From County Jails to Guantánamo Bay – Scalawag

“That’s my brother,” said D, a student enrolled in the Stanford courses held at the San Francisco county jail.

He pointed to a new student in the room, M. Terms of endearment, like “brother,” are commonplace among the students inside, so his comment didn’t stand out. When no one responded, D doubled down, saying, “No, like, my actual brother.” 

He pulled up his orange sleeve and revealed M’s full name alongside a few others—siblings he had mentioned before—all tattooed inside a teddy bear outline on his bicep. 

D is five years older than M, though the two were arrested just six months apart a decade ago. Because of subcontracting laws in California, state prisons are allowed to rent beds from local jails, meaning that those convicted and given long sentences often live out those sentences in county jails instead of prisons. In California, jails lack the “amenities” of prison, with limited guarantees of mobility, visitation, and entertainment and no access to outside rec courtyards. D was convicted and placed at the county jail 10 years ago, but M had only recently arrived. The two brothers were held in separate pods, but reunited during our class periods, albeit for brief interludes. 

Three thousand miles away, in the high-security detention center of Guantánamo Bay, sits Walid bin Attash, known to his lawyers and loved ones as Khallad. Khallad is one of the five detainees—also called “the brothers” by those who support them—undergoing the twelfth year of pre-trial hearings for his alleged role in the 9/11 attacks. In the intervening 18 years during which Khallad has been held and subjected to well-documented torture, someone he knows sat just beyond his reach: in the building adjacent to Khallad is his younger brother, Hassan bin Attash, who is the youngest person detained at Guantánamo. Hassan is held without cause, under what is known as administrative detention. He spent the last 20 years subjected to the harsh yet concealed system of punishment that rules Guantánamo, despite never being accused of a crime. 

Correctional facilities in America are as common as Burger Kings and just as populated as Dallas, Texas. Guantánamo, on the other hand, is a once-in-a-lifetime rarity. Though it held almost 800 individuals at its height, today, the detention facility holds just 30. There are important and unignorable differences between the two systems, and yet, similarities abound across America’s diverse carceral settings. The two systems’ similarities reveal that ending carceral realities in the states has to involve ending them elsewhere, especially those places where the US props them up. But ending the facilities might entail knowing them, and knowing them is made difficult by the confounding and obstacle-ridden journey demanded of those who want access. I have entered US detention centers as both a writer and educator and witnessed how the locks on prison doors have two functions: to keep some inside, and the rest of us out.

It is October 2023 when I remember to look at the website calling for journalists to apply to cover the forthcoming hearings at Guantánamo Bay. I remember to check that night because I have spent the last two hours scrolling on Instagram, reeling alongside my feed in shock and horror as the arms of America’s military and carceral industries grip their catastrophic fist around the population of Palestine. I navigate around the government website, looking for the 9/11 trials set to take place the first week of March, nearly six months away. The announcement and call for applications was posted 24 hours ago. There are 24 hours left to respond. 

Because I was born too close to it happening, I don’t remember anything about 9/11. But I do remember its repressive fallout: legislation like the Patriot Act created lasting systems of surveillance that still disproportionately target the Black, brown, and Muslim men they originated to police. Islamophobia skyrocketed, and hate crimes committed by both individuals and the state became a norm, since being Muslim grew synonymous with posing a “threat.” Whole cultures were reduced to danger, a rhetoric that justified American violence against Muslim communities abroad. In the days, weeks, and years after the attacks, adults pinned American flags to their shirts to broadcast their patriotism and their paranoia, a paranoia that manufactured the consent needed for the US to carry out the War on Terror. Decades of war against the people of Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq help to explain America’s continued apathy in stopping the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Guantánamo’s creation is another one of the nation’s post-9/11 legacies. But its continued existence is shocking to me because while my entire conscious life has unfolded in the aftermath of 9/11, boys who were captured by the CIA two decades ago have spent all that time living and languishing on the imperial island.

I hurriedly fill out the application for journalists, typing my short and requisite answers into each field. I convey all my most private information to the Department of Defense in the janky boxes. I hit submit. The webpage goes blank. A warning message fills the now-empty screen with the words “no longer exists” bolded. I hit the back button, surrender to the re-typing, and try again. A second time, the page fails. I email the military contact listed on the announcement, hoping that a screenshot of my attempt will suffice. I can’t sleep that night as I wait to hear back. 

