Chapter 9 · The Body on the Floor

Yesterday morning, I am sitting on the sofa with a cup of coffee and the newspaper BA. I have showered and got ready for school. Then the alarm goes off.

The officers come in and say we are to be locked in our cells. I ask whether we are not supposed to stay on the residential unit when the alarm goes off. No. This time it is our cells.

Then something is going on.

A week earlier, they turned my room upside down. The big discovery that time: a PUNCHING BAG. They were looking for a phone then, too. I was already on my way to school, and the senior officer let me go after a trip into the office with the handheld metal detector. Kind as he was, he only gave me a bit of a grope with it. Fair enough.

This time, I lie down on the bed. This could take a few hours. Then the senior officer is standing there with two others. Three men in front of my bed. Black plastic gloves.

They are looking for a mobile phone. I have to strip.

A mobile phone? That is what you were looking for last week. You searched the room. There was none then. Why would it be here now?

They know there is a phone on the unit. The room is to be searched again, and they are going to check every item of my clothing.

But at that very moment, I am preoccupied with something else entirely. Marita. What she told me the day before. I have to tell the senior officer. I have to make him understand what this means.

Because whatever picture you now have of a senior officer wearing black gloves in front of my bed: I believe he is a good person. He has a father's heart. He understands some of what I am going through, and I think he wants to help. At the same time, he has the uniform, the rank, his colleagues, his entire adult working life in this place. Sometimes I think I can see it tearing at him. His conscience has something to wrestle with.

And no, it is not Stockholm syndrome.

So I say fine, jump out of bed and start undressing as the words come tumbling out. I have become so used to this that my clothes come off before I have time to register what I feel. I tell him about Marita, what she said, how this is what I have been trying to explain all along. Now he has to help me. Now it has to come out.

My mind immediately races on: Surely Lene cannot keep using what I believe is a fabricated account now? Someone has to investigate what Gørbitz has done. Breach of duty. Misconduct in office. Everything I have reported to the police and tried to get someone to address. The police dropped the case last time. Will they do it again? How eager are people to investigate those they have worked closely with, year after year?

If Marita tells the police what she told me, surely they have to bloody well look at the basis of the case again. And if it turns out that false information has been written in my case, who will investigate the other cases bearing the same signature? How many people are living with a decision no one has bothered to pick apart at the seams?

I barely have time to draw breath between thoughts. The senior officer has to interrupt me several times. I stand there peeling off my clothes and talking nineteen to the dozen, excited, almost happy. There may be an opening. Someone might believe me. I might get out to my little girl. Someone might even say that what happened to me was wrong. An acknowledgement. Something to soothe the wound. Perhaps from the Directorate of the Norwegian Correctional Service, KDI, itself.

No. Now I am fantasising.

It must be a strange sight for the three of them. A man smiling and talking about hope while he takes his clothes off on command.

The senior officer says he will talk to Marita. He hears what I am saying. I keep going: Marita said I had to talk to him, ask for Kenneth and me to be questioned again. This has to be recorded. Now. Before she has too much time to think about what saying it aloud could cost her. She loves her job, too. A respected team player. I am afraid of what will happen when loyalty to her colleagues gets in the way of what she told me. When she sees how far the decision is from what I describe, this becomes serious for more people than just me.

Yes, he will talk to her. But right now, he has a job to do. The boxer shorts have to come off, too.

Then everything else stops.

The boxer shorts. Completely naked.

Now my thoughts take a different direction. The security cell. Eight men. My clothes being forcibly removed while I lie on the ground. I have been there before. And the day after tomorrow, I am due to have prison leave with my daughter. What happens to that if I refuse now? How little would it take for me to lose her that day as well?

There are three of them in my room. Afterwards, I see eight in the corridor. The one at the front has a baton, a shield and a helmet. I see another twelve on the stairs and in the corridor below. People from Bergen Prison, people from Bjørgvin. Gold stars, stripes and boots. A lot to coordinate. A lot of prisoners to strip.

This must be one fucking important mobile phone.

But in here, right now, my boxer shorts stand between me and what I am afraid will come next. Off they come. My hands go straight over my crotch.

No. Arms out to the sides.

I turn my arse towards them and hold my arms out. That is uncomfortable enough. Perhaps some people enjoy being forced to expose themselves to three men. It is certainly not my thing.

No. The other way round.

So there I stand. Stark naked, arms out and legs apart. Three men in a V between me and the door. They look. I am to stand still.

I try to joke it away. It is cold in here, I say, that is why I do not want to. A short laugh from the officer. Then I turn round, they take a look, and I am allowed to cover my crotch again.

The clothes are examined one item at a time. I ask them to check the boxer shorts first so I can put them on. They let me. A trainee explains that he just needed to check thoroughly.

Just check thoroughly.

I ask the senior officer how small this phone actually is. It cannot be much of a thing. He laughs a little and says it is small.

