The day arrived when a dozen of us were escorted to the front of the jail, then chained together and loaded into a van. Our next stop was the largest walled prison in the world, a dungeon in Jackson, Michigan. And from the second we arrived I realized something was off. Sure, the abuse I expected was there, but it seldom came from other inmates.

As soon as we arrived, I was stripped naked, told to shower, then photographed and given a number: 470236. The next step was processing, where I received clothing, bedding and a few basic hygiene supplies from inmates who appeared on the verge of dying from boredom. Then it was on to housing. The girth of the structure bore down on me as our group, now numbering hundreds, entered the prison wall, a brick edifice so massive that inmates are housed inside it. The single-man cells were barren and rusty. The prison was built a decade before Alcatraz began housing federal inmates, and it looked the part.

The thousands of men who were caged with me were mostly good guys stuck in a bad situation. But many of us had clearly seen the same prison films and TV shows, because we expected the violence that seldom showed up. We were convinced that the penitentiary was a dangerous place full of terrible monsters, but it turns out that the abuse most of us experienced came directly from the system.

No inmate ever forced me to get naked so they could photograph my body, or to bend over and spread my ass so they could look inside me with a flashlight. No inmates ever agreed to feed me, then left me hungry night after night. No inmates ever put their hands on me or took my possessions. No inmates ever uprooted me from one prison and moved me to another without notice. These power moves were monopolized by the system, not the people caught up in it.

Are there fights in prison? Sure. And right now most of us can probably understand why that happens better than we could a year ago. When you are locked in a room with someone for months or even years due to a pandemic, things can get awkward, annoying or even explosive. The system is designed to make sure we pressure cook until we blow unless we are extraordinarily prepared to keep our cool.

Read the full article about prison system abuse by Benjamin Boyce at The Marshall Project.