Six months later: A first-person account of Ramsey county jail

reposted from http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090215145255455

When it happened, we were trying to get the hell out. So far that Monday, we’d been shot at by the National Guard, run into with horses, pepper-sprayed, and had flash-bang grenades go off at our ankles. We’d danced in the street and held our ground. But it was around 4pm and it was obvious that the situation was about to go sour. “We’re gonna have to call it at some point,” she’d said, and ten minutes later we were rounding the corner out of the parking lot when we saw a line of cops on motorcycles roll up along the sidewalk. A trigger-happy cop with a fire-extinguisher-sized pepper-spray canister jumped at us from around the corner.
When it happened, we were trying to get the hell out.

So far that Monday, we’d been shot at by the National Guard, run into with horses, pepper-sprayed, and had flash-bang grenades go off at our ankles. We’d danced in the street and held our ground. But it was around 4pm and it was obvious that the situation was about to go sour.

“We’re gonna have to call it at some point,” she’d said, and ten minutes later we were rounding the corner out of the parking lot when we saw a line of cops on motorcycles roll up along the sidewalk. A trigger-happy cop with a fire-extinguisher-sized pepper-spray canister jumped at us from around the corner. We turned around and saw a triple line of riot cops coming at us from the other side. “Get down on the fucking ground!” It all happened over the course of maybe 30 seconds.

Shit.

My hair was soaked with pepper-spray and my hands on my head drove the chemical into my palms. They went around and cuffed all of us, flexi cuffs, of course, and a woman to my right was screaming as her hands swelled and turned white but we eventually got them cut hers off and do it again, looser.

When they picked me up, my hands were in about the same shape - I couldn’t see a damn thing because my chemical-poisoned hair kept falling in my face and I could feel it on my eyelashes. I heard someone behind me asking for a clipper, and then a pinch. It was all I felt at the time since the burning sensation of the pepper-spray pretty much dulled anything else, but later I found out that, since the cuffs had been so tight, when they tried to cut them off they’d dug into my skin instead and a small chunk of my wrist was missing. When it happened, though, all I heard was, “Oh, shit. Someone get the gauze.” Yeah, always a good sign.

They lined us up against the wall and came around with a camcorder, telling us to look up into the camera but hardly any of us could even open our eyes. One guy (an epileptic, as it happens) was clubbed in the head so hard that he threw up but no one would give him water. We were in the lot for maybe an hour, there were around 45 of us and when we asked what our charges were, a voice off to the left yelled, “Felony riot. All of them.”

That voice, though we didn’t know it at the time, belonged to Sheriff Bob Fletcher. Awesome. This led to us being informed that we would be held until probable cause was determined for the charges, which would be at least 72 hours (so they said at the time).

My friend next to me couldn’t feel his hands anymore but we eventually got his cuffs loosened too. Not everyone was that lucky. With the infinite slowness characteristic of all police routines, we got loaded onto buses and waited on them for I don’t even know how long, female-bodied people were in tiny little cells to the side on the front of the bus and male-bodied people were on benches in the back. I found a weak air vent on the wall and tried to hold my hands to it to ease the burning. A voice from the back said that he felt like he was going to pass out, could someone get him water, and the cop on the bus with us spit some shit about how once you’re on the bus we can’t do anything for you until you get processed, we asked politely and then chanted for a while but the asshole just kept saying, “I love America.”

After waiting on the bus for hours, the drive was literally four minutes long. We couldn’t have gone more than a mile and a half before we got to county jail, and honestly, when we got into the garage I was terrified that they would just leave us on the bus. It’s definitely happened before, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be able to last in this microscopic cage that could barely fit one person, with two people crammed in.

They took us off one by one, cut our cuffs, took us down the hell, put our jewelry and shoes and anything from our pockets into evidence bags, put us in holding cells. Someone came to get me a few minutes later, to have a nurse look at my wrist. This is another way in which I lucked out - I ended up being one of the only people who would receive any kind of medical attention, and the reason for it wasn’t nearly as bad as most other people’s illnesses and injuries.

