A story by Buddy Bieler from 2025
All of my life I have tried to drown out my thoughts and feelings with drugs and alcohol. All that did was bury my trauma and forced me to deal with it later in life. I’m forty years old and I’ve been sober for four years now.
I was first incarcerated at twelve or thirteen, maybe younger I don’t really recall. I do know it was 1997-1998. I grew up in poverty and had stolen money out of a safe from a local business for my sister. She was pregnant and we had nothing to support her and her soon to be born baby. I was caught and incarcerated. It was my first time away from home and I was scared and sad. On my initial intake I was asked a lot of personal questions and I started to cry.
That’s how I found myself in the SMU for the first time. I was a kid and they sent me to 23-hour lock in for my tears.
I was placed in the Special Management Unit (SMU) at the Maine Youth Center (MYC) which was later changed to the ICU at Long Creek Youth Development Center. The SMU was designed to hold kids who acted out, were suicidal, had behavior issues, or who couldn’t get along with the others. They had these cottages that held between twenty-five to forty kids. If we got into fights or acted out, that’s where we were sent.
The SMU was dark, damp, and dreary. It was horrifying. I felt like I was trapped in a horror movie. To this day I still have nightmares when I see something on TV that resembles it. Talk about being traumatized. They had this old restraint chair that was different from what they use nowadays. They could strap someone in while they were handcuffed from behind. When they did that it forced the restrainee to sit on their own cuffed hands. I can tell you this is very painful. They could also strap us in with our arms strapped to the arms of the chair itself. When they put someone in this chair they were supposed to videotape it with this great, big camcorder they had. The only time the camera was turned on was after they had been torturing us for a while and we began to lash out in an attempt to fight back. They could turn it off and on as they wanted.
While I was at MYC, me and seven other boys were placed in SMU for our behavior. There were two officers that worked together in this unit regularly, Mr. Jackson and Mr. Berry. They were two of the largest men I’d ever seen, as big as NFL linemen and were very intimidating. These officers were loud, mean, cruel, vicious, ruthless, dirty, and sick and they were there five days a week.
When these officers worked, torture was the one thing on their minds. I am convinced the only reason they came to work was to take all their frustrations and all their life problems out on us boys. We were just kids. Not one of us deserved what they did to us, nor does anyone else in this world. They’d arrive around 6:30 in the morning. They would go through the motions of rounds, and feed us breakfast with the other officers. Somewhere between 7-7:30 the other officers would leave for the day and that was when the hell and nightmares began.
One day a boy found out his mother was killed in a car accident the day prior. The two officers started right in on him. They would say things like “she was killed because she had you, brought you into this world.” “Your mom was the biggest whore around.” Another kid’s mother was in a wheelchair and had HIV or AIDS. They call him Rolaids, straight dog him and his mom out until one of us would finally snap. They pushed all of us to our breaking point. They pushed us over the edge. They pushed until we lashed out with anger and hate, letting out our emotions. Now what do you get when you push a young boy to the point of no return? They did this to every one of us. This was just the beginning of the pain.
Once they pushed us to the point where now we were angry and ready to fight back with rage, anger, and hate, they had a reason to come into our cell. The officers would cuff us and bring us to the restraint chair. When they popped the cell door, they would rush in and brutalize us quick, as hard and as fast as they could. Sometimes we could last longer than other times. It was just a matter of time before they had us up in the air smashing us into the floor repeatedly until all the fight and air from our lungs were snatched from our bodies. We struggled for one single breath, sometimes fighting for it with two 300lbs men on top of us bending our arms behind our backs, even sometimes making our elbow touch the back of our own head. One of them would put their forearm across the side of our face while the other side would be pressed on the concrete floor. They would put all their weight into it. I can still feel pressure from his arm right now as I write this.
The back room where the chair was kept was where the real pain and suffering began. When I say suffering, I mean life changing stuff. Other kids still in their cells couldn’t see back what was happening because a wall blocked the view, but we could hear everything that went on back there.
The screams were so loud and heart piercing. The sound of flesh hitting flesh. The worst of all was the gagging or choking sounds and the sound of bodies slapping together combined with the screams and the pleas of them begging for it to stop. There were eight of us down there during this time. Every one of us experienced the same things. We all were tortured, degraded, sexually assaulted and were made to feel and think that it was our own fault, that we were worthless. We were just kids.
There were eight of us, but today I’m the only one left alive. Whatever issues brought us to corrections were exacerbated by the abuse we suffered during our time incarcerated. From then on we all developed severe drug addictions. The other seven were all cut up, self-mutilated and are now dead by drug overdose or suicide. The last was found hanging in his cell at the county jail. Every one of us went on to prison and pretty much did nothing with our lives. Drowning these memories in drugs ruined my life and damaged the lives of those around me. I’m ashamed of what my life has become and I’m so sorry for what happened to the seven others. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don't think of them.
I’m currently serving a 55 year sentence and doing what I can to be my best self while incarcerated. I think about how so many kids in this world are mistreated and abused. Take it from me, go find someone you can trust and open up to about it. Holding this stuff in is just a disaster waiting to happen. As the years go by it catches up to you. I’ve spent my whole life trying to kill the pain of my childhood, but it’s all still there haunting me. I wish I knew then it would have been okay to talk to someone. I encourage anyone dealing with trauma to find someone to talk to. They will have compassion for you. Please get some help. I swore I would do better. I owe it to myself and the seven others.
Because of my time incarcerated I know this system sets people up to fail.