Of course, the website fails because it is not meant to be found, nor functional. The deadlines are too short to achieve, and the timeline, though made up, is enforced. Applying is simply the prologue to every remaining step of the process of getting to Guantánamo, each one posing inordinate difficulty, obscured from the public eye, and subject to the whims of whoever it is that decides to be in charge from one moment to the next. 

Months later, after demonstrating sufficient competence for the numerous officers screening my past, I reach Washington D.C., which houses Joint Base Andrews, the military base from which all civilians traveling to the penal colony must depart. Shortly after my arrival, I receive a text from the military officer assigned to surveil me on my journey south. In the groupchat he’s constructed with me and the three other journalists, he sends the court schedule for the forthcoming week of hearings. On it, I see that some sessions are closed to the media because of “national security concerns.” He tells us that because of closed sessions, we are unlikely to learn much from the trip. So he encourages me and the others to reconsider our journeys. Two of the four in our text thread drop out. 

The closer I get to entering Guantánamo, the further in reach it feels. Those in power assure me, at every instance, that I can back out. 

For three long days, I wake up every morning at 4:30 a.m. and travel to the Visitor’s Center at Joint Base Andrews—a graveyard of American cargo planes and duplicates of Air Force 1—to board my flight to the island. And each morning, I am turned away. The plane has mechanical issues, the plane will not leave. One day, we board and waste away on the tarmac for nearly five hours with no updates.

Those in charge of letting me in can push me out. Leaving is always made easier than staying.

Two years earlier, I logged onto a noisy Microsoft Teams meeting with officials from San Francisco county, who painstakingly read off each individual’s name on a list of nearly eighty in attendance. Microphones were unmuted as NGO practitioners, lawyers, and educators like myself showed our faces to the officers managing the online orientation required for those who wanted to enter the local jails. Despite a seven-year-long relationship with Stanford University and our organization, each member had to sit through online and in-person sessions in which dozens of pages of rules were read aloud. In the process, tiny, and sometimes incongruent, warnings made a home for themselves in my memory. Don’t wear orange, red, blue, or green. Don’t dress in monochrome. Don’t bring your keys or phone. Don’t give your last name. Don’t be too personal nor too political and don’t wear a Tupac t-shirt.

“You guys really wanna do this, huh?” the lieutenant asks me and the other educators equipped with our carefully-crafted syllabi as we leave the first session of orientation. Nods from us give way to head shakes from him.

To get inside requires a number of stops and security checks. When the first guard scans my ID at the gated entrance, he asks, “Have you been here before?” When I answer affirmatively alongside the others in my car, he retorts, “Why would you come back? Didn’t we scare you off?”

Inside, after passing through the metal detector, an officer lines us up against the silly putty-colored walls and barks, “These men are murderers, rapists. They are violent criminals who will hurt you. They are here to exploit you, harm you, sexualize you, violate you. This red button will be your savior,” he rants, pointing at the emergency button in the corner of the pod. We are instructed to press it when a fight breaks out or we are threatened. Of course, there is no real threat and no harm ever comes to light in the classroom. At least, no harm comes from the students. 

Instead, the harms we experience come exclusively from the carceral policies and their enforcers. Each week, the rules are applied differently and educators who once had no trouble entering are stopped and turned away for any number of reasons. One week, a mathematics PhD student is turned back because her crewneck sweater rides up too high on her back when she stands, and the guards hypersexualize and punish her. Another week, an educator from the Sociology department is rejected because she is wearing a yellow blouse, and yellow is really close to orange, which means she might be mistaken for one of the men in the class. 

Worse than the one-off denials of entry are the days when whole carloads of educators commute to the jail only to be turned around for issues of short-staffing, sudden lockdowns, or”I swear someone told you X was happening today.” Like a Joint Base Andrews plane that won’t take off to head to Guantánamo, sometimes, you have to turn the car around. 

Inside, I tote a clear bag that passes the metal detector. I wear closed-toe shoes with no laces, and a badge clipped front and center screaming that I am a JOURNALIST or a VISITOR or a VOLUNTEER. But for those who have no such protective badges, the harm is infinitely worse.

