Sierra

It was two in the morning in March 2019 when three male officers jolted Sierra from her sleep to take her to segregation. She asked why and got no answer. As a nonviolent offender in the minimum security unit at Topeka Correctional Facility, she had never had much interaction with the “Special Operations Response Team”, or SORT, the officers tasked with handling security issues and using force. Until then she had only seen them in passing, dressed in all black, always carrying a certain air that the other corrections officers lacked in their lowly brown khakis.

A sense of uneasiness came over her. She was dressed in nothing but a nightgown. She needed to get dressed, she told them.

“Three men in my room,” she says, and they didn’t step out. “They didn’t even shut the door. I had to get behind the big locker and put my clothes on.”

Her roommate had recently been rolled, but intentionally, after she caused “a big scene” to get sent to the maximum side of the prison to join her girlfriend. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to try to “get rolled” to join one’s significant other at Topeka Correctional Facility, as many of these relationships provided psychological support for the women during their incarceration, or at least helped pass the time.

But Sierra had made no such effort. “I’m no threat to nobody,” she says, and “on the dorms, it was easy peasy,” compared to life in the maximum or medium units, which are housed on a separate compound of the facility. Sierra liked it in minimum security; it was easier to stay busy with programs and jobs, so she avoided disciplinary reports and otherwise behaved to keep herself there. This was her third time in prison, and she had found it at least tolerable so far. In 2014, she did just “a quick dip,” just under two months while pregnant with her son. In 2016, she stayed a little over a year, letting the time pass by without much incident. When she went back in 2018, this third time around she had a whole 18 months to do. She fully intended to stay out of trouble for this longer haul, away from the harder time of “I-MAX” that she had been able to avoid so far.

So again, as she was being handcuffed and shackled, as they threaded a long chain from her hands to her feet, she asked the officers why she was being rolled. This was a very new, very intense experience for her - and she began to realize what going to seg could mean for her time from here on.

“I started cussing. I said, ‘you’d better tell me what’s going on.’”

She could not have expected what happened next. Officer J-------- told her to shut up, and without giving her the chance to, grabbed her by her neck and dragged her out of the room, cuffed and shackled.

“Once he started to choke me, I was screaming,” she says, “and he took me from a standing position and slammed me down on my back.”

It’s not lost on Sierra that she was a black woman subjected to excessive force by a white man in a law enforcement uniform, one who already had something of a reputation for causing harm. “They said he’d been beating up girls before, but it hadn’t ever happened on the [minimum security] compound.”

The altercation had woken up the rest of the dorm. From up and down the hall, women had watched from their windows, and now they stared in shock as the officers put the easygoing Sierra in a wheelchair and wheeled her away, leaving behind bloody smears where the officer had pushed her face against the concrete wall. Sierra found out much later that the incident caused an uproar.

Sierra’s family heard about the incident from other residents, and called the facility for updates to no avail. “They wouldn’t give no information about me,” she says. “I was in seg, and nothing was wrong, but they just would not tell them.” Sierra’s family even reached out to local news reporters. “My mom, my sister, my cousin, they were crying and so scared, like, ‘Is she alive?’”

“All of the girls were calling home to their families,” she says. “It sent people to mental health, all traumatized from him beating me up. They had some group talk on the dorm. It was traumatizing, for me and for them. They heard me screaming bloody murder at two a.m. I’m not a violent person, no violent crime, not a single write-up.”

Topeka Correctional Facility had recently garnered local attention during that past year as knowledge of yet another wave of sexual misconduct by a staff member emerged, on top of the existing, nearly decade-old foundation of Justice Department findings of constitutional rights violations in the form of widespread sexual harassment and assault at the facility. Families have reason to worry about the women incarcerated there.

Sierra says that she later heard the baby-faced, bald, blue-eyed officer was demoted from lieutenant to sergeant for the incident. When they let her out of segregation earlier than the 14 days she was supposed to stay, the administrative investigator told her the video was disturbing.

She found out later what the original disciplinary issue was - when her roommate had flipped a table to try to get rolled, “she told them people were pissing her off, and they looked at the cameras and I was the last one to talk to her. They assumed I was inciting a riot.” It was not the case - Sierra was actually trying to talk her roommate out of getting rolled, reminding her about the new baby niece she hadn’t met yet.

But even though the prison administration threw out the basis of Sierra’s original write-up that sent her to segregation, for the remaining year of her sentence she was kept on the maximum custody side because of the incident, unable to complete the classes she had been taken previously while in minimum. “When they were wheeling me out, I had said, ‘I oughtta spit on you,’ and they tried to charge me with threatening and intimidating against the two officers for that.”

The rest of her time, nearly a year until her April 2020 release, was much harder and disorienting - “one week went by like a day, and an hour felt like ten years.” When Sierra asked to go back to minimum, her case manager told her there was nothing she could do. “They said they consider you a security risk - I think it was because of the reactions by the other inmates. I was well-known and well-liked, so the reaction said I had some kind of power. They saw how they reacted to him beating me up, so they didn’t want me back over there.”

It still makes Sierra mad. “I was handcuffed and shackled and this man just whooped my ass for no reason.... It never happened to me before, and [before] I thought as long as I keep my nose clean, then I’ll be fine. But that’s not true. Next thing you know you’re getting abused by a staff member.”