Anyway, she took me to a sink and took off the blood-soaked gauze and looked at my arm. She turned to me and asked, “Are you depressed?”

“What?” I said.

“You know, are you depressed? I mean, did you do this to yourself?”

She was dead serious. I stared at her. “No. Your friends did.”

She washed the wound and put a steri-strip on it, which promptly bled off. I was telling her that a lot of us were covered in pepper-spray and needed to get decontamination immediately, to which she muttered something noncommittal and sent me back to a different cell.

There was only one guy who I interacted with sort of consistently while we were in jail. A friend of mine. Somehow we always ended up being taken to the same desk or hallway or whatever at the same time. Of course, they wouldn’t let us talk, so we just pointed and mouthed “are you okay?” and made thumbs-up signs to each other.

Ramsey County jail is not designed to process a hundred people at once. We sat in small, unventilated holding cells, about 20-25 to a cell, literally soaking in pepper-spray. There was zero room to sit down, or even to move. The burning chemicals seeped into our skin and sat in the air, we could smell it and even the people who hadn’t been sprayed before were starting to feel it. I kept going to the sink and running cold water over my hands and arms but it was only temporary relief, once the water turned off, the burning came back stronger than before. And my neck and face and hair and back and clothes, you know, it was searing. There was another woman in my cell whose burns were really, really bad - they were all over her arms and legs and back and she was crying.

The only air sort of coming in was through the slot in the door that they slide meals through, which they closed as soon as we started singing. We tried to keep our spirits up under the hot fluorescent lights and stagnant poison air. We were eventually given a few pieces of white bread and some peanut butter and grape jelly, which would be pretty much all we ate for the next few days. We needed some fucking decontamination, and we said so repeatedly.

After a while, when our skin had already absorbed everything and it was too late to wash any of it off anyway, myself and the other woman in the cell with chemical burns - the two of us were in the worst shape with regard to the pepper spray, they took us to a trailer with showers but no soap, we got four minutes to run hot water over our bodies and then they put our clothes in hazmat bags and gave us clean clothes and took us to a different holding cell - this one was a court holding cell, and it was bigger and cooler.

I don’t even remember the timeline, it was hours and hours of getting moved from cell to cell, getting processed bit by bit, prints, mug shots, every step separately with a long wait in a cell in between. They took me to see an investigator; I told her I had nothing to say to her and I wanted a damn lawyer and she shrugged and said the DA would look at the footage and pick us all out anyway. She also mentioned that the time for which we could be legally held without charges would be up at noon on Wednesday, which I was told a number of times in the next few days, but you can guess where we still were when that hour came.

We got taken up to a housing unit, and myself and the other woman who was in so much pain from the pepper-spray ended up being cellmates. I tried to talk to her, to distract her, but nothing worked and I got on the intercom and said we need a fucking doctor, and was told that there was only one nurse on duty and she was dealing with someone with hemophilia so we’d have to wait. I asked them to just give her an ibuprofen, at least, something to dull the pain, but they said they didn’t have any. Bullshit, I said, I was offered one for my arm.

After maybe 20 minutes, they came and got me again and I went to another court holding cell, just as small as the holding cells before but this time with only maybe eight other people. No one else had eaten, and we decided to be polite but persistent in getting some vegan food. We actually held a brief consensus meeting on how to go about it, which, as terrible as the circumstances were, was actually really beautiful. In this hard, crammed, shitty little box, we sat in a circle and figured out how to make sure that everyone would be able to eat without compromising anyone in other ways.

Every time the door was opened, we asked. They told us, in turn, that it was on its way, that there was no vegan food at the jail, that the kitchen was closed, that they were asking their supervisor, that the cook was gone, but we kept asking and I said I knew they had the stuff because I’d gotten it in the other cell and we finally got a cup of cranberry juice and a granola bar for everyone.

I was finished getting processed and went back to the holding cell. They said my prints were already back from the FBI so I could make a phone call. It was 3:30am. I called Coldsnap, talked to a friend who was there, and gave all the information I had. One of the people from my group had called and said for them to say hi to me for him, which was incredibly comforting. “Stay strong, we’ll be here all night,” said the person on the phone.

