They put me in solitary for drugs I didn’t have Many prisons use faulty

“Inside Out” by Keri Blakinger is a partnership between NBC News and The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the U. S. criminal justice system. The column draws on Blakinger’s unique perspective as an investigative journalist and formerly incarcerated person. It was just after dinner on a warm summer night in 2011 when the guards stormed our cells. They pulled out one woman — a 20-something who’d been getting pills smuggled in — then came back shouting. They tore through everything we owned, tossing our photos and letters from home all over the floor, like they meant nothing. I’d been in the Tompkins County Jail on a drug charge for seven months by then, so I’d seen searches before, but this felt different. The guards crammed us all into a grimy holding cell with one toilet, then came back a few hours later for strip searches. One at a time, we squatted and coughed and lifted our breasts. Just when we thought it was over, one of them returned. He said they’d found powder in my cell, and it tested positive for opiates. I was confused — and terrified. An angry sergeant showed up to interrogate me, hollering red-faced accusations: “You brought drugs into my jail!”I told him he was wrong, begged him to drug test me. But he kept shouting, threatening solitary confinement and new charges. When he finally stopped, the guards moved a few of us into a separate cellblock, where they stormed in for shakedowns several times a day, confiscating more books and clothes and food every time. There were middle-of-the-night interrogations, and so many strip searches we stopped wearing underwear. After someone claimed I was hiding drugs in my hair, they decided it was too messy to search and cut it all off. Then, they shipped us to another jail and put us in solitary. A few days later, with no further explanation, they started shipping us back and jail life returned to normal. For a long time afterward, I wondered what had really happened: How did that test of the powder supposedly found in my cell come back positive? It couldn’t have been a lab test, because that would have taken longer — so what type of test was it? Or did the guards make it all up? I had no good theories until a few years later, when reporters began questioning the reliability of low-cost field tests, the roadside kits police officers use when they think they’ve found drugs in someone’s car. The kits seem simple — mix a chemical or two with the suspicious substance and see what color it turns. But the tests are imprecise and prone to user error, so they can flag everything from doughnut glaze to motor oil as illegal substances. They’ve generated so many wrongful convictions that some courts refuse to allow them as evidence. Even so, many prison systems still rely on them to punish people for drugs they don’t have.


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Article Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/prison-drug-tests-solitary-rcna2937


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