July 14, 2008
Jailhouse jaunt
By Carlos Miller
The most humiliating part of my arrest was not necessarily the way the five Miami police officers slammed me down on the hard sidewalk and bashed my forehead against the concrete. Nor was it the way they tightened the handcuffs on me until they cut off the circulation in my wrists. Nor was it the way one officer twisted my right wrist backwards until I yelled out in pain. Nor was it the way an officer threatened to taze me if I did not shut my mouth.
It wasn’t even the way the sergeant taunted me at the precinct by saying, “I don’t know what police department you’re used to dealing with, but this is Miami PD and we don’t put up with that kind of crap here.”
No, the most humiliating part of my arrest was when I was ordered into a small dark room at the Miami-Dade County Jail and ordered to drop my pants, bend over and spread my cheeks while a jail guard with a flashlight ensured that I was not smuggling any contraband into the jail.
That’s not to say they didn’t keep any contraband from coming into the jail because later that night, one of my cellmates was smoking crack out of a small pipe and even offered me some, which I declined. I hate to see what orifice he used to sneak that in.
But despite the humility of that moment when I stood there with my bare ass in the air, feeling the cold jailhouse draft chill my balls, it doesn’t compare to what one long-haired inmate went through when he had to defecate in a cell with about 20 other inmates.
We all tried to ignore him as he sat on the seatless urine-soaked toilet dropping his load, his facial expression no different than a defecating dog, but there was no way we could ignore the smell.
It was a nauseating, burning smell that permeated our nostrils, eyes, mouths and lungs, drifting through the bars and into the fingerprint processing room and prompting one burly guard to proclaim:
“Damn, boy, something crawled up your ass and died.”
