Note: This is a translation of an article published on March 26 in Southern Weekly.  It is part of a series on how to solve the issue of "prison tyrants" in China’s system of detention centers.  

The original article in Chinese can be found here. 

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 An account of life and death in jail

An oral description by Guo Xinshui （高信水）

By Huang Xiuli （黄秀丽）

 

 

Editor’s note: This series of reports by Southern Weekly aims to reduce the ground on which prison tyrants [牢头狱霸] exist and to search for policies to solve this problem.

 

Prison tyrants have been a part of history for all nations.  In contemporary China especially, it is intertwined with a number of deficiencies in the criminal justice system.  The Supreme People’s Procuratorate has admitted that “prison tyrants have existed for a long time” and that there will be increased efforts to stamp it out throughout the whole country. 

We would rather believe that the repeated deaths in detention centers revealed as of late are not because supervision of detention centers has gotten worse, but that the media has become more open, bringing the chronic illness of these years into the light and stimulating public opinion to find a way out of the grief for our system.

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Guo Xinshui (pseudonym) was held in a detention center for three years on unjust charges.  He was found not guilty and released. He went from a “new recruit” (jargon for a new prisoner) and eventually passing as a cell leader, experiencing life and death.  He told his story to Southern Weekly at the end of March 2009.

The jail cell: a group ruled by the law of the jungle

I was taken to a detention center by the police at little after nine in the morning on March 9, 2001.  After they finished checking my person, they had to take my belt because of the rules.  Then I walked into the “storehouse” with my bare feet carrying my pants.  That’s what they call jail cells in Fuzhou.  When suspects go in and out of jail, it’s called going into the storehouse [进仓］ or coming out of the storehouse ［出仓］.

Behind the steel door, the room is about twenty or so square meters with about 27 or 28 people.  Everyone was busy making candle snuffs, knitting or threading beads.  I learned later that this was work that everyone had to do in the detention center.  The room was about six or seven meters high with only one window.  We hardly every saw the sun.

My arrival got everyone really excited.  A guy who was about 50 years old said, “Take off your clothes. You’re getting juiced.”  I found out later that he was the cell leader. There was a small open area in the room and I was told to go there to be tested.  They threw 20 or 30 buckets of water on me.  It’s still really cold in March.  My whole body was frozen. And there was a couple dozen people surrounding me, staring at me standing there without any clothes on.  I was terrified to the extreme.

I found out later that getting juiced was considered a good thing.  We were in a cadre’s prison.  There were civil servants, foreigners, elderly and a few other suspects they were asked to take care of.  There were two cadre cells in the detention center.  All the others were cells were larger and housed people suspected of crimes like murder and robbery.  The way new comers are tested in those cells is with beatings.  It’s like the way they used to beat prisoners with sticks in the novel Water Margin in order to show them their place.  

After I got juiced, the cell leader told me to come over and explain the details of my case.  When he heard it he just said, “That’s a real pain.” Then he told me to get to work.  I threaded beads for a whole morning.  I didn’t eat thing for lunch.  After ten, everyone went to sleep one after another.  The beds were about fifty centimeters high and slept a dozen or so people packed together really tight.  There wasn’t enough room even to step between people.

That’s when the cell leader spoke up and told me to sleep in the “Ritz.”  So I took a paper mat used we used for work over to the “Ritz.” It was actually the  latrine.  Because there wasn’t enough room on the beds, about half of us had to sleep in the aisle or near the “Ritz.”  When there were a lot of people, you couldn’t even sleep there.  You had to lean against the wall or take turns sleeping with others.

I was really scared the first few days but I slowly got used to things and realized it was just a really different place.  There were 28 people divided into three levels.  The highest group was called “first pound,” followed by “second pound” and “third pound.”  The people in “first pound” were the cell leader and a few others at the top of the heap.  The ones in “second pound” were in the middle.  Newcomers and those suspects with lower status were in the “third pound.”  The cell leader was usually chosen by the correctional officer, but the three groups were up to us.  There were many factors that went into deciding which level you were in, including how hard your fists were, whether or not you were a cadre and how you got along with the cell leader.  Another important factor was your case. People accused of fraud or rape were seen as having character problems.  They weren’t allowed to mix with the top two groups.  

