‘Orange Crush’ Officers Sexually Humiliated, Abused Men in Illinois Prisons, Lawsuit Says
For more than 10 years, a group of incarcerated men have said Illinois prison guards forced them into painful stress positions and forced them to rub their genitals on one another.
More than a decade ago, Illinois correctional officers allegedly attacked, sexually humiliated, and tortured hundreds of prisoners. At the end of March, a lawsuit filed on the victims’ behalf is finally scheduled to go to trial.
In 2015, the Uptown People’s Law Center and other attorneys filed a class action suit against Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) officials and members of the state’s Special Operations Response Team (SORT)—known as “Orange Crush” due to their uniform’s colors. The suit says that in 2014, Orange Crush officers conducted violent shakedowns at numerous prisons holding thousands of people. They allegedly forced prisoners to stand in painful positions for hours and made men rub their genitals against other men.
For roughly 10 years, the victims have fought in court for damages, compliance with Prison Rape Elimination Act standards, and an end to the Orange Crush officers’ abuse.
The suit alleges that the officers “gratuitously inflicted punishment for the sole purpose of causing humiliation and needless pain.”
The Illinois Attorney General’s Office has said in court filings that the victims’ accounts of the shakedowns are false. IDOC declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
The first shakedown detailed in the complaint occurred at Illinois River Correctional Center in April 2014. Orange Crush officers allegedly ordered the men to undress and stand outside their cells, one at a time. The officers told the men to bend over, spread their buttocks with their hands, and then open their mouths with their fingers.
The complaint says that when some of the victims asked to wash their hands before touching their mouths, they were told to “shut the fuck up” and threatened with solitary confinement. Some of the Orange Crush officers were female.
Guards then allegedly ordered the men to dress but did not let them wear underwear. IDOC officials told the court that the “SORT tactical unit limits offenders to pants, overshirts, and shoes for legitimate security reasons.”
The suit says that officers handcuffed the men’s hands behind their backs with their palms facing outwards and their thumbs pointed to the sky. The officers lined up and allegedly chanted “punish the inmate” while smacking their batons into their hands.
From there, the complaint says the violence only escalated.
The officers allegedly slammed each man’s head into the back of the person in front of them and ordered the men to stand “nuts to butts”—with one man’s genitals pressed against the buttocks of the man in front of him. The officers then “shoved their batons in between each prisoner’s legs and jerked upwards, forcing the prisoner to straighten his legs while keeping his back bent over at a 90-degree angle onto the prisoner in front of him,” the suit says.
The officers ordered the men to march to the gym and allegedly yelled that they didn’t “want to see any fucking daylight” between them.
“Every time that a prisoner’s head came off of the back of the prisoner in front of him, officers responded with violence,” the complaint says.
The victims say that officers pulled some men out of the line and “choked and pulled [them] to the ground while other officers jabbed them in their backs with batons.”
Once the group arrived at the gym, the officers allegedly made them stand for several hours facing the wall, handcuffed with their heads down. One officer allegedly yelled, “This is punishment for all your sins!” He told them they could not go to the bathroom and would not receive medical assistance or water.
When the officers marched the men back to their housing wing, guards allegedly forced the prisoners into the same painful and humiliating positions as before. The men say officers ransacked their cells and, in some cases, took their legal documents and items bought at the commissary.
The complaint says Orange Crush officers also conducted the same shakedowns at Menard, Big Muddy River, and Lawrence Correctional Centers.
In a 2016 court filing, the victims’ lawyers told the court that no officers had been disciplined for their actions. Incarcerated writer Phil Hartsfield described the traumatic shakedowns in a 2018 piece for the news outlet Truthout.
“When it comes to dealing with Orange Crush, prisoners are strip searched and fully restrained in handcuffs and/or shackles,” he wrote. “If the inmate is ‘non-compliant,’ well, that’s where the name ‘crush’ comes from—because that’s when they have their fun crushing you, six of them with chemical agent, shield, and baton. It’s a battle you can’t win, period.”