NY Authorities are Detaining Prisoners Indefinitely in Solitary “Shit Rooms,” where They are Denied Running Water, Lights are Kept On 24/7 and are Forced to Defecate in a Bucket [49% Black, 23% White]

From [SOLITARYWATCH] In late May, guards at Green Haven Correctional Facility, in Dutchess County, locked Rahkeem Brown in a room in the prison’s medical unit. The room had a mattress on the floor and resembled a cell, he said, but its sole window didn’t open and there was no running water.

The guards had accused Brown of hiding contraband in his rectum, though they didn’t say what the contraband was, and Brown denied having anything. Still, he says they replaced his prison uniform with a hospital gown — which he said was stained and smelled like feces — gave him what he described as a “bucket,” and told him to pass the banned item and give it to them.

Brown says he spent the next eight days in the room, giving officers stool after stool. None had any foreign objects in them, but he says the guards told him the stool was always an “insufficient amount” and thus didn’t prove his innocence. They gave him cups of water, but it was barely enough to drink and clean himself. “You can’t shower, I got defecation all over my body,” he said. As the days passed, the room’s overhead lights never turned off.

“I was literally losing my mind in there,” Brown said.

Corrections officers keep incarcerated people in similar rooms across New York’s state prison system. According to a prison agency directive, officers can confine someone in one of the rooms if they have “probable cause” to believe they’ve swallowed contraband or inserted it into their rectal cavity. Officially called “special watch” or “contraband watch” rooms, they’re meant to facilitate the safe recovery of drugs, weapons, or other prohibited items that prisoners have hidden in their bodies.

Incarcerated people call them by a different name — “shit rooms” — and say they’re ripe for abuse.

“It is part and parcel of the torture, brutality, and abuse endemic to New York’s prisons,” said Jerome Wright, the formerly incarcerated co-director of the HALT Solitary Campaign, a New York-based advocacy group.

The rooms stirred up limited controversy in 2019, when a formerly incarcerated man sued Elmira Correctional Facility for holding him in a “defecation room” for 61 days. Officers claimed that X-rays showed a “razor-type weapon” in his rectum, but they never recovered one. (Federal district and appellatecourts dismissed the suit, asserting that the prison was maintaining “security.”)

Since then, the rooms have eluded public scrutiny, though prisoners have continued to allege mistreatment within them. In 2021, another man sued the state for keeping him in a watch room in Elmira for over two months without recovering any contraband; a court ruled in his favor, awarding him $6,390 for wrongful confinement. Yet another man claimed that officers at the now-closed Great Meadow Correctional Facility, in northeastern New York, locked him in a special watch room for five days with no food or water. He was hospitalized for dehydration, he alleged in a lawsuit — then locked back in the room for another week. (Officers said they later found drugs in the Great Meadow watch room; the man claimed they planted them. The prison agency denied the allegations in the lawsuit, which was ultimately dismissed on procedural grounds.)

In a statement, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which runs the state prison system, said that “special watch is a security measure designed to prevent the introduction of dangerous contraband into correctional facilities and to protect incarcerated individuals, staff, and visitors.” It said that prisoners on special watch are given hygiene items and a basin of water to wash themselves, and that “lighting is maintained throughout the watch to facilitate continuous observation and ensure the safety and security of the individual and staff.”

Critics argue that the rooms are cruel overkill.

“It’s a completely inhumane practice,” said state Senator Julia Salazar, who heads her chamber’s corrections committee. While drugs remain a particularly serious safety issue in prisons, she said, the rooms are a misguided way of intercepting them.

“The response is crazy and no longer about mitigating harm,” Salazar said. “They’ve really lost the thread.”

In 2023, Jayquan Griffin was in a recreation yard at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, in the Catskills, when a fellow prisoner punched him, breaking his jaw.

Officers took him to a hospital, where a CT scan revealed a metallic object in his “rectal area.” He later told medical providers that he had accidentally swallowed a razor blade that he had wrapped in plastic and stowed in his mouth. Prison records indicate that DOCCS staff were convinced that he had inserted the weapon into his rectum.

Whatever the case, guards then transported Griffin, still with a broken jaw and a razor in his body, to nearby Eastern Correctional Facility, and placed him in a special watch room, according to two lawsuits he filed against DOCCS and the state.

Griffin tried to pass the weapon, but couldn’t. He told guards that the razor wouldn’t come out, but they insisted that he defecate it. After a day, officers took him to another outside hospital for X-rays, which showed that the blade was still inside him, but left without getting him treatment and took him back to the defecation room. [MORE]