(Editors note: The DOC censored this once….what didn’t they want you to know?)

At 5am Monday slumbering women were suddenly woken up by screaming male voices. The guards stoically stood, two in each bay, yelling for the residents to wake up but not telling them why. All the lights blazed on making more chaos ensue. Is there a fire? someone asked. Some ladies took their toilet paper and headed for the bathrooms, but were rudely yelled at to get back in their seats. Again, no explanation was given. Finally, they were informed that they would not be allowed to use the restroom until they were stripped out.

As soon as the guards said “stripped out” we knew it was a shake. But wait…..we just had a shake last week! Management apparently can’t count, because initially they only had 2 female guards to strip out 450 women in the Bay. With bladders rapidly filling up, the women said screw it, we’re going to pee go ahead with the tickets. More poor planning: The guards herded the women to the kitchen to wait out the search, not realizing there would be no water or bathroom facilities available. An hour later they discovered their mistake and herded the gals to visitation. All 450 people of one bay and some of another bay, made quite the crowd in Visitation. The sign clearly says, Maximum Occupancy 280 persons. If there had been a fire how many women would have been trampled to death? As it was, there were long lines to the water fountain and even longer lines for the 2 bathrooms. At about 8:30 am the knuckleheads that planned this event said, “Oh shit we forgot to FEED THEM!”

So, one guard announces feeding will start, get in two lines. They could barely move because they were packed so tightly. Those of us lucky enough to have a chair weren’t going to relinquish it, because we knew they’d run out of food. Sure enough!! An hour later the guards announced that the “kitchen ran out of food”. Tough luck girls, you go hungry. We knew things were really going to get crazy when Pill Call time rolled around. Out of 1300 women on Carlos, it seems like 80% go to pill call twice a day. Chaos reigned. The old timers said they’d never seen a shake last this long…..usually it’s only an hour and a half. The women who were woken at 5 am didn’t get back to their cubes until almost NOON!

Is this the Director’s idea of dignity for women? I’m not feeling it. By the DOC’s own statistics, 86% of incarcerated women have endured abuse by men. Why would they scare the living daylights out of ladies with screaming male voices…. out of a sound sleep no less? Why would they deprive (most of them) of breakfast? There are many women that take their medication with food, and they were unable to.

SIX HOURS?!! It took them six hours to search one Bay? The women arrived back to their destroyed cube, dehydrated, hungry, unmedicated, sleep-deprived, and utterly despondent. Arizona is misogynistic. It’s deep and it’s intrinsic.

The DOC put out a press release Oct 6th, about a new Women’s Affairs director named Amber Marshall. We’d love to tell her what Perryville’s women endure on a daily basis, but she’s nowhere to be found.

11-26-23 8-9am. In the 15 years I’ve been in Perryville this was the most brutal incident that I’ve witnessed in person. There are horrible documented stories of brutality to women here, and I’ve seen my share. Pile on’s of 7 grown men on a 90lb woman are not unusual, neither is women becoming pregnant by guards, or the hundreds of ways the DOC treats our vulnerable women prisoners.

But this was up close and personal. Ms. S. had been deteriorating mentally for about a month before this final episode. She was exhibiting personality changes, then they became more pronounced as time went on. In the four days leading up to her psychological break, her friends in A3 watched her rapid descent into madness. Ms.S. spent all her time kicking out, fighting, against imaginary beings, and screaming at “them”. She didn’t eat, sleep, drink, bathe, or even go to the bathroom. As her torment grew more agitated, several of her friends tried to alert staff, but of course they were ignored. At one point her best friend tried to talk to Lt. Adamu and he replied, ” If you bother me again I’ll give you a ticket.” (Isn’t he a treasure.)

Then that fateful morning when COII Lucid was told…THEN things happened. CO Lucid was very calm and talked quietly to Ms. S. in her cube. Suddenly, S. was out of her cube dancing and screaming obscenities. Lucid called the cavalry, the yard was shut down, and seven guards descended on the scene. CO Gully is a huge, 230lb, 6’2 body-builder, and he tried to cuff her first. As she saw the guards surrounding her…she went wild. They couldn’t handcuff her so she was thrown on her bunk and held down by 5 guards, one was filming the event. I felt they were entirely too rough physically with her, and Sgt. Brown was the MOST culpable in inflaming the situation by YELLING at her at the top of her lungs.

Do these people have any crisis intervention training at all???? Apparently not! I have alerted the Court Appointed Monitors, and hope to hell the DOC has not erased the tapes.