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“Strip.”
“Pardon?”
There's plenty that's demeaning about the prison system, everything actually, but being ‘unclothed searched’ has to be one of the most casually humiliating. At least to Colin Moriarty, currently serving time for a string of rather serious crimes. Rather serious. This ain't his first rodeo, not at all, but it always goes the exact same way, to a point where the baloney faced guard has moved on past irritation and insane rage to a kind of anxiety. His mind is being systematically broken by the prisoner's abject refusal to ‘make things easy’ for himself. It's incomprehensible. The prisoner is not crazy or a dope fiend, like most of the rest who 'cause trouble' for themselves.
“Moriarty, you stupid bastard, you old clown, you dumb, lazy, potato eating Paddy bitch, don't act like you don't know what's what. Strip!” the guard is already losing it and it's only nine in the morning. Oh boy. 'Correction' incoming. Everyone else in the lineup is doing their thing, semi-ignoring the verbal beat down, faces either blank or bored, on both sides. Mostly. Yeah you do get guards who like their little power trip, looking for sick kicks, quite a few of them in fact, but this one is not that sort. And Moriarty doesn't jitter and blush like a virgin getting undressed for the first time, when eventually he is made to stand in his birthday suit. If anything, he gets his kicks from inconveniencing people. Luckily, he doesn't get much of an opportunity in the case of strip searches, because few visit him.
But that is what the guard believes about his motives, because one refusal is enough to mark you as irredeemable in Authority's eyes, and these people in front of him aren't human, no matter that they look like him. And because they aren't human, they are unfathomable. They don't have feelings. The man himself, the problem prisoner, stares at him, high points of colour blazing in his tanned cheeks, nostrils flared, chest heaving, lips white, blue eyes wide. It definitely doesn't look like he's deriving pleasure from anything at the moment.
“No.” he says, lips curling off his teeth. Several are missing, looking like empty places at a packed family dinner table, and his lips themselves show signs of having been busted recently. Really, every part of him shows signs of having been involved in a recent altercation.
By now his fellow inmates are putting their clothes back on, going off to wherever, and he's holding up the smooth functioning of the highly profitable Correctional Machine. Good way to have a cannibal psycho put in your cell, Moriarty. Good way to have guards look the other way when Big Buster asks you to be his girlfriend, or when you have some sort of fake medical emergency after getting your head stomped on. But it doesn't matter, never ever will he comply when ordered to humiliate himself, no matter what punishments are meted out. He's crazy like that, probably the last sane man, and don't the female guards love it? And those punishments can become quite cruel and unusual indeed. Punishment loaf, nothing but raw potatoes for food (nice bit of personal tailoring), the hole, solitary confinement, denial of privileges, messing with his cell, bed and clothes, confiscating his possessions, set ups, tasing in the shower, old fashioned torture, gossip, beatings...worse - the list is endless. Everything those with power can think to do to those without.
“One more time, asshole. Strip, before I make you. Strip before I shove your thick skull in the toilet like last time.”
The prisoner pulls something out of the red blooded past for his next refusal. You're not allowed to refuse, incidentally. Whatever a guard tells you to do, you do. Otherwise you're not a good boy with good behaviour. “Droch chrích ort.” says Moriarty, with finality, his tone being sinister enough to convey that yes, he did just curse a prison guard with something very nasty. Somehow speaking the malediction at an ordinary volume is worse than if he had yelled it. More serious. More occult. Deliberate. The guard's skin crawls. That plus the display of foreign language skills turns Moriarty's near future into something very unfortunate indeed.
It also causes the guard to turn and signal for some of the least gentle, most bloodthirsty of his assistants. A horde of men swarm the inmate, working to restrain him as he fights back, as savagely as possible. Elbows, teeth, and headbutts do much of the damage, but a lone prisoner versus seven guards is inevitably overwhelmed.
“Now you're in for it, chump. Should've did what you're told.”
They half walk, half drag (‘relocate’) him to the segregation unit. But not before ‘accidentally’ throwing him down some stairs. A small flight. Not too bad. That's still not as humiliating as anything he's made to do to himself. Other prisoners don't usually understand his refusal, but they wouldn't. They've never been in control of anything before. They were barely in control of their lives even before prison. But he lives on control, and ceding it is a kind of death.
The fall hurts, it's sprained or maybe even broke something because he was unable to break his fall, his arms being handcuffed behind his back. Maybe his face, his cheekbone feels like it's floating in pieces. The heap he lands in on the concrete, hurts. If he had broken his neck or dashed his brains out, well, the incident would have quietly been swept under the carpet. Accidents happen. Moriarty hisses in pain, bites his lip till it bleeds while writhing around on the landing, but he's ignored, picked up and marched on. No limping allowed.
Once in segregation the crypto sexual assault proceeds. He's held down on a bed while his clothes are removed by ‘safety’ scissors, exposing ‘intimate’ parts to view. Cutting his clothes off is much worse than yanking them off would be. Needless destruction. Ice cold. Something mechanical and especially sadistic in it. Speaking of cold, the room, like most of the prison, is freezing, and the prisoner quickly begins shivering. He's not even carrying contraband, and they know that.
Also, the prisoner is going to be billed for those clothes.
Since he refuses to do anything to ‘cooperate’ in his degradation, 'refuses' to even stand now that he's naked, and instead looks off to the side like a dead thing, other people hold him by the hair and stick their fingers in his mouth, under his tongue, rubbing them over his gums. He doesn't bite. The revenge is to refuse and then to pretend that nothing hurts and you're not there when you can no longer resist. Make them do it. Put it on their conscience, not yours. Tell yourself that's what you're doing, when really severe trauma and shame has made you catatonic.
Other people inflict the rest of the invasive, repulsive, indecent acts that desensitized inmates perform on themselves like a perverted circus routine. If you hope to see your family, you'd best be prepared to display your organs, external and internal, for inspection. Twice. Have a nice day. Someone shines a flashlight into his navel, like he's stored a shipment of heroin in there. Even if he could, he wouldn't. He's no mule, he employs mules. Nothing goes where it's not supposed to, when it comes to his body. Or, nothing goes somewhere it's not supposed to, by his consent. The hand touching his stomach is hateful, beyond hateful. It's an impersonal possession. That's worse, much worse. Whoever said ‘it's not personal’, was a psychopath. Only a demon can be so detached.
Technically the guards require a warrant and a doctor in order to medically rape someone, but the Law is for the world outside prison walls, and it's amazing how easily camera footage can ‘go missing’ in these institutions. Tears traitorously escape Moriarty's eyes, and a sob escapes his throat, but he hopes to pass these off as being generated because his sprained possibly broken limb was jostled when they turned him over.
The game is over after ten infinite minutes. All the steps have been followed. Process complete. They still couldn't find any contraband, although they might say they did and bring down more reprisals that way. Either way, now comes the extra beating owed for the sinister sounding bit of Irish. Still nude, as he will be till someone ‘gets around to’ issuing him new clothes and letting him out of segregation, Moriarty curls up as best he can while being restrained, as in, he curls up not at all. But mentally he curls up in a ball, and that's the most important part.