A couple people tried to intimidate me in the beginning.  There was a  guy suspected of contract fraud and one day it was his turn to give out food, which was boiled potatoes.  He only gave me the broth.  I was furious and said, “You don’t have to be such a damn snob!”  He said, “So how does the new guy want it?”  A couple people came around him and a few came around me.  We started to fight.  A few minutes later the officers came and knocked their batons on the metal door to warn us.  The cell leader stepped in to break it up.

After I fought once, no one dared to underestimate me again.  I had to sleep near the Ritz half a month and then I slept in the aisle for about a year.  If you’re a coward in jail, then you’ll never be finished washing everyone’s clothes and dishes.  There was one guy with a criminal record  who was the former section chief of the housing management bureau who was pretty much a chicken.  He was always getting bullied.  Most people were like this.  If you have money, you buy things to pay your respects to the cell leader or those in the “first pound” and “second pound.”  Your life can be a little better that way.  If you don’t have money or status, then all you can do is sweep the floor, rub somebody’s back or wash people’s shorts.  It’s really tough.

Cell leader: tiny powers enlarged without limit

One correctional officer has to watch two cells in that detention center.  Each cell has 20-30 people.  It’s impossible to watch everyone, so it’s all done through the cell leader.  Therefore, whatever kind of person the cell leader is a key factor in how orderly things are.  Whether or not a newly arrived inmate can acclimate himself really depends on how the cell leader teaches him.

There are advantages to being a cell leader.  Little things you take for granted on the outside become enlarged to end on the inside.  They become things that everybody else envies.  The cell leader can eat little more than everyone else.  He can does less work.  He gets a bigger space to sleep in at night.  You’re not allowed to write letters in detention centers, only postcards, but the cell leader has the special “right” of writing one or two letters a month.  These are really small things on the outside but on the inside they’re the best things you can imagine. What’s the point of writing a couple extra postcards?  On the inside they are strands of hope for getting out.  You want the opportunity, but you just can’t get it.  

There’s another benefit to being the cell leader.  You get to leave the “storeroom” twice a day to give a report to the officers.  This is an incredible privilege because the vast majority of prisoners only come in once and go out once, not matter how many years they’re inside.    

When the old cell leader left, the officers felt I my standing with the other prisoners was pretty good so they made me the new cell leader.  The only reason I agreed was to get some air. You can only see three or four meters in front of you in the storeroom.  Your eyes end up going half blind.

I was able to get out, but I was also able to overhear news from the outside.  Suspects are separated from the world.  I would go back and tell everyone what I heard.  Everyone was really jealous.  

The cell leader also holds the power to divvy up whatever resources are available.  Like when you sleep, there’s a world of difference between the bed and the Ritz.  We split up into three shifts at night: early, middle and late.  The worst is the middle shift because it’s in the middle of the night.  The cell leader decides who does this however he wants.  The food is really bad.  You get one dish and soup. Green vegetables are boiled yellow, but whether or not you get any food is also up to the cell leader.

He can also decide whether or not you can send a postcard to your family. The officers give them to the cell leader.  If he makes even the slightest indication about one, that postcard has no chance of getting sent.  People on the outside laugh at these crumbs of power, but to suspects they’re really important. 

The relationship between the cell leader and correctional officers is really tricky.  They use the cell leader to manage the prisoners, so they have to give him some privileges.  For example, if the officers demand something from the prisoners or the prisoners want to contact their families, the cell leader is a go between for everything.  It’s illegal for the cell leader to cooperate like this with the officers.  I was there for three years and there was an awful lot of police who came in [and explained this].  

At the end, we were able to eat officer’s food.  This is one of the best things the officers did for us.  Every month we gave 800-1000 RMB and for lunch and dinner we could eat those boxed lunches you get for 5 RMB.  Only one third of the prisoners could eat it though. The others watched us helplessly as we ate.  They divided up whatever was left over.

It’s not that every cell leader is a tyrant.  They need to maintain order and they need a sense of justice and sympathy.  Some cell leaders take on the outside and the take on the inside too.  They’re quick to dominate and take advantage.  If the police aren’t careful, he can turn into a tyrant.  But if there’s enough of an outcry, they’ll switch you because they’re afraid something might happen.

