Gordon Grilz, reflects on prison violence in the Florence Prison Complex in Arizona, while recalling the disturbing events, deaths, and spiritual weight that surrounded life inside.
When I was incarcerated in Central Unit and East Unit in Florence, Arizona, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Many times when dark clouds moved in with a thunderstorm, they would split as they came over the prison complex, leaving us high and dry as the surrounding farmland got a good rain. We used to speculate that it was almost like some dark force was causing the storm to go around us.
Prison brings with it many evil spirits: riots (see My First Prison Riot), assault, rape, suicide, intentional drug overdose. Communities which invite private, state, or federal prisons into their neighborhoods often don’t realize the dark baggage that’s coming with them. In Central Unit, an officer stationed on the parapet above the gate put his rifle barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger; his supervisor at the prison was having an affair with his wife while he was at work.
The Weight of Prison Violence
In East Unit, an officer working in the control room waited until the other officer stepped out, then he locked the door and shot himself in the head with a Glock 9mm pistol; he was having domestic problems and was allegedly facing sexual charges. We were very late getting out for chow that morning, as they had to go to the Central Unit Armory to get a key to open the control room. The county coroner had to come and take away the body, then they had to clean up the mess.
Correctional officers are known to have high rates of alcohol and drug use, divorce, and suicide. I believe that the dark spiritual forces they’re continually exposed to in the dehumanizing nature of their work contributes to these problems.
Death and Despair Inside the Prison Walls
Some prisoners in Central Unit have hung themselves in their cells. The unlucky ones were discovered and cut down before they could finish the job. They were left to serve their sentences with brain damage. Drug overdoses, intentional and unintentional, have taken lives from many prisoners who no longer wanted to exist in such darkness. Shall I tell you of the prisoner who cut out his testicles with a razor blade and placed them on the bars of his cell?
Central Unit and East Unit are both closed now. I’ve heard that they made Central Unit into a museum open to the public, like Alcatraz in California. If you go there, you might be able to visit the death house where they executed prisoners with lethal gas and later by lethal injection. Botched executions prolonged the suffering of those chosen to die for their sins. In the old days, they used to hang the prisoners inside the walls. I’ve read of the execution of a fat woman whose head came off during a hanging. The prison chaplain said, “Look, all of you who favor execution, women first.”
Haunted Ground and the Lingering Presence of Prison Violence
It amazes me that I’ve outlived two of the prisons I’ve been locked up in. But then, I’m 75 years old and have served 45 years. It seems, at least in some cases, sinew and bonds are stronger than concrete and steel.
When I first came to Central Unit, I read an inscription that had somehow been carved into the wall in the sally port. It read, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” I recognized it from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. It was an ominous warning of what lay waiting for me inside these prison walls.
There have always been devil worshippers of one sort or another in prison. “Irish,” the leader of the devil worshippers in Central Unit, died a horrible death from colon cancer. When he died, they found his blood splattered all over his cell. Some nearby prisoners heard the screaming, but no one came. Then it went quiet. After that, the prison coven lost several members who showed up in Christian services. (See The Death of a Satan Worshipper in Prison.)
The word is that East Unit was built on a Native American burial ground. When I was there in the 1980s and 1990s, pottery shards and other artifacts were dug up during construction projects. Nothing was done, and the construction continued.
In the desert in back of East Unit is Camacho Hill, the prisoner cemetery from way back, where prisoners were buried when no one claimed their bodies. I knew a longtime volunteer who used to visit Camacho Hill to pay his respects to some of the men he knew. On one visit, he noticed that the markers were moved. He said to one of the prisoners there tending the graves, “It must have been quite a job digging up all those graves.” The prisoner responded, “Oh, they didn’t move the bodies, just the markers.”
I knew a dear lady whose family owned much of the land that the Florence Prison Complex was built upon. Her family had leased the land to the state for 99 years to build the prisons. At the end of that time, the land reverted to the family, along with all the improvements. She worked in Central Unit as the warden’s secretary for many years. They even named a prison unit after their family. Her son, an only child, died in a crash of his single-engine plane. She and her husband died in a tragic fire of their mobile home where they lived on their land in back of the prisons. Her husband was in a wheelchair, and she died trying to get him out. She volunteered at the local museum and curated exhibits from the prison, including ropes used in hangings.
I have no doubt that the spirits of some prisoners who died there remain where they passed, whether in the gas chamber, death house, cell blocks, chow hall, or industry buildings. It’s an often untold part of the darkness our society creates when we choose to build castles of despair.
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