Prisoners Reportedly Locked in Showers in Oklahoma, Florida
by David M. Reutter
According to a lawsuit removed to federal court for the Western District of Oklahoma on May 1, 2024, prisoners at Great Plains Correctional Center (GPCC) were confined in a tiny shower stall for days on end. That follows a report from Florida that prisoners there were also being held in shower stalls in violation of state Department of Corrections (DOC) policy.
The Oklahoma complaint was filed by seven GPCC prisoners allegedly held for extended periods in tiny shower stalls measuring just two feet square. Prisoner Daniel Saldivar was initially placed in an eight-man cell but requested a transfer after learning that his cellmates possessed homemade knives. That’s when he said that prison officials stripped him naked and threw him in a shower stall for four days and nights. The situation became so dire that Saldivar used a shirt—which another prisoner gave him to stay warm—as a makeshift noose, in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.
Fellow prisoner-plaintiffs Michael Wolfe, Durrell Hernandez, Christopher Hicks, Ronnie Smith II, Larry Pruitt and Robert D. Johnson also described degrading and inhumane conditions. In addition to the lack of bedding or clothing, they said that the shower drain was the only receptacle for their human waste. The prisoners said they were forced to defecate in the floor or in a paper bag. In some instances, raw sewage came up through the drain.
Retired DOC guard Sgt. Kenneth Buck described the showers pressed into service as holding cells: “No mattress, steel bunk, no pillow, no linen, no blanket, no toilet paper, no water. If you need a drink of water, tough.” He said that guards have little choice but to go along with the practice. “If you wanted to stay in good graces with management, you kept your mouth shut and went with the flow.”
An August 23, 2023, report by DOC’s Inspector General (IG) concluded that “the practice of placing inmates in the SMU [Special Management Unit] showers has been utilized in multiple [DOC] facilities for years.” Placements continue “until a cell/bed can be found.” When GPCC prisoners refused to be housed in the eight-man cells, they were subjected to shower placement because SMU is “almost always full”—the result of so many prisoners refusing eight-man cell placement. The IG found that most shower placements last no longer than 30 minutes, but cases of three-day placement were documented.
The prisoners are represented by Oklahoma City attorneys Richard C. Labarthe and Alexey V. Tarasov. See: Saldivar v. Okla. Dep’t of Corr., USDC (W.D. Okla.), Case No. 5:24-cv-00442.
Florida Prisoners Locked in Showers, Too
“When they feel like they want to punish you, they put you in the shower for hours,” said Florida prisoner Milton Thompson. “They do that all the time. That shower will drive you crazy.”
Thompson said he spent 23 hours trapped in a shower in 2023 at Blackwater River Correctional Facility, forced to urinate there, though guards helpfully provided a plastic bag he could defecate in. Thompson said that he was locked in a shower as punishment, but other prisoners said they were kept there because there was nowhere else to put them.
DOC policy prohibits using shower stalls for anything except bathing or “temporary placement of an inmate for the purpose of conducting an unclothed search or application of restraints in preparations of an escort.” The policy specifically bars showers from being “used as a holding cell” and says prisoners may never be “restrained or unattended while in the shower.”
Despite an equally explicit ban on serving meals in showers, Charlotte Correctional Institution prisoners Jeremy Johns and Kevin Stover said that’s what happened to them. “There’s nowhere to sit but on cold concrete—it’s not properly cleaned or sanitized,” Johns said. “It’s just torture.”
As PLN reported, Miami-Dade Correctional Institution guards locked prisoner Darren Rainey in a scalding shower in 2012 to punish him after he allegedly defecated in his cell; though they killed the 50-year-old, no one has ever been charged in his death. [See: PLN, Aug. 2020, p.48.] A lawsuit filed by Martin Correctional Institution prisoner Lynn Hamlet, 66, accused guards of locking him in a dirty shower stall that flooded, floating feces into contact with open diabetic wounds on his legs. He then developed an infection that spread to his heart and required surgery. But as PLN also reported, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed dismissal of his complaint in November 2022, opining that “brief exposure to urine and feces in the shower is [not] an objectively extreme deprivation of the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities.” [See: PLN, May 2024, p.44.]
Sources: Business Insider, Tampa Bay Times
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