“So will we,” I assured him.

The next morning I woke up to banging and screaming. People were sick - the cell next to us, I think something was wrong with her stomach, and a person who was anemic was being denied iron supplements because she didn’t give her name. Again, there was only one nurse on duty in the whole place. We couldn’t make phone calls - I was one of maybe a third of the people in that unit who were ever able to get on the phone. Only people who gave their names got a pin number, those who didn’t give their names were told that they were working on getting them a different set of phones but of course it never happened.

The banging and screaming and chanting wasn’t working. It hadn’t worked at all so far. Asking persistently was what had, so, as painful as it is to be polite to a corrections officer, that was what we needed to be doing. Which is why I was frustrated with the situation, it seemed like an obvious dead end at that point.

We were essentially on 23-and-a-half hour lockdown. Groups of 15 or so were allowed out for 30 minutes at a time. The guard at the desk was pretty decent by CO standards, but of course CO standards are below ground-level so that’s not saying much. She kept insisting that she was an old hippie who would have been right in there with us in her younger years, that probably wasn’t true and anyway it’s not like it mattered, but she let us keep our doors open when we went back to our cells and that night we all came out and watched the convention coverage on the TV in the corner until she got us to go back in our cells: “Come on, guys… Alright, 15 more minutes and that’s it.”

There are a couple of other things that happened that day, Tuesday, that I need to mention. One happened while my cellmate and I were on our half-our time out in the unit. I was on the phone when two big COs came in, the guys that you look at and you can tell that their job is the wander around the jail and rough people up. I didn’t hear what was said, I only saw them suddenly grab my cellmate and drag her up the stairs by her hair back to our cell, both of them were on her and they locked the door behind them. I got off the phone, tried to get one of those assholes to tell me what the fuck had happened, and ran up to make sure she was alright.

The pseudo-sympathetic guard told the two male officers to get the hell out of the unit, and let my cellmate back out.

One of the women in the cell next to ours was someone I’d met in Chiapas earlier that year. We sang Zapatista songs to each other through the vents. I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in years on the floor of the unit when she got booked.

Another thing that happened is that two immigration officials came in to get someone who wasn’t white - we didn’t know who they were or why they wanted her, we just saw her getting called out by herself and we banged on our doors and it turned out that they made like they didn’t believe she was a citizen even though they had her passport and evidence and they threatened to keep her longer for an immigration status investigation.

Then, there was one of the only truly hilarious experiences of the whole week.

A voice barked my last name over the intercom.

“Yeah?” The buzz of the opening cell door.

“The investigator wants to see you,” said the guard who’d showed up to escort me.

I told her that I’d already talked to an investigator, and explained that I had nothing more to say to this one than I’d had to say to the last one. The guard said that she was just supposed to take me to the room, and if I wanted, I could say all that to the investigator when I saw her and she’d send me back.

I sat across a desk from this woman in a small room. I mentioned that this was now round two of me not telling them anything, and asked why I had to do this again. She didn’t know, so she read me my rights (she was ever-so-slightly dismayed that the other investigator hadn’t done that - I, on the other hand, hadn’t had any reason to expect due process or anything), and asked if I wanted to make a statement. I said no, I wanted to talk to a lawyer. Predictably enough, that last bit went unacknowledged every time I said it. She told me, fine, but now we have to wait for another guard to come to escort you back.

So I waited, kind of glad to at least be out of my cell for a few minutes. Until this woman started talking.

“So, how long have you been in Saint Paul?”

“Uhh, I’m not gonna answer that.”

“What do you think of the city?”

“Yeah well, your jail is really… uh… bright?”

It was at this point that the monologue began. I can only attempt to recreate some small part of its glory, I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things and other things are meaningless without the impenetrable sincerity and the perfect Minnesota accent:

“We’ve never had a mass arrest before, you know. We really, gosh, we don’t really know what we’re doing! You know, we had a meeting yesterday, and I just said to them, ‘we’ll just have to make the best of a bad situation,’ and we are. We’re really just sluggin’ through this right along with you guys, you know, it’s a tough situation for us too: I didn’t have lunch today, and I probably won’t have dinner. But you know what? I’m proud to be a Saint Paul cop, because we’re dealing with this the best way we can. And after this, you’ll go back to your cell, and that’ll be your reality. And I’ll stay here and keep doing interviews, and that’ll be my reality. But right now, in this moment, our two realities are connecting.”

