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Before and After: Prison Continues Domestic AbuseDebi Zuver, Central California Women's FacilityII had just gone through so much A man, my abuser, threatened to kill me and I had defended myself. I was semi-conscious when the cops pulled me out of the closet I was in and the next thing I knew was that I was being slammed on the floor and then stuck on a gurney. All this happened so fast I couldn't comprehend what was going on. Once I got to jail, I was stripped by two women officers and then was left naked on the floor of the cell while a man from "mental health" services kept looking in to see if I had tried to kill myself. Every 15 minutes they would come by to ask various weird questions which were meant to establish my mental ability. Finally I was taken to the shower to clean up because I wouldn't bathe for four days since the shower was in stalls placed in the center of a unisex mental health module. It was very degrading - I no longer had any privacy whatsoever! Then I was placed in an observation cell which was all windows with the light on all the time. I felt like a bug under a microscope. Because the tank was in the mental health module, there was constant yelling and screaming and the noise kept echoing making it even louder than it already was. And the cops would stand outside the women's cells, women who already had mental health problems, and whisper horrible things to them, trying to make them think that these things were the voices in their heads. When I was finally brought out to go to court, I was in waist chains with both hands cuffed at my waist. This was the beginning of my understanding how the domestic violence I had experienced would be continued again and again by the prison system. Last updated February 14, 2005 06:56 PM |
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