On April 12, 2024, at California State Prison, Sacramento (CSP-Sac), Christopher Leong died at the hands of custody. In its official press release, the prison alleged that, after officers “responded to a disturbance in a housing unit,” Leong “charged and began to hit staff.” The prison also alleged that Leong resisted being put in physical restraints, which they claim led officers to “use physical force to pin [Leong] to the ground,” after which, and for undisclosed reasons, Leong stopped breathing, eventually being pronounced dead at 7:50 PM. It is curious to note that CSP-Sac makes no mention of the potential that drugs, overdose, and custodial response tactics played in Leong’s death; that they make no mention of a medical emergency being called before Leong stopped breathing; and that they make no mention of Leong vomiting on the ground while lying prone under the combined weight of multiple full sized adults, handcuffed and shackled. Curious or not, there is nothing surprising about the idea of CSP-Sac leaving vital details out of its media releases, nothing out of the ordinary for an institution predicated on harm and punishment to afford only a limited view of how and why a life entrusted to the its care was not merely lost, but lost at the hands of custody.
During my time at CSP-Sac I investigated this incident, finding multiple independent sources who reported that Leong was under the effects of a heavy dose of synthetic cannabinoids prior to, and during his involvement with custody on the twelfth of April; in addition, these sources also reported that Leong’s combative behavior began only after correctional staff attempted to place him in restraints. Understandably so, the sources who gave these accounts requested anonymity, thus affecting the reliability of their allegations; still, when truth may, at times, be only heard at a whisper, we are not excused from our obligation to listen for it.
For anyone who has done time at CSP-Sac, an understanding soon develops about how dangerous confrontations with custody can be and how quickly they can escalate. During my time there, I observed many incidents where force was used to subdue an incarcerated person, and as I watched these near tragedies unfold, I began to recognize a hard and terrible truth: CSP-Sac has cultivated an institutional culture that openly devalues the lives of incarcerated people. As one former CSP-Sac resident commented, “They’ll kill you like a zombie and never think twice about it.”
For context, it’s worth noting that, on ‘B’ Facility where Leong was housed at the time of his death, a drug epidemic had been in full swing for several months. At the center of this epidemic was Spice, a designer drug using synthetic cannabinoids as its primary ingredient. At the time, Spice was everywhere, in every building, every dayroom; it was cheap, in full supply, and dangerously potent. The signs of widespread consumption were glaring, evident by the frequent sight of zombified users who milled in common areas, faces wiped of expression, empty and distant gazes, slack jawed and mumbling incoherent utterances. Make no mistake though, Spice is not just a synthetic copy of Weed, it is something else entirely.
Spice can be five to one hundred times stronger than most common strains of marijuana and frequently includes an assortment of other substances in its mix, added to specialize the blend and effects of each batch. The high is shorter, only forty-five minutes or so, thus making consumption patterns more like crack, users “dabbing” frequently to maintain a steady effect. Spice can give a general body high and frontal cognitive fuzz, similar to that of THC—the active agent in marijuana—but it can also cause an increased and rapid heart rate, a manic energy boost, and even panic attack-like symptoms, such as racing thoughts and shortened breathing combining into peaks and valleys of frantic and subdued intoxication. To convey the experiential aesthetic of this substance, immediately upon inhalation the Spicer understands the reality that spice is nothing natural, screaming out of some cyberpunk dystopian future as if the street urchins of Blade Runner or Total Recall were addled by spice just off screen. Where it was unnerving to see an ever-growing hoard of zombified bodies, eyes devoid of conscious spark, it was the regularity of overdoses which was truly alarming.
Throughout February and March of that year, Spice overdoses—or “cat outs” as they were referred to by the incarcerated community—were a near-daily occurrence. Sometimes a Spicer would simply topple over and attract custodial attention, but individuals had more extreme reactions on other occasions. I saw individuals lock up, becoming trapped within a body gone completely haywire. Their limbs would seize and constrict at the joints, losing most of their basic motor functions, crumpling into a tangled ball of uncontrolled jerks and twitches. An even more troubling sight, though, was when people would tumble haphazardly into a complete psychotic break. I witnessed several of these episodes, watching in disbelief as someone ran screaming from the building in their underwear, chased across the yard by a gaggle of officers; another time I saw someone fall to the ground and begin writhing as if they were being raked across a bed of coals, shrieking at the top of their lungs with an intensity which conveyed actual pain, a drug-induced hallucination gripping their reality.
When overdoses occurred, members of the incarcerated community were reluctant to become involved, either by attempting to render aid or by calling for medical attention. This reluctance, however, did not reflect any disregard for the wellbeing of their zombified compatriot; rather, the looming reality of custodial reprisal proved a powerful dissuasion, the knowledge that, after medical attended to the incident and the poor spicer was carted away, a team of hard-nosed ruthless authoritarians would soon be upending everyone’s cell who was even remotely involved with the event, even the foolhardy good Samaritan who thought to call for help.