I tell him he knows me. Two years without a positive drug test, without them finding what they suspect me of having. He knows I want nothing to do with the criminal milieu here. I have made that clear. I do not want to hear about it.

He knows. But if anyone could make use of a phone, with all the writing I do, it would have to be me.

I take the joke and parry it. I do not need to break the rules for that, dear Tore. I have fifteen ChatGPT agents running on automation, I say. They are working while we stand here talking. Access requests and all sorts. We are going to get to the bottom of what has been done to me.

Then comes that knowing smile of his. There is something I like about that smile. Yes, it had to be something like that, he says. He receives emails from me in the morning while he can see on camera that I am sitting eating breakfast.

Silence.

I do not need to say anything else.

We walk down the corridor. I sit down in the projector room with the rest of C7. Apparently, they had saved me for last.

C7. My residential unit. In my head, I turn it into a little riff on Kamelen: killers, no sex offenders, me and the loneliness. A nod to Kamelen. That is how humour surfaces in here, too, right in the middle of what is not funny at all.

Because all of this is about a mobile phone. The tool you are probably holding as you read. Or that is lying close enough for you to pick up without getting up.

When I was younger, former prisoners sometimes visited schools. Men who had been around the block were meant to frighten young people away from crime with their stories. I think they could spare themselves the whole talk now. Put up a poster: Do something that sends you to prison, and your phone could be gone for two years.

That would get people's attention.

Or have a man stand in front of the class and explain it completely deadpan: He committed a crime. Went to prison. No phone. For a whole year. Think about that next time.

Mic drop.

Then I start playing with words again. Turning it into something people can laugh at. But I was not sitting in that projector room because I had signed up for a comedy show. I had just stood naked in front of three men because they were looking for a phone.

That is when the question starts to gnaw at me: What does the prison wall do to my body? Move that same body a hundred metres. Hold me down out there, rip off my clothes against my will, put me on display naked. What would you call it then? Who would you call?

In here, they can say they are only doing their job. The scars do not get a new name along with the justification. I am the one who has to live with them. My body does not lie there calculating which side of the wall it was on when it learned to be afraid.

And I ask about the phone, too. Deprivation of liberty is supposed to be the punishment. It is a principle we like to show off. How far do you follow it when it actually becomes inconvenient for you?

I have a mobile phone when I am on prison leave. I have conditions to follow, including not contacting the victim in my case. I have not done so. I have no intention of doing so. What changes the moment I come back through the gate, apart from who holds the key?

That I might lend the phone to someone else? That the other person might do something illegal? Then I want to hear why an imagined chain of other people's actions should be enough to take away the most ordinary tool of 2026. I am responsible for what I do, too. I am trying to stay in touch with my family and keep the life waiting outside in order.

Here, we have thirty minutes of phone time a week. The world outside has moved banking, mail, school, appointments and half of people's contact with one another onto a screen. In here, it feels as if phone time has stood still for twenty years. We are going back to that society. In the meantime, we are supposed to manage without the tools almost everyone out there depends on.

And then there is everything that can be at stake. Isolation. Prison leave. The progress towards release you have worked for. The very permission that lets your child spend time with you. Every time you consider protesting, all of this is there. If you will not undress, you can be stripped. If you want to defend yourself against the humiliation, that defence can become the next case against you.

Try explaining that logic to a child: Dad cannot come after all. He had a phone. Maybe he was on Facebook.

If the leave is cancelled, so is the child's time with her father. How much of that punishment are you prepared to let her bear to enforce a rule about a tool the rest of society carries in its pocket?

And finally, the very specific question: Why do I have to stand there with my hands out, first this way and then the other? If you think the phone is hidden up my arse, you have not seen it just because I am naked. What, then, have you achieved with this particular humiliation? Why is a check like the one at the airport not enough?

Is it because people there still expect to be treated as human beings?

A West · 2023. When I was imprisoned in 2023, the anxiety came on A West. Inside the cell, I had flashbacks to violence by adults in the child welfare system. The past came back in the situation I was in. The response from those who held power over me was force, forced stripping and a security cell.

This is the incident I mean when I write about revenge. As I experienced the course of events, the coercive treatment led to self-harm. An ambulance was called. Think about what happens to someone who is already afraid of violence by adults when adults again take control of his body by force. It was torture, as I experienced it. And then all of it can end up as an account of how difficult he was to manage.

I want the whole incident brought to light. The reports. The decisions. What they wrote about the force and the security cell, about the self-harm and the ambulance. I also want the information about the windows Statsbygg replaced, and what it cost. Who wrote what afterwards? What effect did the incident have on how I was treated from then on?

I ask because I believe there may be a trail of retaliation there. Because I want to know whether I was made an example of for others who resisted. It must be investigated while the documents still exist. The incident must not be allowed to disappear behind the word management.