Author: Bernard
In the darkness I began to feel stings all over my face and body. I started screaming. When the officers finally got there with their flashlights, they saw what I already knew — I was covered in ants. They laughed and left me there to suffer.
This was a lockdown cell in a Georgia prison. No lights. No running water. They made me sleep on the floor. And the ants bit me continuously for two weeks straight.
There was nothing I could do.
They’d slide food through the tray slot like everything was normal, like I wasn’t being eaten alive in the dark. The ants never stopped. Not for two weeks.
When they finally let me out, I was swollen and vomiting. They gave me some aloe lotion. That’s it. No doctor, no nurse. Just lotion. It took two months before the swelling went down, two months before my body started feeling like my own again.
You want to know why they put me in that cell? I had refused housing. The inmates in my assigned cell wouldn’t let me sleep there. That’s how it works in Georgia prisons — gangs control who sleeps where. The only time your assigned cell actually means anything is in lockdown units. That’s the only place the gangs don’t run.
I tried to protect myself, and this is what they did to me.
The officers knew what was going on. They know the gangs run everything. They just don’t get paid enough to care.
After I came out of that cell — swollen, vomiting, covered in bites — they transferred me to another facility. But it didn’t matter. Gangs run every single prison in Georgia. Same system, different building.
So I stayed in lockdown. I chose it. After what happened in that ant-infested cell, I wasn’t going to risk the alternative. I stayed in lockdown for 18 months, until the day I got released.
Lockdown didn’t have ants, but isolation in itself destroys the mind. A year and a half of that broke my spirit. That’s what it did to me. It broke my spirit.