Nobody knows the arbitrary nature of the carceral systems’ rules better than folks inside. In San Francisco, students remark about the randomness of its violence. Yesterday you could use the microwave, today you cannot. Yesterday you could have socks that reach your calves, today they have to be crew cut. In a site where compliance can facilitate one’s bodily safety, ever-changing rules are psychologically disorienting and damaging. In Guantánamo, randomness is also the name of the game. 

“The Standard Operating Procedures? You mean Shit On Paper,” said Mansoor Adayfi, one of the men wrongly accused and formerly detained at Guantánamo laughs at me when I ask him about the Standard Operating Procedures, or SOPs, inside the facility on the island. Typically, SOPs detail how detained folks are to move around the facility and the steps guards should follow in cases of emergency. “When the new guards arrive, nobody’s watching them. No one will hold them accountable,” he explained.

Adayfi was captured by the CIA at 18 years old and forced to reach adulthood in American detention. He confirms that Guantánamo is like America’s battle lab: a playground for torture and violence where guards and interrogators learn how to abuse.

“When new guards come, they can make your life hell,” he said. “The little peace you have, they want to take it.”

Carceral rules—always subject to change by the whims of the overseers—are backed up with violence. In San Francisco, that means angry deputies rushing in from break rooms to escalate in other pods of the jail with stun guns, tasers, fists, and knees. It means a student is punished for asking for water at the “wrong time.” In Guantánamo, it means CIA agents “taking turns” to learn how to torture on the bodies of the innocent. It means a wrongly-detained man answering fully and honestly to officers who won’t take innocence for an answer. 

Guantánamo Bay and US county jails have one thing in common: their carceral logic. And what the similarities between these sites reveal is that power is amplified by its mutability. 

Ensuring the locks work both ways is a necessary strategy for the carceral state’s survival. Because eroding that border—making prison doors porous—makes the charade less believable and less tenable. It also reveals the death trap inside and its scale of horror.

Like other targets of abolition, Guantánamo has been the object of numerous activist campaigns aimed at shutting it down. The naval base itself is a wretched embodiment of American imperialism. While Cuba, the home of Assata Shakur and others who escaped persecution from the US government, is often seen as a sanctuary from American military violence, the southwest corner occupied by Guantánamo belies this legacy. The United States rents the land for Guantánamo from the Cuban government for a nominal monthly fee, but in protest, Cuban political leaders refuse to cash the Western power’s checks. Because the money is never withdrawn, the United States operates its death-dealing detention center for free. And on the island, America’s violence extends beyond the bodies of the detained. Former landing strips for military planes were converted to “Camp Justice” facilities, where civilians and defense lawyers stayed when traveling to the island. There, carcinogenic soil resulted in a cancer cluster and multiple deaths among site workers. In the early 90s, before the construction of the infamous detention centers utilized for the torture of victims from America’s War on Terror, Haitian refugees fleeing political violence, came ashore on makeshift boats after a harrowing journey across the sea. The Haitian families, including more than 32,000 adults and children, were detained in US Coast Guard-managed camps, where they were subjected to invasive physical searches, denied legal rights, and some, forcefully returned to Haiti. Others remained in detention on the island where an outbreak of HIV claimed numerous lives. The detention of Haitian migrants was the first time Guantánamo was used for imprisonment, a legacy bleakly referred to as “the world’s first and only HIV prison camp.” 

Abolish prisons and the county jails that rent out their beds for interminable incarcerations. County jails and their overseers can manufacture just as much, if not more, violence inside as state and national prisons, whose conditions are rightly raised to the public eye. But the everyday violence in county jails usually goes unwritten, unnoticed, and unrectified. With my limited access, I have witnessed the rush of guards body-slamming those who speak the wrong words aloud, the verbal torment wielded against those on monitored calls home, the confiscation of private letters and mail, and the denial of food, water, fresh air, and other life necessities as icing-on-top type punishments. County jails are also capable of tremendous harms linked to broader imperial violence, like San Francisco county jails where, earlier this year, officers conducted a training on warmaking tactics, like releasing chemical weapons—which injured dozens of nearby elementary schoolers. 

Breaking in, like breaking out, reunites community members who have been wrongly separated by prison walls and forces us to witness the obsolescence of detention. ▽