She made some spiritually significant gesture of connection with her pointer fingers.

“And that’s why I love being a cop, you know? The chance to make connections like this.”

I sat in my chair, clenched my fists, gritted my teeth. I fought back both laughter and the urge to say something that I would regret in court. I have never been more eager to get back to a housing unit in my life.

Wednesday, we waited for 12 o’clock but, surprise surprise, nothing happened. I used my break to call in the names and booking numbers of a bunch of people who hadn’t been able to call Coldsnap yet. My cellmate and I played hangman on the medical request forms that we’d finally been able to get, but of course it was too late to file them so we just took the paper and the little pencils and were relieved to have something to actually do. We decided to up our demands, and started to chant for kale, spelt, and barbecued seitan (somehow, none of this was ever provided).

Throughout the afternoon on Wednesday, it went like this: a couple of groups of people, seemingly arbitrarily, we called out and let go without charges. As it turns out, all our charges were technically filed in the system by noon, even though we wouldn’t be arraigned until much later - except for a few people whose charges they weren’t able to get in by the deadline, and so they had to let those people leave. My cellmate was in one of those groups, along with a really good friend of mine who I’d gotten arrested with.

Then they started to call out groups of us to go to court. I was in maybe the second or third to last of those groups, they told me they’d thrown out the felony and given me two misdemeanors, and to put the bedsheets and everything in the corner and go out for arraignment, which was more exciting until we realized that all this really meant was a transfer back to court holding.

I mean, we should have known. Maybe 25 of us in one of the bigger cells, some people had already been arraigned and released on their own recognizance and were just waiting to be let out - one by one, we talked to public defenders, but first we were put in a room with “Project Remand”, which supposedly helps to determine bail - then again, remand is when you’re held without bail, so the bias of the process wasn’t exactly subtle. I told them that I still lived with my parents because I didn’t want to put my real address in the system. My earlier request for medication had gone through (like I said, I was lucky), and a nurse showed up with a lot more of it than my usual dose and said I needed to take it while she was there. I explained that if I take this stuff in a situation where I can’t go to sleep afterwards, I’ll get sick as hell, and she shrugged and said that maybe she’d come back later.

When I say that the guards were overworked and underslept, I mean in no way to imply any kind of sympathy for them. I didn’t feel bad for making them work the better part of three days straight. I didn’t wish they gave those poor guys better hours. It’s a statement of fact - they had all been pulling double- and triple-shifts, and they were getting a little loopy.

In particular, one of the younger guards we dealt with on Wednesday night in court holding had pretty much completely lost it. It was hell trying to sort out what was going on with people who had already technically been released, people who had been waiting in the cell for hours while other people breezed through to court in minutes, and all manner of other bureaucratic bullshit, and this guy had checked the fuck out for sure. He opened the door with a muppet in his shirt. Seriously. A big, bright, furry muppet doll, buttoned in so that it poked out from the middle of his torso.

We had been banging on the wall to try to get some answers, but we all fell pretty much silent when we saw Zoe. That was the muppet’s name. Zoe. The guard looked at us, scratched the doll’s head, and said, “Now, Zoe doesn’t like it when you make all that noise. Do you, Zoe?” He waved the doll’s hand around and adopted a high-pitched voice: “No, I don’t!” Zoe confirmed.

We didn’t really know what to do - honestly, I was pretty close to delirious at that point anyway, and the whole exchange was just so bloody surreal. After he left, and we stopped laughing, one of the people in the cell said loudly, “Hey, can we all come to consensus right now that from now on, we will only address the muppet?” We all agreed that this was a fine idea, and stuck to it. That worked out well, since whenever that officer came back, it wasn’t actually him but rather Zoe who would address us. In a way, it was more pleasant to converse with a puppet than with a corrections officer, but of course, that preference was tempered by the fact that the one was, inescapably, only a more aesthetically pleasing extension of the other. Oh well.

