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Philosophical, ironic and terribly funny, The Reflections of a Solitary Hamster will appeal to thoughtful readers—young and old. Translated by Linda Burgess.
Table of contents

• Reflections from Inside
• Reflections from Inside – Michigan Abolition and Prisoner Solidarity
• Get Involved

His dispatch covers the poor systemic conditions that those inside face at the hands of the Michigan Department of Corrections, and particularly in the newly re-opened and renamed Kinross prison. Last September, increasing frustration led to a work stoppage and then a spontaneous march, when the facility declined to provide full meals in the face of the stoppage.

Our pay wages being incongruent with commissary prices and food services being utterly disrespectful with the way that they serve and portions being too small and quality being not so good and living spaces being over congested and crowded and ventilation, in our unprofessional views, being still not up to code. So what I understand, is some guys decided not to show up to work, to do a work strike.

In order to try to come to the table to reach some sort of agreement with administration. So they decided that no one would go to work on a specific day and they followed through. So the facility was locked down due to no one reporting to work. So the facility was locked down, but no one reporting for work, the private entity of the food services had to work, because of course they had no prisoners to work for them.

So their idea was to punish everyone by feeding us peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner. And so that carried on for a day and a half and frustration amongst the prison population was increasing. The only thing that was coming up was that people were being fed even worse than before.

And that was the breaking point. They decided they were going to stand out and protest. Protest the food, protest health services, protest the ventilation, protest the living conditions overall. So these few guys stood outside, walking in circles protesting, chanting, equal work, equal pay chanting and they were also calling for other guys inside the housing units to come stand with them in solidarity.

And it worked. Slowly but surely, guys just start pouring out of their units going outside, walking into the circle. But these guys took it upon themselves to disregard all rules and policies and they walked in circles in the common area chanting and the crowd kept growing larger and larger and larger. Until the point where when I looked out the window, it looked like maybe guys out there. And at one point they basically stormed the control center.

For instance, some small changes, like the visiting room, prior to that date, you would have to sit across from your family member instead of next to your family member or loved one. And so they were frustrated.

They began yelling at administration and threats. So ERT, emergency response team was called in. ERT members came from all over the state and so it took a while for them to get that team together. It took four or five hours and from what I understand, this is the first or second time the government allowed for live ammunition to enter onto the prison compound in Michigan. So I would say, four or five hours, because they had blew the emergency count, the emergency count is a institutional horn that everyone knows, right, once you hear that emergency count, it means get to your room, lock down, get on your bunk so you can be counted.

And this is a horn that everyone adheres to, kinda like a fire alarm, when you know to exit the building. When you hear this emergency count horn, it means enter the building. I told you all rules and policies went out the door like all consequences for breaking any rules or policies were not adhered to. And then I noticed that once the administration noticed what the prisoners were doing, they rerouted the ERT to the side, and once the prisoners noticed that, they blocked the side.

So they had the front entrance and the side entrance. So you know, the language that they used was enough to quell the rebellious spirit for that moment. It was a trick. Those guys went in and locked down and was counted, and then something that never happened before happened. All of the officers who worked in each housing unit fled the building.

Once every prisoner was on their bunk to be counted, all the officers of each housing unit left and ran to the control center. At that point, no one knew what was gonna happen, so everyone just started running crazy. Some people were already intoxicated because you know they had been drinking and smoking that day, because, like I said, all rules and policies were out the door.

Like guys were walking around brandishing weapons, you know, in preparation to defend themselves against ERT. Once there were no officers in the housing units, guys just ran rampant. With breaking into the counseling office, stealing files, setting things on fire, throwing washing machines and dryers out the window, snatching sinks and toilets from the wall and breaking cameras and breaking windows. Yah it was mayhem, it was mayhem for a moment.

Like the intensity increased by the thousands, right, like because in your mind frame, all the regular officers are gone. Who knows what they have the capacity to do. So when you hear guys say they have ARs and they have shotguns, and they have 40 cals? So once they got into the units, well first of all, guys was jumping out of the windows, because of smoke.