The invasive and all-out disrespectful “searching” methods freely permitted to officers at CSP-Sac, as a direct reprisal for attempting to help another incarcerated person, begins to reveal the workings of a brutal and deadly culture at Sac. When personal property is intentionally destroyed, pictures torn from the wall and left strewn about with bootprints on their surface; when commissary items are opened and emptied onto bedding; when cleaning supplies are dumped onto piled laundry and left in a sopping heap in the corner of the cell; and when cellmates who had nothing to do with the incident get the clear worst of it, in an attempt to incite internal policing, there is something more going on than just a routine verification that whatever caused the overdose is not present.
These habituated searching practices tell us something about custody at CSP-Sac, something beyond the impression that they are an over eager gang of bullies looking to ruin the lives of the incarcerated; rather, we can see an early trace of the general disregard which Sac officers have for the lives of the incarcerated, and their willingness to discourage anyone who attempts to assert or advocate for the value of those lives. Where this observation gives us a trace impression of custody’s devaluation of incarcerated life, when we look at the uses of force brought to bear on those undergoing overdose, the story opens up into a new and ghastly light.
Over the course of the Spice epidemic, custody at CSP-Sac responded to countless overdoses, and my frequent presence at these events, marked as a convenient misfortune, meant that I was cast, again and again, into the role of a watchful bystander, observing as guards stormed in unison across the yard, the body of a poor Spice-addled mind eagerly encircled by a hungry brood of disastrous possibilities, death quivering on the brink of indiscretion.
Where the calculated and organized application of bodily control—achieved through non lethal force—might look good on paper, in a real world situation, where this force emerges extemporaneously and from the careless and resentful hands of brutish authoritarians, it’s another matter entirely. Typically, officers involved in uses of force include a portion of those who have been poorly trained and permitted to freely cultivate their professional identities around institutionalized violent ideologies. This reality brings a terrifying possibility into view: the risk that, during a use of force, the devaluation of incarcerated life will somehow give way, eking out from the hands of a brutish ideologues, and as its effect seeps in on that mass of colliding bodies, the poor soul which lay at the bottom of the pile is rendered lifeless.
The question here should be aimed at understanding the consequences, asking what harmful effects are let loose when the loss of an incarcerated person’s life at the hands of custody has become so normalized that this death passes without mention or even a visible sign of reverence from anyone who works at the prison? What other harms are empowered within a culture such as this?
After Leong’s death in April, I made a conscious effort to engage with staff and administrators about the incident, looking for signs of moral acknowledgement, recognition that a life had been tragically lost at the hands of custody. Time and again, I was shocked by the responses I received, my sentiment made to feel worthless as the vastness of values divided became ever more apparent. I could not find even a noticeable trace of that somber countenance which I had assumed we all learn as children, the reservation with which we are taught to attend matters of death. In the absence of this common shred of human decency, I realized that, at CSP-Sac, the prison’s institutional culture had effectively erased not merely the compulsion to uphold the immense value of human life, but also, the compulsion to recognize and openly acknowledge the tragedy of life lost, no matter whose life it was.
In late April, a CSP correctional sergeant reported to the Incarcerated Advisory Council (IAC) that the only training ‘B’ facility staff had been given concerning Spice had been limited to identifying signs of its use and intoxication in incarcerated folx. He told the IAC that custody had not been trained on the unique health dangers associated with synthetic cannabinoid overdose, nor the heightened risks posed by certain use of force tactics. The sergeant dismissed the potential risks raised by the IAC in a tone which was almost cavalier, characterizing the possibility of death as the fault of the spice users, a risk they brought upon themselves. I walked away knowing that I couldn’t break through the wall of custodial cultural, and that to them my words would never matter.
As a community representative at the time, I felt obligated to make some kind of statement, and in April of 2024 I submitted a report to administrators and custody representatives at CSP-Sac, presenting the report’s findings at the warden’s meeting. The report drew on multiple peer reviewed academic articles, as well as interviews conducted with both custody and medical personnel at CSP-Sac. Focused, in part, on the effects of synthetic cannabinoids on the human body, the report made careful note of the unique respiratory and cardiovascular vulnerabilities which typically occur during overdose cases. The report also presented evidence that certain use of force practices, specifically prone restraint with compression of the torso–a practice employed by custody at CSP-Sac–had been associated with instances of sudden death in countless studies. I told administrators that these restraint tactics, coupled with the unique physiological dangers posed by excess use of synthetic cannabinoids, created a potentially deadly situation whenever force was used to restrain a person overdosing on spice. I urged them to reconsider the lack of training their staff had been given and the risk of further loss of life.
The response given to me by administrators dangled in the air with the hollow gestures of puppets, never truly able to convince anyone that humanity lingered behind their forced animation. At Sac, however, custody runs the show, and these scenes reek of horror, the standing fear caused by having a rabid frothing custodial beast hover over every deliberation, leaving administrators cowering in their ultimate capitulation, spineless noodles swaying in the wind.
People are still dying at CSP-Sac, nearly every month. Though such tragedies do not always occur at the hands of custody, in a world where lives are made not to matter, where death is blamed on the deceased, and where custody is permitted to joke about the tragedies they had a hand in making, the certainty we can leave with is that more deaths will come. All we can do is give a voice to the departed, say their name, and contest the devaluation of their life; in this, we bring them back, neither alive nor dead, just zombies seeking retribution.
