MANSFIELD: The Goon Squad

The devastating report on conditions in the Cuyahoga County Jail that was just issued by the U.S. Marshal depicts the facility as a pure hellhole, which the more mean-spirited citizens among us loudly applaud. “Fuck ’em and feed ’em beans” will be the response of those who are too stupid to realize that how prisoners are treated is a harbinger of where a society is headed, and how we will one day treat each other. But then, they have never read Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Indeed, the last book most of these kinds of idiots read is “See Spot Run.”

While the report identified a laundry list of problems in the lockup (some of which no doubt contributed to the deaths of seven prisoners between June 10 and October 1), the conditions at the jail are not determined by the administrators as they should be, but by the “Special Response Team,” a unit of jackbooted, black-clad thugs that act as enforcers. They view their sworn duty as one of kicking ass and take names. These punk’s dicks get hard every time they put on their riot gear and take up their batons.

Certainly, there is a need for a team of guards to quell dangerous situations in any jail, but in the Cuyahoga County facility, these cowardly cocksuckers are looking for the slightest opportunity to saddle up and go bust some heads. Like prisoners oftentimes say, “It ain’t no fun when the rabbit got the gun.”

It’s like training a pit bull to be aggressive; they think you have to let it attack someone every now and then just to keep in practice. The problem in this jail is that they’ve taken the joke past Broadway. Other than a fistfight and someone flooding their cell, there are very few incidents of real violence, other than the occasional extraction of someone from a cell. But these goons have literally turned into modern-day Nazi prison camp guards.

Know this: Anytime unchecked power is given to one human being over another human being, the results are going to be catastrophically dangerous if someone is not watching very closely. I know whereof I speak since I served a county lid (a sentence of nine months and 21 days) in the worse jail in the world before it was reformed: Los Angeles County. Back in the ’80s, it was a real snake pit before a federal lawsuit forced the administrators to clean up their act. Hint, hint.

For prisoners to be treated humanely in the county jail, the new incoming jail administration is going to have to have the courage to call off the dogs — on at least put a muzzle on them, and it won’t be easy since now these thugs think they are running shit in the joint.

From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.

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