Liberation newspaper subscriber David Naylor experienced and witnessed severe abuse while incarcerated in FCI Elkton – including the murder of an LGBTQ inmate by guards.
He recently spoke with Liberation reporters at the Baltimore Pride festival detailing his experiences.
Naylor explained how anti-LGBTQ bigotry is rampant throughout the prison system. “Especially for the LGBT [inmates], it was horrible,” Naylor said. At one point, a guard told him outright that “I think you act too gay.”
The extreme exploitation of prisoners’ labor was also a common practice at FCI Elkton, as it is throughout the system. Naylor told Liberation about a mandatory GED class that supposedly paid six instructors. “During my entire time there I never saw one of those instructors conducting a class. Who was conducting the class? Inmates, getting paid 12 cents an hour,” he said.
But Naylor was determined to fight back. After tireless advocacy work, he was able to get an abusive guard punished with “seven months suspension, with no pay.”
Of course, prison officials were not happy with inmates trying to understand their situation. Naylor said that the contact information and sometimes other sections of Liberation newspaper were cut out by the time he received his copy.
The most shocking abuse Naylor reported to Liberation was the murder of an LGBTQ
inmate. The victim was struck over 50 times while in solitary confinement, where the only people who had access to him were the guards.
Naylor said about the victim and the incident, “He was beaten. He had 52 contusions and a broken sternum, and they wanted to rule it as a suicide. The next morning… they had a town hall meeting where they call all the inmates into what they call the multi-media room to announce that this particular individual committed suicide… But inmates, they do their homework too and I did mine. I found the article in the newspaper about that and it was an outrage”.
Naylor closed his account with an appeal for solidarity between incarcerated and non-incarcerated people, “Those barbed wire fences
around the prisons aren’t made to keep the inmates, the bad people, in; they’re made to keep you out so you don’t know what’s going on.” Let’s keep up the fight to end mass incarceration and smash anti-LGBTQ bigotry!
