Picture a row of cages with iron bars floor to ceiling and a broad passageway running along one side. Each cage contains thirty women, all totally naked.
It did have a formal name but everyone called it The Hole. All it showed to the outside world was a blank concrete wall topped by razor wire with a guard tower beside the steel gates. Above the wall one could glimpse a stark building rather like a multi storey car park with ranks of barred windows. Its purpose was, just by existing, to terrorize the populace into submission.
Picture a row of cages with iron bars floor to ceiling and a broad passageway running along one side. Each cage contains thirty women, all totally naked. Uniforms cost money and can be used to hide contraband. Each woman sits or reclines on a blue, plastic mattress. They all wear a collar around their neck like a bicycle lock; it is a chain encased in plastic attached to an oval metal plate stamped with a number.
There are no facilities for washing or for sanitary needs and some mattresses are stained with menstrual blood. Women and cells are washed thoroughly on alternate days when high pressure hoses blast the cages. At the back of each cage is a hole in the floor which serves as a toilet. Once each day a large trolley is pushed along the passageway heaped with plastic food containers which are issued, one at a time, through a horizontal gap in the bars. Every meal is a plastic bottle of water with a dish of some sort of meat stew and a piece of baguette.
These women do no work, they rarely leave their cage, but they do earn revenue for the state. Jane recalled the first time that it was her turn. Guards came into the passageway and women would be pointed out and ordered to go into the passageway to be handcuffed and led away.
About ten of them were led downstairs watched by guards who wielded long, black batons. They came to a white tiled area with showers along one side and plastic bottles of liquid soap on a small ledge. All the guards in The Hole were men but all these women had been here too long not to have become used to men seeing every part of their bodies.
When the guards decided that the showering was complete, an order was barked to turn off the water and coarse, cheap towels were handed out. After that, each woman was handed a dark green smock which could loosely be described as a dress. No footwear, no underwear.
Then a short march out to the bus with its blacked-out windows. The drive took them to an institution with a long dormitory; each small bed divided from its neighbors by a wooden screen. When the women had been assigned each to her own bedspace, the clients were allowed in.
This was a common brothel for “working” men and soldiers. There was no choice but to allow the client to do whatever he wished. None of the men had any “finesse” or gentleness; they had paid for a set time and were hungry to wring the most satisfaction from every minute. The feelings of the piece of meat they were using played no part. The operation was slick in that just enough women were brought in to cope with the demand so there was no down time. As soon as one man left, taking his sweat and his semen with him, the next would come in and it would begin again.
For hour after hour, Jane’s body was subjected to pain, abuse and degradation. When the “shift” was complete, the guards were there again and, handcuffed, the women were herded back onto the bus. All of them stank and most were weeping with semen still staining their bodies. Many had blood running down their legs. Back to The Hole, the green dresses stripped off and the women thrown back into their cages.
So how were wounds treated? What happened if there were pregnancies? All sickness was handled in the same way. The woman would be ordered or dragged out of her cage and never seen again.
Jane asked her fellow inmates what happened to the sick and she was told the stories which had filtered in through the grapevine. The documentation would read “Died in Prison” and the inmate would be shot or put to the garotte. The garotte had a long bench taking perhaps ten women at a time with restraints for each. The bench had a high, wooden back with a metal collar which would be locked in place and then tightened by turning a screw at the back. The keynote of The Hole was efficiency – nothing spent on doctors or medicine.
The hosing of the cages was brutal but it did break the monotony. Every two days a guard would come into the passageway and unroll the large hose from its spool on the wall. He would aim it into each cage in turn. The pressure of the water was like being punched when it hit the stomach, breasts, face or groin but women would thrust out their genitals and part their buttocks just to be clean. Of course, the plastic mattresses were soaked but, again, it was a relief to be relatively clean and, in time, everything would be dried by the heat emanating from all those human bodies.
Sometimes fights would break out between women, caused by being held so close together. The cameras would see every detail but no guard saw fit to risk his safety by coming into the cage. The fight would be allowed to run its course and then the injured, or sometimes the corpse, would be dragged away. In a vicious fight, a woman could get behind her opponent and pull hard on her collar until she was throttled to her death.
Jane had far too much time to reflect on how she had come to be here. It had begun in anger after her editor spiked a story about corruption because the lawyers said that they could not “stand the story up”. Jane had felt a need to show what she could do and she had heard of the worst women’s prison in the world so she came here to make enquiries but she never got as far as even one interview with a source.
Jane walked from the aircraft into the airport building and two uniformed men had simply fallen in each side of her and grabbed her by the arms lifting her feet from the floor. She dropped her bag which was collected by a third guard and she was carried out of the building and thrown bodily into the back of a black, windowless police van. She was never to see daylight again as the van took her into the reception area of The Hole and her clothing was torn from her body before she was photographed and fingerprinted before being locked into her collar and then dragged to her cage. She had never got as far as Customs at the airport so there was no record that she had ever entered the country. The only way to fly into this nation was to use their state airline who would ensure that her name never appeared on the passenger list.
In such a regime as this the human spirit comes to accept that resistance is futile so the guards rarely had any dissent to deal with but just occasionally one woman will decide that she will take it no more. Jane recalled an incident when the guards had come to collect women for the bus and a girl who had not been called made a rush for the open door.
