February. Two other people in prison wrote to the Michigan branch of the AFSC alerting them to the fact that this man had been held in restraints for so long.

"The staff laughed at me and was calling me nigger every day of those three weeks of torture and telling me if I keep tearing up their cells to try and get transferred back down to Huron Valley Center prison then you will die on that bed. Freezing to death, stsrving and sick from no blood pressure pills most of the time. Until I’m dead from all three ways. And I knew they was serious cause I spit on many of them for taking my food a lot and refusing me yard breaks sometimes. And I spit on them for refusing to give me a mattress and clothes when I was supposed to have. when chain to the bed. Anyway, when I was at the Marquette Prison chained to the bed the only way I was to make it alive each day for three weeks on the cold slab and ice cold room. cold chains on. and no mattress or clothes or food. most of the time. I had to raise my body up far as I could to do as many sit ups as I could every 20 minutes to keep from freezing to death and couldn’t sleep but two hours a day and a couple of hours at night because no matter what I was forcing myself to do 1000 thousand sit ups to stay warm. The cold would come back all over my body within one hour and I would have to do the half way sit-ups again for another 1000 times with tears in my eyes and anger and hate for the whole world beyond human imagination. The hate worse when I was forced to have to use the bathroom on myself and the bed for bowel movements or urinating—most times because they never let me up for three weeks to go the bathroom. And whenever they did bring me some food to eat it was mostly a sandwich and apple. Only then sometimes they will bring food that I could eat without being un-chain and with no spoon or fork. I had to use my hands and eat what little I could. I choked every time and had to throw up a lot of times. Sometimes they would let me keep the food tray to shit and piss in for emergency, ain’t that a bitch? Also when my head and back itched everyday and night I had to rub it against the wall. When I sit up and turn sideways and I had to rub my head on the wall up and down and sometimes bang my head on the wall to make it stop itching. even to the point of almost knocking myself out and every day and night I holler out how much I hate them all and I holler out curses saying Michigan will be destroyed worse than the state of Louisiana with tornadoes this summer and many will die from heat stroke from the sun burning more and more through the ozone layers of sky. And I’ve been spit on and punched." (22 years; Marquette--now at Ionia)