It’s straight out of some Kafkaesque nightmare, with the benign name of “the chair.”  From the Boulder Weekly :

It’s a restraint seat used by many jails to subdue inmates who pose a threat to themselves or others. It has wrist straps, ankle straps, a lap belt and a harness.

The rationale behind its existence not only makes sense, but seems imminently sensible. After all, it’s easy to imagine the person who has lost all control, becoming physically violent, unable to calm down.  Maybe it’s fear, or drugs, or mental illness, but the idea of putting someone in restraints when they pose a threat to themselves or others is hardly outrageous, and may be the most reasonable means of dealing with them.

But the potential for abuse is similarly obvious.

The thing is, inmates don’t always go peacefully into “the chair.”

And when they don’t, deputies are authorized to use what at first glance might be seen as violent methods to force compliance.

In official police reports, those methods carry names like “infra-orbital pressure point technique” or “straight punch to the chest.”

But inmates describe it more along the lines of getting beat up by out-of-control cops.

When violence is sanitized by technical jargon (infra-orbital?), it sounds almost surgical, as if someone who cared deeply developed a method carefully designed to achieve a beneficial purpose. To the person on the receiving end of the beating, it’s hardly so benign.

The article goes on the tell the story of Joshua Johnson.

By his own admission, Joshua Johnson became angry after he was taken to jail on Sept. 19, 2009, after being pulled over for a broken headlight. He felt he had been arrested wrongly, for violating an alcohol-related condition of a restraining order that he said had been lifted. In addition, he was supposed to pick up his daughter later that morning, but being incarcerated put a crimp in those plans.

This is the sort of situation ripe for an uncooperative person, a stop for a trivial offense, a wrongful arrest for a mistake and a daughter who would be left unattended, possibly at risk, when her father doesn’t show.  For a father, this is a pretty good reason to be “disruptive,” rather than the compliant, docile inmate the police prefer he be.  And Johnson was angry.

Johnson says they came into his cell five deep, the red laser light of a Taser target shining on him, and he put his hands up. He says they cuffed him and backed him out of his cell, his arm twisted back hard. He was placed forcefully into the chair. According to Johnson, his face was slammed against his knee after he dared to look backwards, and he asked why they were hurting him. Johnson admits he called the deputy a “fucking cocksucker,” and says the officer straddled him and said, “I’m going to show you what a cocksucker I am.”

That deputy then lifted the inmate’s upper lip, Johnson says, pulled it up to his nose, put his palm underneath his lip and repeatedly jammed his hand up forcefully against the base of his nose for more than 60 seconds. Johnson says he heard squealing and later realized he was making the noise himself. He says he thought about biting the deputy’s pinky finger that was in his mouth, but thought the better of it. Johnson claims he managed to gasp that he couldn’t breathe, and the officer replied, “Yes, you can, because I just heard that.”

As he was about to pass out, Johnson says, another deputy punched him in the stomach.

The police explained that they used force to put him in the chair because they were concerned for his welfare.  They say that despite their efforts, Johnson continued to be “disruptive” and refused to stop when he was told that his continued disruptive conduct would not serve any beneficial purpose. In other words, he could either do as he was told or they would beat him.

One deputy “applied an infra-orbital control hold,” the aforementioned blows to the nose, which by one account “had little impact and he continued to resist.”

It doesn’t sound nearly as surgical when described as continued blows to the base of his nose.  The blows broke Johnson’s nose.

What makes this remarkable isn’t that it happened, but that there was no video of the chair.  The chair could be used for sound, protective purposes, as is its purported purpose, or for vindictive purposes to teach the noncompliant person who’s the boss.  Either way, the potential for harm and abuse is obvious and overwhelming.  Yet, given the ubiquity of video, the idea that there was no camera aimed at the chair, no way to know whether the screws story or Johnson’s story is accurate, is absolutely mind-boggling. 

We video street corners and parking lots, but don’t video a chair used for the forceful restraint of prisoners.  Naturally, they have an explanation:

There were never cameras there because video was used primarily to assist deputies with real-time surveillance, not recording, he explains, and there is an observation area looking directly out onto the day room, so there was no need.

Sheriff Joe Pelle tells BW that cameras have historically been used “as an operational tool to see places where deputies couldn’t see, so they weren’t everywhere. But then, a few years ago, attorneys started making requests for video and we noticed it started multiplying and it became apparent that this was more than just a management tool, it was being used for prosecutions and lawsuits.”

He agrees that the disciplinary day area is a good spot to add cameras.

After Johnson’s, and others’, allegations of abuse, the Boulder County Jail has decided to put a video camera in place to record what happened when force is used on prisoners to put them into the chair.  As Johnson notes: “When it’s their word against ours, they win every time. All I’m asking for is a transparent jail system.” 

The absence of video speaks volumes. Now that video is coming, it will be interesting to see what it shows.  And one can only hope that video is properly preserved and not accidentally lost or deleted as a corrections officer practices his “infra-orbital pressure point technique” on the video recorder.