Diesel Therapy

Inverness Jail (MCIJ), colloquially known as “Inverness.” A medium-security correctional site managed by the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office. “Nestled near Portland International Airport, it primarily holds lower-risk detainees in dormitory-style arrangements.”¹ I find this use of “nestled” to be grotesque, the way the word itself is nestled within this otherwise purely informational description, how the jail’s concealment of itself is rendered warm, cozy, natural. Inverness has a capacity of 1,037 beds, and during my 13-month stay at the jail (before being sentenced and shipped to prison), there was always talk from the admin about overcrowding, but there was also a strange and common knowledge that accrued the longer your body spent there: hundreds of the beds were empty at any given time. It was understood that the jail was able to charge the county a “bed fee” every time an inmate was moved from one bed to another. So admin would shuffle the housing units like cards, rotating them like the glitching hands of a clock, and each time we were moved from Unit 15 to Unit 14, or from Unit 4 to Unit 16 to Unit 3, a massive invoice was generated. A common misconception about prison is that you are just sitting around on a single discrete bed for years, but in fact you are always being moved around, or at least under threat of being moved around. At the greatest order of magnitude, this experience takes the form of “diesel therapy,” a torture technique that entails the movement of a prisoner from one facility to another, every day (sometimes multiple facilities in a single day), over and over and over again, for the purpose of driving the prisoner to insanity. I have never been subjected to diesel therapy, but I’ve done long drives in vehicles from one prison to another and another. It is a strange way to travel. Your hands are constrained by a “black box,”² and a belly chain connects your hands to your bound ankles, and then there are chains connecting you to the other prisoners in the van,³ and a young person in the center seat of the middle row of the van pisses themselves as you near the prison, and the seats are just a concave length of hard black plastic, so the urine pools and gathers. I am sitting to the right of the person who has pissed themselves, so I lift my ass out of the seat and pitch my body forward, so that the top of my head is flush with the plexiglass that is flush with the headrest of the officer sitting in the passenger seat ahead of me. This means that I am crouched in an uncomfortable position, and when I turn my head to the left, trying to find a way to get more comfortable because the prison is still a long way off, I see that the person sitting to the left of the person in the center is also pitched forward. When we get to the prison we all get out of the van and one of the two officers who has escorted us points at the person and humiliates them for having pissed themselves. The person is coming to the prison with a lot of personal property, so it is understood that they have already been in prison for a while and are just being transferred to a new facility—the rest of us are new arrivals, fresh from jail. Before this trip began, as the officers were loading up all of our property, they threw a large cardboard box violently into the back of the van and then threw all of our shit on top of it. This box contained the humiliated person’s guitar. After laughing at the person upon arriving at the prison, the officers once again handle the guitar box violently as they remove it. One of the most destructive aspects of the carceral system is the way bodies and property are transported through it. Vans, buses, sally ports, interrogation rooms, holding cells (“bedrock”),⁴ orientation cubes, transition centers, R&D, the yard, subterranean corridors, body scanners, highways, Main Streets, city centers, sidewalks,⁵ medical, rec, chow hall, dayroom, the hole. Diesel therapy is a forced and perpetual nomadism, a haunted house ride, you’re sitting in a mining cart, on tracks, in a cell, shackled for many of the day’s hours. It is a travel against your will, you see the crops outside of the van’s window and ask everyone else in the van what they are, and the guard in the driver’s seat says Those are the lavender fields and you are unable to stop, disembark, and softly walk out into them.