In disturbing news out of North Carolina, a number of current and former inmates of Sampson County Correctional Facility allege that guards “initiated” them with torturous methods—methods that involved hot sauce, physical abuse, and racial and sexual humiliation.
A lawsuit was filed in 2015 against the North Carolina Department of Public Safety by 25 current and former inmates, and the details are now becoming public. According to the suit, prison staff “entered into an agreement to abuse and humiliate the plaintiffs.”
The prisoners say they took a road crew assignment in hopes of whittling down their sentences. Those who took the assignment ended up as the alleged victims.
They were forced to engage in something called “taking the sauce,” which involved the road crew members sticking their hands in a plastic bag of hot sauce—sauce rated hotter than police pepper spray—and licking them off. The guards also allegedly forced the inmates to consume the hot sauce, and to rub the hot sauce on their genitals and anuses in front of other prisoners. One of the plaintiffs said after “taking the sauce,” he lost his sense of taste.
Yeah—pretty twisted stuff.
The punishments don’t end there, though. The prisoners were also forced to squeeze each other’s genitals until they “said particular racist phrases convincingly enough.” The plaintiffs were also forced to dance naked in front of video cameras and digitally sodomize one another.
These are just a few of the cruel punishments they were subjected to—there are more, including inmates being maced and beaten.
"We have good information that supervisors knew full well what was going on, witnessed it with their own eyes and—more egregiously—ignored complaints that came from members of the road crew," attorney Christian Dysart said.
For a full rundown of the case, read pieces from the Charlotte Observer and the Courier-Express.
