Hard time

It is the ultimate nightmare scenario. Late last year, one NOX reader was held in a Jordanian prison on an unfounded allegation of smuggling after his name mistakenly came up during the arrest of the real culprits. He was detained for two weeks while his innocence was ascertained in conditions – physical and psychological – he now describes as “pure hell”. Although he naturally wants to keep his identity secret, he decided to write about the experience of getting through an average day inside a Jordanian jail with murderers, rapists and petty criminals.
Having been arrested at 11am, he was deposited in a small holding cell in a police station in Amman, measuring
2 metres by 1.5 metres.

He shared it with nine others, among them a man who’d been shot, another with a broken knee and a drug addict going cold turkey. There were two bottles of urine in the corner because the guards didn’t allow them to use the bathroom. At 1am, after his fingerprints were taken, he was then transferred with ten other handcuffed prisoners to a facility on the outskirts of the capital – where they were forced to strip, undergo a full cavity search, and kept in another small cell. At 7am, they were driven to jail.

Your day begins with the voice of the guard shouting “wahdoo allah ya shabab… yella ’al ’adad”, at which you and roughly 25 inmates are let out of the cell and led into the freezing cold, just so other guards can count us all like sheep. This is at 4am and it’s pitch black. They’ll occasionally do the count twice, just to annoy you.

You keep trying to get back to sleep but at around 6am they turn on the TV on the Watan channel, which only plays nationalistic Jordanian songs, and turn the volume
up to full. They then keep it on all day long.

Any hope that you will be able to nap is finally removed at 9am with the appearance of the coffee boy shouting “Gahwa shabab… gahwa gahwa gahwa”. That’s the signal to look for any plastic cup lying around that’s still intact, which you then wash and use to go and buy a tasteless cup of 15-piaster coffee and a solitary Jordanian Marlboro cigarette, the best brand you can find in prison.

Then it’s time for the bathroom, which has a smell straight from the grave. You brush your teeth, courtesy of a cheap, gum-shredding toothbrush, and wash your face with soap that smells little different from the aroma in the room.

Your choice of activity for the next few hours is then limited to walking back and forth down the 50-metre hallway or sitting on the freezing floor next to the gates, where you hope – actually, no, you pray – that they call your name to attend a visit from a lawyer or a loved one with news. Sitting and waiting can be the worst; your mind is bombarded with different thoughts about what’s happening regarding your case, what’s the situation on the outside, what people are saying about you, when you will be released, what will happen to you after you’re free.

You try to find a friendly face in order to prevent the panic at your incarceration rising to stroke-inducing levels. But most conversations in here are about crime, the government and the reason they are in prison. The stories, many sickening, vary between rape, murder and petty theft.

They call you down to have lunch at around 1:30pm. You have to retrieve your Tupperwear containers, hoping no one has stolen them, and then stand in line waiting to see just what inedible concoction awaits you. Usually, lunch consists of slimy yellow rice, a stew made of some sort of boiled vegetable to which they occasionally add a small tin of corned beef, and a third dish, which might be anything from freakeh, moutabbal, half an orange, a boiled egg or an old, dry piece of bread. It’s food you would be ashamed to feed your dog – which, to the police, is perhaps what we are – but you eat it to keep the pangs of hunger at bay for a few hours. 

After lunch, you either keep walking around the hallway or lie down on the filthy, stain-ridden sponge mattress, waiting for time to pass by. You hope they will change the channel from WTV or JTV. Some try to pass out for a bit, but it’s hopeless amid the constant volume of people’s shouts. Neither the inmates nor the guards know how to talk in a normal tone of voice, with most of the dialogue restricted to a stream of cuss words shouted at each other from a few feet away.

The stress and anxiety builds again at around 4pm because you know it’s soon the time for the names of the people about to be released to be called out. You wait in the hope you will be next on the list. And you pray you will.

When the list of names has been finished, and your name isn’t on it, they lock you back in the cells. There’s precious little else to do now other than lay down on the bed and try to ignore the inane conversations around you, in which all the prisoners tell sick jokes, argue over card games or squabble about whose crime was worse.

The inmates make the playing cards themselves. They are fashioned out of cigarette cartons, which they draw on one by one for all of the various suits and numbers. They also have dice made from soap, which are done so well it looks they were made in a factory.

Back in the cell, with your last hope of release for the day now gone, you only pray that they don’t bring in new inmates. There’s only one way this hell could get worse and that’s by overcrowding – as disgusting as your bed is, you really don’t want to be sharing it with a murderer or a rapist. In the end, I settled for bribing one of the cell “bosses” 10JDs for protection, making him promise he would let me keep my bed for myself.

I spent much of the afternoon writing a journal of my experience inside this place on small scraps of paper. I wrote in English to keep them private from my ill-educated cellmates, but the minute they saw it, they merely pestered me with requests to learn the language.

Interestingly, there are no mirrors in the prison, not even any objects that might reflect anything. One day I heard a commotion in my cell and went to see what was going on. All of the inmates were pushing and fighting next to a wall; apparently, someone had managed to get hold of a small shard of mirror and they were all fighting over who got to look at themselves first.

At around 8.30pm, they put on a TV show called Wadi al-Thi’ab, a translated Turkish programme about the country’s mafia, where all the inmates sit around like little children, totally enraptured by the action. It’s impossible not to watch it as it’s the only peaceful hour during the entire day.

You are handed a calling card for 2JDs when you arrive, with which you are able to make a one-minute phone call once a week, maximum. There are no phone booths, though. You go into an office with six other guards listening to every single word you say, plus the inmates waiting behind you in line. Not very comforting...

Should you be lucky enough to receive a visitor – the allowed limit is two per week – they are made to wait for an hour or more before you are shown through to a room. You are separated by a pane of glass and have to talk through a phone through which you can’t hear anything. The visits are rarely allowed to last more than two minutes.

I usually ate my dinner with an inmate known as Abu Sandooga. Food is heated in a plastic bag that is placed in an old bucket filled with boiling water. The water is heated using two wires attached to a piece of metal broken from the bathroom window – meaning they literally electrocute the water until it boils. They sometimes heat water for showers in the same way, although how no one is killed is beyond me.

Dinner is something you have to buy from the “subermarket”. A guy comes and takes your order in the afternoon, and you usually have to make do with labaneh, cheese triangles, corned beef or tuna … but only when he comes back do you realise that they put the food in plastic bags so the cans can’t be used as weapons.

After dinner, with the night stretching out ahead of you, you just lay down in bed and think: “What the hell am I doing here? Why the hell didn’t I get out today? What on earth is going on with my case outside this hell?” You try to numb yourself to the surroundings, staring at the annoying shows they put on TV and trying not to completely lose it. You slide into a state of semi-consciousness until sleep arrives, although it never comes completely. Your mind can’t help but focus on your cellmates, and your prospects of being released the next day.

The hardest part of being in prison, though, isn’t any of the above. It’s the emotional and psychological aspect of being locked away, completely cut off from the outside world, with no idea what is going on – even to your own family. It’s impossible to think that you won’t be leaving at any minute. And as each day draws to a close with you still in this cell, on this mattress, knowing you’ll wake up to more of the same is the worst punishment of all.