I spent a year and a half there starting in 1982. It was my first real understanding of what true evil was, something that prior to this I had never really believed.

I spent months -- literally months -- locked up inside without ever seeing daylight even through a window. I watched as kids I knew were drugged with so much chemical poison that they would just stand wherever you placed them, drooling on themselves and going to the bathroom where they stood, their minds completely destroyed. Probably forever.

I will never forget the horror of that place. The physical and mental torture. The brainwashing. I know it sounds like I am being melodramatic or exagerating but in truth the inhuman abuse that went on in this place was beyond comprehension. It was so bad that doing hours -- standing frozen with your nose an inch from a wall (and I literally spent MONTHS doing this) -- was a relief.

But worse than any physical abuse, worse than any beatings or even the methodical infliction of pain (as just one example of this, being handcuffed, stripped naked, then having a dozen guys devote hours to pealing your skin off by grinding you into the rough carpet in their time out cells) worse by far was the mental abuse and sheer INSANITY of this place. It was like some crazy mind control experiment administered by maniacs.

Obviously just telling someone what happened doesn't begin to get the depth of the horror these monsters inflicted across. The horror rose not only from what they DID, but from the sure knowlege that they might litterally do anything. They were capable of anything at all, and you watched them do it. And when it was your turn that terror was always there.

Picture yourself sitting in a chair. You are given a pad and pencil and told to write a confession. You are not told what you supposedly did, and it really doesn't matter. So you write something to make them happy, and an hour later they show up screaming and beating you for lying to them. But one guard is there (thankfully, right? Sure) to calm the other down. He is the good cop. He is your "friend." He wants to help you, but you have to help him to do that. Just tell him what you did. Write a real confession.

After an entire day of this -- hour after hour after hour - with nothing to do or think about except to wonder, you start to believe that you must have done something. But every time they return its the same thing, the beatings, the screaming, the fear. By the end of the first day you are confessing to swearing, confessing to the dirty thoughts you had seeing an actress, confessing to having a bazooka hidden away, whatever. But the beatings go on, each time accompanied by "We know about THAT, your friends have already confessed, now tell us what we want to know.".

By the end of day two with no sleep and constant abuse you are are beyond trying to invent things. No, now you BELIEVE them. But the beatings and screaming and torture continue. They switch out, you don't.

By the end of day three you not only believe the imaginary things they beat into your head, but you pretty much believe anything at all, you exist in an insane world, a world that might as well have been imagined by Stephen King, a world where right is wrong or right or whatever the fark they tell you. And your friend cop... well long before this he has been beating you to, but always with that "I wish you wouldn't make me do this" insanity.

And then one day it ends and the next installment of fun begins. Maybe it is a month or two staring at a wall, maybe a lie detector thrown in. Certainly more beatings and the excitement of watching as other kids are destroyed.

I spent a year and a half there. I went in a shy kid and came out a wreck. But at least I came out as a human with his mind badly bruised but fully functioning. Too many others were not so lucky. I said it was evil and I was not stretching the truth at all. If the public understood a hundredth of what I saw those monsters would spend the rest of their lives in prison.

If anyone would like to talk to me about this place, feel free to email me.

you and i share the exact same story and im haunted every night by this