Ok so here how's how it began...
I was 16 I believe and was in my junior year of high school. In high school I drove this VW bus. It was pretty nice, loved that thing. 82 diesel. Anyhow, I worked at a car audio shop, so I had a pretty nice stereo in this thing, and everyone in high school knew it. Anyhow one night this kid comes over in the middle of the night with a few others and breaks in and steals my stereo. My dad hears them, and calls the police. He then comes to wake me up, telling me the police were on their way. Well I had a small bag and a pipe in my van. So I ran out and grabbed it and took it inside before the cops came. Cops came, made a statement, yada yada end of night.
Next day I go to school. First period, principal calls me to the office. I go into the office and there is two sheriffs and the principal there. On the table were my pipes and the gram of herb in a baggie I had. Ends up my mom told the cop the night before I had taken something inside, he told here she should check my room. She does, finds it, calls the police. They cuff me, take me home, write me up on possession and paraphernalia, and leave me home. My mom says to go to my room and stay there.
Fast forward a couple days. I wake up at 3 am in my room with two huge dudes standing over me. I have no idea what is going on, and my parents aren't anywhere around. They tell me to stand up and put some clothes on. I'm dazed and have no idea what is happening, but i get dressed. Soon as I am done, they cuff me. Now I have no clue what is going on, but I start asking for my parents, and they aren't anywhere around. They walk me downstairs and outside and load me into a van. I ask them where I am going and they just say "the airport".
We get to the airport and they drape a jacket over the cuffs and walk me in. No this was before 9/11, so security wasn't anywhre near what it is today. Somehow they shuffle me through and onto a plane. I sit in between two of them and we take off to where I now learn from the pilot is Miami.
We land in Miami and get off to switch planes. We make the switch and this time when I get on I figure out where I'm finally headed... Jamaica. Now I seriously have no idea what is going on. Jamaica? Are you kidding? The one place I thought nobody would ever send me, a pothead, is Jamaica... so now I have no idea what is going on. I ask the guy where I am headed and he tells me "a private school." I ask him for how long and he tells me "1-6 months. You will like it." So now I have no clue what the deal is, but he then takes off the cuffs. I get a little more relaxed and think maybe somehow as crazy as it is it may not be so bad. I had no idea what bad was yet.
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Here is where the craziness starts...
I get off the plane in Jamaica and me these two dudes take me and bypass everyone and go to a small side room. Everyone else is standing in line for customs and whatever, but they take me aside into this small room. Inside is a bunch of Jamaican airport security and policemen. The two dudes give them an envelope and my passport. They look at my passport and stamp it. Done. I would later find out they stamped it illegally knowing I would be there longer than the legal time limit. They also took over my rights, which my parents had signed over in a legal document. They then shuffled me outside and threw me into the back of a van. If you've ever been to Jamaica and taken a taxi from Montego Bay to Kingston, Junction, Mandeville, etc... you know it;s probably the scariest ride in your life. They had me lay down in the back and was not allowed to look outside, so that I could not see the way I came and keep me from running. I thought I was going to die on that trip. Ripping corners in the jungles of Jamaica at high speeds honking the whole way around blind curves dodging cars, people, goats, the whole nine yards. The whole thing was nuts, and this was just the fist 8 hrs.
So after a good hour and a half we get there.
We pull up and it looks like the David Koresh compound, but it's on the edge of a cliff overlooking the water. No other buildings are even in sight of this place, and you can see a good mile in all directions and it's all flat.
I get out and they take me inside, strip search me, send me to bed after showing me my room.
They take me to my room and here is what it is. No windows, like most places in Jamaica, just wood slats. The room is maybe 10X8 and when I walk in there are two bunk beds on either side and maybe a foot or two between them. Hardly any room in there to do anything but walk. I would find out in the morning that the beds were nothing more than a wood slat, a mattress topper, and a sheet. During the day they folded these wood slats up and secured it with a deadbolt, so the rooms were completely open. We each had a cubby in the room, whom which I shared with 3 other guys. Our cubby was 18 inches high and 20 inches deep, and everything I owned there fit into that cubby. It had to be folded perfectly and everything was inspected daily. We wore the same thing, tan UPS looking uniforms and sandals. We were allowed to wear shoes only during sports play, but otherwise had to wear sandals. Why? Because you can't run away in sandals.
So here I am my first night. I'm told I'm not allowed to talk, and to just go to sleep. There are no doors on the rooms, and everything is completely silent. Nobody else, the other three guys, even move when I come in. A guard sits in each of the hallways. If you need to go to the bathroom, you go to you door, ask the guard for permission, and you go to the one right next to him. If you need to take a shit you need to ask for TP. If you ask them for it, they give you exactly 5 squares. 5. 5 doesn't work, just an FYI.