You know guys was trying to evade? It was wild for a minute, if I could just go back and capture a moment. The moment in between the regular officers leaving and the ERT officers arriving. Setting things on fire, and breaking everything, destroying everything within site. Well they pepper sprayed and then they began handcuffing people and taking people outside and laying them down in the rain.

It had started raining, it got really cold. And they began putting people on the bus by the hundreds and shipping them off to level 5 facility segregation and then charged them with incite to riot and failure to disperse and so on.

Like I had seen guys who had been taking away who actually did not participate in the protest or the rebellion or the uprising or the riot, however you choose to phrase it. And even when they were letting off shots, the pepper spray shots right, there was a red dot on your head. How far it was going to go. But a days after and weeks after, there were still guys being snatched away and sent off to level 5 and segregation, never to be heard from again.

There are guys who still are in segregation and all those level 5 facilities as a result of that day. The one thing I can say that changed from it, was the visiting room seating arrangement. Now you are able to sit next to your loved ones when you going to visit. Guys did not go in and lock down. As you will hear, Harold was released from the hole thanks to a call-in campaign by outside supporters.

Some kind of way, I was made the de-facto spokesperson for the inmate population. So a lot of people participated out of fear. You know, inmates were angry and upset and they wanted support and they were gonna get it. They came to me and asked me, well, it really gotten out of control, even for the people who planned the riot, it had got out of control. They planned a protest, and they wanted it to be peaceful, and on an intellectual and open an intellectual dialogue with the administration to better the conditions and it worked.

Because prior to that, the day before that, we had done a work stoppage where nobody went to work and that alerted the administration. But the officers and the staff there had a different opinion about it. They were upset about it and they started getting abusive.

They started mistreating us and malnourishing us. Feeding us spoiled food and things like that, which incited the inmates to get angry, which incited a whole nother set of inmates, an aggressive set of inmates. And subsequently the aggressive inmates got a lot of them guys out there through fear. The guys who were out there, the leaders, the guys who planned the protest and the guys who were scared, asked me, would I be the spokesperson for the inmate population with the administration?

So if the aggressive inmates agreed to tone it down or whatever or go with whatever we come up with through this dialogue with the administration, if they agreed to go with it, then I would do it. The aggressive inmates allowed me to speak their truth. I talked to the warden, who asked me if I could get everyone to go in and then he would call me up there along with the unit representatives to discuss the issues or whatever. I did that, I went and got everyone to go in. I went to the control center and I talked to the Warden. We actually had a good conversation. He was pliable, well at least on the surface he was pliable.

Get Involved

And then after the meeting was over, they sent me back to the unit. Everybody was in their cells, everybody was calm, everybody was on they bunks cause it was a count situation, so everybody was on their bunks. Nobody was loud or boisterous or whatever, everybody was complaint.

They ran in with guns, helmets, pads, shields. Just on the compound not into the units initially, but they ran onto the compounds, running towards units. But the emergency response teams did just as much damage as the inmates did, when they did come in the units. But they blamed that on the inmates, too. But finally, when they got us to walk outside the unit, put us in cuffs, put us on busses and rode us to different facilities. I was among inmates who went to Marquette Maximum Security Facility. They opened up a condemned block, put of us in a condemned block, in a block that had previously been condemned for four years.

It was filthy. There, I stayed there, well at the onset of that, two days after we were there, they came and got me and separated me from the rest of the inmates. They put me in another block called E Block, and told me that I was, I guess, I was being dubbed the leader of the riot or whatever. I stayed there 27 days without any of that stuff. An upcoming birthday sends Hamster on a journey of the mind and, luckily, while his wits are wandering and his ego expanding, his good friends conspire to keep his feet firmly on the ground.

The Dominion Post, January — February 11, Reflections of a Solitary Hamster is a picture book that really is for the smart set — be they five or Hawkes Bay Weekend, December — February 3, This book is like a soap-opera for children. A book of comic strips that focuses on the life of a group of forest animals.