Life Inside Complex 5: Surviving the Segregation Unit

Andrew Krosch writes about life inside the segregation unit at Minnesota Correctional Facility–Oak Park Heights, where daily routines, tense encounters, and quiet endurance define the experience of surviving weeks, months, or even years in isolation.

Complex 5 is the segregation unit here in Minnesota Correctional Facility–Oak Park Heights. Located across and a few yards down the main corridor from the hyper-secure ACU, where such notables as George Floyd’s killer and a 9/11 flight school candidate the FBI overlooked, later turned Gitmo detainee, have stayed. CX 5 has the same layout as the other units in OPH, remodeled into a segregation unit through a liberal application of plexiglass, concrete, and sheet metal sometime in the 90s. It’ll never make the prison edition of Architectural Digest.

The Walk to Jail

On your way to the segregation unit—or “jail,” as we sometimes call it—you’re secured in waist chains if you got picked up out of your cell. If you got arrested elsewhere, you’re hauled with your hands cuffed behind your back. You may have gotten a ride on the back of the golf cart the squad uses, or you might have walked. No matter how you got here, from the front sliding door of Complex Five, it’s always the same routine: A cop holding each elbow and at least one right behind you in case you decide to get squirrelly. One of the Complex Five staff has a brown paper grocery sack with your name and OID number for the shoes you’re about to kick off. Conversations between con and cop range anywhere from “Hey, did you see that game last night?” to “I’m gonna beat your fucking ass, motherfucker!”

There are four tiers, two east of the bubble, two west. Each of the 13-cell long runs is cut in half, with a solid steel and safety glass door creating what they call defensible living units (DLUs). CX 5 always has a dungeon feel. The lighting is weak, which is weird, because it’s got the same type and amount of lighting fixtures as the rest of the living units. It’s like someone turned a dimmer switch down a couple notches.

Inside the Segregation Unit

You get walked down to your new home in stocking feet. Depending on the time of day, your new neighbors in the segregation unit may be at their door’s window to greet you. Sometimes everybody’s sleeping. You don’t get a lot of food, which means guys will go back to sleep right after breakfast and again after lunch with a somewhat full belly. You can always hang onto something from your tray for an evening snack, but it’s never enough to hold you over from 5:00 supper to breakfast the next day at 7 a.m.

With everybody sleeping when you come in, things occasionally get interesting. Like when it turns out your next-door neighbor in the segregation unit is an archenemy—which you don’t find out until the moment you come out for your one hour of rec per day and find yourself throwing down with hopefully only one, but possibly two or more, opponents who’ve been waiting for something to do, someone to take out their anger on. Waiting for weeks, maybe months or years. Now they post inmate ID photos beside the cell door. Not to help out the incoming prisoners identify friend or foe, rather as a marker for staff so they don’t give your mail or canteen to the wrong guy.

Segregation Unit Cell Conditions

The cell door is open, waiting for you. All the cell interiors are basically the same in OPH except for the ACU and the medical unit. The bed frame is a concrete slab stretched across the back of the cell. It and the built-in desk/sink combo form an L. The wall-mounted toilet is at the top of the L, closest to the door. The cast concrete shelves and locker by the specially reinforced doors in CX5 were removed a few decades ago after an episode. The same episode that prompted them to beef up all the doors in CX 5. There’s a bare mattress, usually cracked and torn. Sometimes worse. Occasionally something completely fucked, something that looks like it was rescued from a tiger’s cage.

There’s a pile of linens and seg clothes (the kind of scrubs-style top and pants you associate with county jails, gray for CX 5 inmates, orange for ACU) waiting on the bed if you’re lucky. Otherwise, after you’re stripped out, you might find yourself standing around buck-ass naked while you wait for one of the CX 5 cops to grab your shit.

They march you into the cell and ask if you’re going to comply, take off the cuffs or waist chains. Two cops stand behind you, a couple more outside the cell, while you face the cop at the door, who does the strip and collects the clothes you were wearing. If you were in a fight and got blood on anything, say, a new pair of sweats from canteen, or worse your good shoes, you can kiss them goodbye.

Once the cops leave, someone awake hollers out, asks what they busted you for. I’m old enough that I need different reading glasses for different-sized print, and my hearing’s going to shit. Communication through steel doors in the segregation unit doesn’t help. It doesn’t take long to yell myself hoarse.

A Quieter Segregation Unit Since COVID

In recent years, since COVID really, the segregation unit is never full. I’ve been in OPH long enough that while I don’t always know the names, nobody’s new. I recognize the faces enough to chop it up on what’s been going on in prison, who’s in what unit, and who’s been shipped out or back in. But other than the broad brush strokes, I stay out of the mix for the most part. Which means I catch up with the guys on my DLU but otherwise fall back from the day-to-day conversations guys use to fill all the empty time.

I’ve been around long enough and am on good enough terms with at least a few of the cops, that I have no problem hustling up a few paperbacks to hold me over until book rotation on Mondays. The books rotate from the tub locked in the stairwell onto the rec room table, then immediately rotate back to the stairwell until next Monday. In theory, the tubs of books rotate from one DLU to the next every week. In practice, it’s hard to say. If you’re a picky reader in the segregation unit, you’re screwed either way. But there are always books, and they’re almost always in one piece. Which is more than I can say for the first 10-15 years of my bit, when seg meant you were lucky to find one whole book out of 10 and learned to look for and be happy that it was only missing a few pages, probably sex scenes. Or the last page, since a certain class of shitheads seems to find that kind of thing funny no matter where they’re doing time: county jails, R&O centers, state or federal joints. (To the book manglers of the incarcerated world, may the fleas of 1,000 camels infest your crotch.)

You’re home for the next however many days, weeks, months, or possibly even years. As long as you settle in and focus on your own sad state of affairs and don’t take on too much of the next guy’s burden, you’ll do just fine.

Want to Read More? Try They Can’t Break My Spirit in Solitary

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