So I stay up all night thinking about what the hell is going on, and next thing I know it's 6am, and guards start yelling for everyone to get up. Everyone in my room gets up and heads outside. It's the morning headcount. Well I decide screw this I'm not staying here and I'm def not getting out of bed. Bad idea. They send in two guards to get me out. They ask me to get up and I say no. They then try and grab me and that's when I go off. I deck the first one and then headlock the second. I wrestled, played ice hockey, and played lacrosse, along with doing some boxing and martial arts all in high school so I could hold my own a little. A third guards comes in and and wrestle with him two, trading punches and wrestling with them all. Then something hits me, to this day I can't remember what it was, but I go down. Two others come in and I'm still fighting but they each grab a limb and pull me out and drag me up the steps. Meanwhile everyone is in the courtyard for headcount, and they have them all turn and face the other way so they can't see me as they drag me upstairs. The whole time I'm fighting it, and the whole time they are beating the hell out of me. They finally get me to this corner room. This I would learn would be called the "observation placement" room.
I walk in the room and there about 10-12 kids laying flat on the ground in the same size room. It is hot as shit in there, and they are laying on the tile floor with their head to one side, body outstretched, hands to the side palms up. None of them are moving. They have me get down into this positions. I sat this was for two full weeks. Anytime you had to piss, shit, shower, whatver... it was done only by permission and we stayed in that room. We went out for a shower once a day for 5 minutes and that was it. Anytime someone would act up, get restles, whatever, they would do what they called "restraining". This is where they sit on your back, pull your arms back and wrench them up towards your head. I had it done once, learned my lesson, and laid still for the two weeks. But to this day I have rip marks on my arms from where they wrenched them so hard. Hurt like hell. I was lucky though... I would soon find out people were not in there for just weeks but months... a girl, no shit, stayed there and didn't leave for 7 months. She had permanent disformity and scaring from laying for so long. Another method they used often was pepper spray. For the ones that really got out of hand, they would restrain them and also spray pepper spray in their face at the same time. They would do this repeatedly and then not offer anything for relief, and if you moved you were restrained further.
The food was really bad. It was pretty much rice beans and bread. Only thing we had to drink was water and powdered milk. We would sometimes have goat or chicken or fish, but it was all stuff that was so bad you could hardly eat it. The meat always had so many bones you'd be lucky if you got a bit out of it. The whole time you were eating you were not aloud to talk, and instead they would blare motivational tapes made by some priest. You would then have to "reflect" after the day on the tapes you heard, and the writings were graded and if they weren't good enough you could be punished.
We had these buckets outside that were for washing our clothes. They were your standard mop buckets, and you got two and maybe an inch or two of water in each. They would then give you a handful of soap. One was for washing, one was for rinsing. Bad part was, plumbing in Jamaica sucks. When the toilets backed up, we used the buckets to shit and piss in, then turned around and washed our clothes in it. Some of the Jamaicans thought it was funny to have us wash our clothes in the buckets without rinsing them out. Wash your clothes in poo water and then hang them on the line to dry in the Jamaican sun sometime... people can smell you a mile away and the stench is so bad it sits in your nose for days. Would make you vomit.
The showers were interesting... they weren't exactly showers.
What they had was a garden hose attached to a few splitters, then hung from 2X4's. This area was surrounded by blue tarps like you find at Home Depot or whatever. There was no pressure, it just sort of trickled. Each "family" of guys, 8-12 of us, had one bar of Irish Spring a week. When it was gone, it was gone. We each had two minutes in the shower, and then we would pass the soap. We had a total of 45 minutes, and if time ran out and someone didnt shower, they didn't shower. We also got haircuts every two weeks, and it was just a matter or buzzing off all the hair. We stood in a line and just one by one they shaved it all off.
I wrote letters home everyday, but they never made it. My gf back home from the time said she never got one, and my parents said they got three in the over a year I was there. They would read them and then throw them away without ever sending them. Some kids were there for years on end, one kid was there for 4 years, and his parents probably never even knew what was going on. They just tell your parents you dont want to have anything to do with them and dont want to come home.
A girl lost it one day and tried to run. She was already upstairs, so she couldn't get downstairs, so she went up. She ended up on the roof, and as they tried to corner her she jumped off. Fell three stories and landed in front of a group of us outside raking leaves. Her head burst apart, and they used some of our towels to wipe up the mess. They never even washed them, they just handed them back to us and had us put them up on the line.
One of my best friends to this day who I was there with ran away once with another kid and made it the longest... they were gone for 11 days. They finally got picked up about halfway to Montego Bay, each spent 3 months in OP.
Medical care was pretty nonexistent. People would get sick all the time and they would just give you a Tylenol. Guys would get bad cuts and be left with nasty looking scars for life. All kinds of rashes, skin disorders, infection, etc. That and the food was almost inedible and would totally screw up your system all the time. You wouldn't shit for a week and just vomit constantly.