The nearest guard swung his baton at her head stopping her in her flight and then, under two more hard blows to the head, she went down and was dragged away not to be seen again.
So, in this climate where the women were kept totally naked and helpless and the guards held the power of life and death, did abuses of power ever happen? What do you think?
It first involved Jane one day just after the hose down. The guard had gone away and the women were wringing out their hair and holding their mattresses up for the water to drain off when two guards appeared at the bars. They stood there for a while watching the show and then one of them opened the cage and came in just far enough to grab Jane by the arm. He dragged her out into the passageway and she was held firm by the other man while the first guard made another ***********ion. The two women were marched through two grilles and into a small room which was obviously used for guards to rest during breaks. There was an orange carpet on the floor, a small kitchen area and, around the walls, low armless chairs covered in orange plastic.
Jane’s guard sat down on one of the chairs while keeping one hand entwined in Jane’s hair. He used his free hand to pull out his cock and then pulled her downwards while yelling the obvious order at her. It would be nice to say that Jane resisted but she opened her mouth and did as she was bidden. Without being asked, she used her hands around the base of the shaft while her mouth worked up and down the hardening organ. His hand, held tightly and painfully in her hair, forced her up and down and, on the down stroke, he pulled her face right into his groin so that his hardness pressed the back of her throat making her choke.
There were sounds of the other guard using his victim but Jane was barely aware of this. While one of the guard’s hands was holding her hair, the other hand repeatedly came down on her buttocks with all its force causing her to try to scream although screaming and choking at the same time just leads to a terror of losing the fight to draw breathe.
When the man was bored, he dragged her head upwards and released her hair while he dropped his trousers and underwear as Jane lay on her side across two chairs trying to recover her breath. He pushed her flat on her back over the chairs and then came down upon her. His hand was again in her hair, holding her head still while his tongue invaded her mouth and his member found its target and rammed in without ceremony. His body was bouncing up and down as he fucked her and came into her depths. Some semen escaped and covered her pubic area and lower belly. When he had climaxed, he threw her so hard that she flew across the room and landed on her back on the carpet.
The air filled with laughter as the men changed partners. It would sound good if I could tell you that, such was the sisterly bond, that Jane was constantly aware of what was being done to the other woman but the truth is that she simply did not have spare headspace for that.
The second guard seemed to get his kicks from violence and he picked Jane up by her hair and began slapping alternate sides of her face so that her ears rang and her vision began to blur. Next, he threw her face down over the chair on the end of a row so that her head was almost on the floor and her behind was in the air. He lashed her with his leather belt causing agony with each stroke and tears to flow down her face onto the floor.
Just when Jane felt she must lose consciousness, she found herself spun onto her back so that she was laid across three chairs and the man came down onto her for his share of sex with her. This man was much more of a brute than his colleague. The other man had simply used Jane as a tool to achieve his orgasm but this guard had clearly set out to use his masculinity as a weapon. He spat in her eyes and into her mouth as he fucked her and he moved in such a way that his sex making stretched her vagina wider than nature intended. His hands seemed to be everywhere, squeezing her breasts, twisting her ears, slapping her face, yanking her legs ever wider apart.
When the brute lifted off his victim, he squirted his seed all over her face and body. But he was not done yet. She was spun face down, again with her head low so that it was actually in contact with the floor and he rammed into her narrower passage clearly taking delight in her cries of pain.
Still the ordeal did not end for the two rapists changed places again and the assaults went on. It only ended when both victims were on their backs on the floor barely conscious.
Jane expected to be thrown back into her cage – she hoped that happened for the alternative was not to be imagined. But the two guards and their victims came to a long, narrow room where Jane knew that lives met their endings. There was the bench with its leather attachments and its obscene metal collars. Some other guards had appeared now, presumably drawn by the impending spectacle. Both women struggled for their lives but batons were brought down without mercy and they were forced down onto the benches with ankles and arms firmly strapped down. Broad straps were buckled around abdomens and foreheads so that they were immobile for the cold metal to be hinged into place around their necks and the locks snapped shut.
The men lined up in front of them to stare at their distress and pleading eyes. There was some talk as if they were deciding who should do the deed and then two men went out of sight behind the contraption. Jane felt her collar begin to constrict and panic rose up to a new level. Her breathing was rapid and her heart was pounding fit to escape her breast. Neither of these two matters were helpful while her airway was constricted. Some of the audience cheered and jeered and the collar tightened another notch. Jane began to have tunnel vision as blackness crept in from around her field of vision. Every breath was a battle but the self-preservation instinct made her keep fighting. She was aware that she was soaked in sweat and had moved from panting to a sort of animal grunt. Every breath made a noise and caused her whole body to struggle against its bonds. How much longer could this last? While her body fought to grab any scrap of oxygen which it could, her mind longed for it to be over.
The audience seemed a long way off now as if they were on a conveyor being pulled off into the distance. And then, the pressure at her neck went away. There must have been a switch or lever which disengaged the screw and Jane found that she had a complete airway. She began to suck in as much precious oxygen as she could to the cheers of her tormentors. Her throat was extremely sore and all the muscles in her chest ached abominably but she was alive and could breathe.
It was as if she was merely a spectator as she observed the naked woman being taken off the bench and supported while she was taken back to her cage and thrown in to land on top of two others who were on their mattresses.
She was passed hand to hand until she was on a vacant mattress where she lay staring at the ceiling as another night in The Hole began.