We tried to play the village but the narrator and elder and werewolf and villagers all kept having to go to see lawyers and judges so it didn’t really work. We did our damnedest to get iron for the person who was anemic, but in the end, all they were able to have was some spinach the the guard in the housing unit had taken from the cafeteria for them.

My public defender was awful. She came in and politely told me that they’d called my mother, whose number I gave the Project Remand people to confirm my address, and she, of course not knowing that I’d said I still lived with her, had said I lived someplace else, and now on account of my “conflicting information” the judge was recommending that I held without bail. I was pretty upset, but tried to keep calm and asked her a few questions, but she interrupted me and said, “Stop. You’re asking too many questions. You’re trying to control this.”

So I was out of the housing unit at maybe 4:30 or 5 and finally arraigned around 8:30. My bail was set at $300 and the judge asked me about what my parents did for a living as a way of gauging whether or not I was, I don’t know, a legitimate human being or something. They asked me if my parents would bail me out. I knew they weren’t going to - they’re really, really supportive, but they were also a thousand miles away. Still, it seemed like yes was the answer they were looking for, so I gave it to them and was handed a piece of paper with my charges and put in another holding cell, where a lawyer from the National Lawyer’s Guild came to the window and when we asked why no one was actually getting let out after their release she said we were slipping through the cracks, they were doing their best but the judge wasn’t cooperating.

Another cell, another visit from the nurse who tried to push four times my normal dose down my throat, I told her again that I’d be sick if I took it then but she said I might not be able to have it later so I steeled myself for being sick and took one pill, half of what she had. And sure enough, back in the inescapably bright fluorescent-lit cell, this time with only three other people, the drugs kicked in and the room started to spin and I clenched my jaw and just tried not to feel the nausea and vertigo and racing pulse.

I want to emphasize that the dude running the desk in the court holding section was a monster. He got a real kick out of making threats, laughing at injuries, closing vents and denying requests. I know he got a kick out of it because he told us. He thought it was funny, he said. At some point, someone I was with made a quiet joke and he went nuts on her. He was there when I was being booked and when I was being processed out, and I hope his life is miserable.

While pretty much everyone else had been wearing either what they were arrested in or standard orange jail clothes, a couple of us had ended up in big white t-shirts and gray sweatpants. A female CO, who insisted that the man at the desk was “usually a real nice guy, he’s just under a lot of stress right now” took us into the changing room and gave us the orange stuff and took us up to a different housing unit for the night, but when the guard tried to check me in she said I wasn’t in the system because I’d been bailed out several hours before. I managed to a phone call to Coldsnap, and a friend of mine answered and said that my roommate had posted bail around 10:30.

Back down in the elevator, they took our pictures again and again and put us in a room to change back into our clothes, except that they’d lost mine (along with my shoes, passport, phone, and bank card) so they just gave me the t-shirt and sweatpants and jail sandals to go out in. It was a little after midnight when they finally led us out, a group of maybe five people, into the cool night air, through a long maze of fences of streetlamps; I hugged my friends and called my mother and passed out on the grass, waking up only to see my partner when they let him out a few hours later.

I got my shit back from the jail the next day when they found it, and on Friday I got on a Megabus and didn’t exhale until we were out of Minneapolis city limits. The cab I took to the station was driven by a Somali immigrant who asked me if I’d been protesting the convention - I hesitated to answer, but then his face lit us knowingly and he said, “I read about you guys in the paper! You guys are awesome!” and he handed me a pile of all the newspapers with RNC coverage.

In the end, my charges were dropped to one misdemeanor. I was offered a deal in October but I’d be damned if I was gonna cave on one lousy unlawful assembly tag (they wanted about $150 to reduce it to a violation and $240 for a continuance for dismissal, and I didn’t have that much to spare anyway). Besides, the judge eventually dismissed it because the prosecutor couldn’t come up with a formal complaint in time. Next chapter: civil fucking litigation. Stay tuned.