Ten soldiers and Nixon’s comin’,
We’re finally on our own,
This summer I hear the drummin’,
Four dead in Ohio.
-Neil Young, “Ohio”

During a Vietnam protest at Kent State, Ohio, National Guardsmen gunned down four protesting students. The events gripped the nation’s attention. The National Guard killed four people with bullets. This past month at Mansfield Correctional, Warden Terry Tibbals matched the National Guard’s death count, killing four prisoners with incompetence rather than bullets.

Four dead in Ohio no longer hits the headlines. I do not yet know their names. What is available in terms of information is how the state classifies their deaths: two dead from what the state calls “natural causes,” and two dead from what the state calls “homicide.” Let’s talk about the homicides first.

In at least one instance of the homicide deaths, the victim was locked in a cell with the prisoner who stabbed and killed him. Of course the prisoner who did the stabbing will be charged with a crime and all the blame will be leveled at him. This is quite self-serving to prison authorities, as they get to pretend that the 100% overcrowding at MANCI that requires double-bunking a cell designed for single occupancy had nothing at all to do with this death.

Chances are, prison officials will try to also pretend the stabbing happened out of the blue, with no warning—which almost never happens. In my twenty-one years of experience, when two prisoners who share a cell have a conflict, they almost always attempt to resolve it with unit staff. Even the most irrational prisoner would prefer to have a cell move in order to end up in a better living arrangement rather than kill someone and maybe end up on death row or dying in prison.

Likely, there were warnings. Likely, the guy who got stabbed to death felt the living situation was awkward before he felt the shank sink into his flesh. Likely, he said something to unit staff.

So why was nothing done? Well, first, with budget cuts, most unit staff have been given additional duties. MANCI has half the case workers that it used to have and anyone with experience has been pushed into retirement. One unit manager is brand new, another one came to the position after running the prison’s arts and crafts program. Some of the cause managers are former guards filling in because so much staff is leaving MANCI. The end result, you end up with a prison run by people who are clueless, overwhelmed, and apathetic.

Just like the warden.

Certainly, the two homicides at MANCI this past month were homicides, but there was a whole network of prison administrators and policy-makers whose prints are now on those shanks, not least of which are the hapless Warden Tibbals and his principle cover-up artist, investigator Andrea Hunsinger, who will deflect all blame away from her co-workers and bosses. That is, after all, her job. The truth is irrelevant. Justifying the status quo overrides everything else.

Sometimes you gotta crack eggs to make an omelet.

While the cause of death listed for those two prisoners will be “homicide,” they were murdered by apathy and incompetence.

Now, the two prisoners who died of what the state calls “natural causes.” To fully understand the irony of what the state calls “natural,” you need some context.

On September 19th, when MANCI investigator Hunsinger had me locked up for the 12 Monkey frame-up, I wasn’t taken to segregation. Instead, I was taken to a row of cells behind the medical clinic. Two of those cells are called “suicide cells,” not because they prevent suicide, but because the conditions drive you to it. The conditions are the same general recipe set forth in the C.I.A.’s Kubark Manual, the desk reference for what it calls “the simple torture situation.” When I was placed in the “suicide cell,” it was for the purpose of psychologically and emotionally breaking me. There was no bed, no head, no shower or recreation facilities; my food was half rations in a styrofoam tray that cannot hold the standard serving sizes; I had not toothbrush; I had no pens nor pencils, making it impossible for me to communicate my intolerable situation to the outside world. I was ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard. Whatever would happen to me in that area is my word against the staff’s. No witnesses. And if I turned up dead, it’s the staff’s word against no one.

That’s why that row of cells, ostensibly for “suicide prevention,” is called “torture cells” by both prisoners and staff. I first reported the Ohio Department of Retribution and Corruption’s use of torture cells in 2002 in a letter I sent to then-sentator Robert F. Hagan of the Corrections Institution Inspection Committee. I reported the use of torture cell 182 in segregation at Richland Corruptional.

Here at MANCI, those cells are no longer torture cells. They are death cells.

Death cells.

In the last month, two prisoners were removed from their population cells where someone else would call for help in the event of a medical emergency, and for their own welfare they were relocated to torture cell row and locked into a concrete tomb they would never exit alive. I don’t know if they died in the very same torture cell I occupied, pacing the floor at all hours to stay warm, sleep deprivation, freezing cold, hunger, despair, isolation, a complete sense of abandonment. I don’t know if they died in that cell and neither do you. Both men were allegedly “found” dead after quite some time, and there is no doubt they were “found” in cells with beds and available pencils and certainly the temperature in the cells was quite cozy by the time anyone other than MANCI staff arrived to investigate.

Those are the decidedly “unnatural” conditions that led to the “natural causes” deaths of two human beings.

I might still be alive only because I have friends who learned of my conditions and raised enough of a fuss to make MANCI murderers stop. The two men who died in those death cells may be dead only because they had no one.

Surviving in the custody of these murderer terrorists is just dumb luck. In a sane world, Tibbals and Hunsinger would be packing the contents of their desks into cardboard boxes and face the unemployment line that thousands of honest Ohioans have to face every day. They wouldn’t be rewarded with 501K’s for causing a record death-toll, for lying and covering-up their incompetence, for doing a worse job managing a prison that the average person you could pick at random out of a phone book.

That’s quite ignominious, holding the death-toll record for a single month. Warden Tibbals has again made his tenor here memorable.

Four dead in Ohio…
Four dead at MANCI…
So far.