(Clearwisdom.net) Below is a personal account of the hellish life that I endured when I was locked up in the Haizhu District Detention Center and the Chatou Legal Education School.
Any Falun Gong practitioner incarcerated in the Haizhu District Detention Center has to undergo full body searches, including searches of their undergarments. Then the police use scissors to cut all of the buttons and zippers off of practitioners' clothes. All personal property, including shoes, is confiscated. Everyone has to walk around barefoot while holding up their pants with their hands, which makes both walking and sitting difficult and awkward.
If you do not want to go barefoot, you must pay the detention center officials to buy you shoes, which are usually several times more expensive than they would usually be. The prices are firmly set at either 50 or 100 yuan, so that the police can make profit.
Each cell is about 10 to 20 square meters in size, with a wooden bed that can hold 10 people. Generally, however, the cell has 17 or 18 persons, so there is never enough room for everyone to lie down, let alone sleep. There are surveillance cameras and speakers installed in each cell. The police use the cameras to monitor and the speakers to curse at practitioners and inmates. Each room with over 10 inmates is given a small bucket of water, so the quick are able to drink a bit, while those who are slow must go thirsty. The food smells of mildew, making it very difficult to eat. Some people would pay the prison officials for some instant noodles, but these would be snatched away by other inmates and disappear in no time.
The toilet is a bucket placed inside the cell, making the cell filthy and giving it a terrible smell. The cell is both a restroom and a dining room in one. There is no place to bathe or to wash clothes. All of the inmates develop itchy and painful reddish pimples all over their bodies. Some non-practitioner inmates get sick but do not receive proper medical attention.
The Chatou Brainwashing Center is an evil place known to the outside world as "The Chatou Legal Education School." Actually, it is a demons' lair. The whole building is surrounded with high walls that are topped with broken glass, and it is also protected by layers of iron gates. It is different from the detention center in that all of the detainees are Falun Gong practitioners. I was locked up in a solitary cell with the only window covered over, and I never saw the sunlight. Outside the cell there were guards on watch 24 hours a day. Being confined to a cell like this, inmates feel that their chests are stuffed up, their minds unclear, and they feel numb. There was a surveillance camera installed inside the cell, so that each and every movement, including the use of the toilet and changing clothes, would be monitored by the authorities. Once in a while, the police and assigned inmates would come in for a complete search, including each piece of clothing, bedding, and blanket. They would confiscate personal items as they wished, without any reason or explanation.
Every day the police, assigned inmates, and those who had been "transformed" would take turns brainwashing the imprisoned practitioners. They would make use of lies and threats. They would lie by distorting factual information and making people subscribe to their own evil logic by blurring the truth in people's minds. They would use threats to forbid practitioners from clarifying the truth and would do everything they could to slander Falun Gong and its founder. In order for them to reach their "transformation" quota, they would force everyone to state their stance on Falun Gong. When someone did not agree to the slander of Falun Gong or to give up their own practice of Falun Gong, the authorities would rip off their disguises and show their cruelty as they tortured practitioners.
The authorities always claimed that they "did not beat people." However, practitioners' wretched screams could be heard by everyone, and they lasted a long time. Those in charge would do inhuman things to kind and harmless people under the guise of a "legal education school." When families came to visit practitioners, the authorities put on friendly faces. Without visitors around, they used the most savage forms of torture on practitioners. The Chatou Brainwashing Center is truly hell on earth.
