formed by years of outside influences or mental health issues, officers are not trained to grapple with problems best treated by psychiatrists. and mental health units are often underfunded and understaffed. at kent county jail in grand rapids, michigan, lansing hodges spent most of his stay in segregation, locked in a one-man cell 23 hours per day. i ve been in administration segregation unit for four months now. there s not much to do, write, read, do a couple of push-ups and sleep most of the day. i sleep probably for like ten hours of the day, you know. these are my flip-flops on the floor. people throwing feces and stuff. i would rather not put my hands on the floor. hodges was serving time on convictions for domestic violence and for pushing his pregnant girlfriend to the ground and threatening her with a knife. within days of his arrival.
they sit in that cell the entire day and at 9:30 at night we return the mattress with their sheets and blankets. the other part of what they do is the loaf. which is this vegetarian ball they bake. they make the inmates eat it three meals a day, six days a week. it is a nutritional loaf. it is vegetables, mixed with flour and yeast and oil to hold it together, baked in a loaf about four inches wide and six inches long. kind of like chunky water. we ve seen segregation in various facilities. and you know, sometimes you ask officers what s the policy about? and they don t really know, they just sort of say, that s the way we do it. but at fairfax, it was different. everybody i asked had the same answer. that segregation should be harsh. should be really tough. because they don t want the inmates to repeat their behavior that got them there. we have found the way we treat disciplinary segregated inmates very effective in controlling inmate behavior.
he broke down. you know, he literally broke down. after experiencing that long in segregation. it s totally expected that he would break down like that. i used to ask myself, how could people be so cruel. it s over with now, though. four years after our shoot, trotter was still at wabash and in general population. imagine being buried alive in a windowless cell 23 1/2 hours a day. the sunlight hasn t touched your skin in years.
believed officers returned him before his time was up. you make my blood boil, you know what i m saying. i m telling you, don t play with me, i didn t do nothing wrong. okay, relax. this is how you make me, when y all abuse your authority, you understand? this will take me back to the old days. i finally got to see the other side of him. but up until then, he had been nothing but respectful and sort of the opposite of what we had heard. kelly opened up to us about the impact of spending nearly a year and a half in segregation. this is going on 17 months right here. done bother me. 23 hours a day spent in this here. sitting here, reading my bible. looking at myself in the mirror. breaking point. breaking point. i think segregation when it comes to eric kelly made him a little more reflective. i was in a cell and i was just meditating. i just started meditating hard about my life, you know what i m
just in 2014 alone, ten states made reforms to their solitary confinement policies. they restricted the use for juveniles and the mentally ill. and we re likely to see more reforms for other inmates as well. one of those reforms may very well have to do with placing limits on how long an inmate can remain in segregation. especially if they are already serving a significant prison sentence. christopher trotter would likely support such an idea. when we met him, he had been in a windowless segregation cell at the wabash valley correctional facility in indiana for nearly a decade. trotter wrote about the experience. imagine for the last nine years, being entombed in a windowless cell. held under sensory deprivation in isolation from human contact. and the only human touch you feel is the unwanted touch of prison guards.