Why do these mysterious deaths happen?

I was the cell leader for only one year.  I didn’t want to do it anymore.  It’s impossible to avoid fights when twenty-odd people live in the same room and do everything together.  If the cell leader can’t deter this from happening, then he can’t control the prisoners.  Oftentimes the officers will send a couple of bruisers from another cell to help out.  When something happens you’re faced with the choice to use violence or not.  You’re in a really difficult position.

In our cell there was a guy we called Little Shandong.  He was about 28 years old and 1.82 m tall [6 feet].  He used to be a security guard and he was really strong.  He had his spleen ruptured by another guy in one of the big cells.  After he had it removed, he lost a lot of weight and walked around bowed over all the time. He didn’t eat much after that.  He showed us the scar.  It was about 15 centimeters [10 inches] long.  If they put him in the big cell again he’d  be beaten to death.  This doesn’t happen often in the cadres’ cells because the severity of conflicts just isn’t as high. That’s why he was transferred to our cell. The big cells are terrible.  There are fights, rapes, robberies.  You name it, it’s there.

During the day officers what a security screen.  If something unusual happens, they come right away.  At night it’s the prisoners who watch the prisoners.  If something happens, like a person is getting beat to death or if someone gets really sick, the cell leader makes everyone beat the beds to make noise and get the officer to come and deal with it.  They get called in everyday.  You hear stuff happen in other cells pretty often.

These mysterious deaths are pretty common.  Every so often the detention center, the doctor comes and gives out vitamins.  We ask him what’s going on and he says that another person died and that even after the autopsy they still don’t know why.  He says maybe it was poor nutrition, so they want to supplement everyone’s diets, just in case.  

You can go for two or three years in a detention center without eating one green vegetable.  There are a lot of department and bureau level figures in there.  Everyone always talked about mixed spinach.  It made our mouths water. Your hair goes white after half a year in there.  One reason is because you’re worried about your case.  The other is the bad nutrition. 

Deaths in detention centers are the result of many factors working together.  The living conditions are deplorable.  Except for deaths purely from violence, there are two other main reasons: prisoners are under extreme mental stress and the nutrition they get is extremely poor.  The most fragile life is the suspect who has just come in.  He goes through intense interrogations.  His mind and body are fatigued.  He doesn’t eat or drink.  He’s under a lot of mental stress.  On the outside you could punch him 20 times and he wouldn’t go down.  Now you just poke him with a finger and he’s dead.   I was a soldier, so I’m in pretty good shape. I’ve been through really tough training, where you sweat for seven straight days and are extremely weak. If you can’t get used to it, you can’t adjust, then you just leave.

There’s no fresh air in there.  Each person’s skin is white as snow because we don’t get any sunlight.  There’s one building that lets in light through a window on winter mornings.  It lasts for about ten minutes.  We all took turns sunning ourselves.  This is what I remember most. 

The officers couldn’t come into the cells unless they were searching for contraband.  When that happened there were armed police who came into the cell with sub-machine guns.  Everyone squatted in the corner with their heads down.  If anyone looked up they got knocked with a rubber stick.  It was really humiliating.  We weren’t criminals.  We were suspects.  

A world apart

No one can find out about this stuff on the outside.  According to the rules, suspects are not allowed family visits.  They can only see their lawyers.  I finally saw mine after three months.  After I got out I finally learned my lawyer applied a bunch of times before he was allowed to see me.  I saw him maybe twice a year and I was overjoyed each time.  We met for about half an hour and we couldn’t talk about anything except for the case.  The police were right there and they’d interrupt you if you talked about something different.  So what would be the point in trying to talk to a lawyer about these things?  

We were most jealous of a Chinese with foreign citizenship. He was suspected of fraud.  Every month someone from his country’s consulate in Guangzhou flew out to see him.  We all felt that they looked at human being as most important.  Sitting in that detention center for three years my mind often went back to the details about the prison guard in Water Margin. Except for the clothes they wear, after a thousand years not much has changed.

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