PETALING JAYA, Oct 7 — Three former prison employees from Oklahoma, United States were slapped with criminal charges after they handcuffed inmates and forced them to listen to the viral children’s song Baby Shark on repeat.
The New York Times reported that ex-detention officers Christian Miles and Gregory Butler, both 21, had committed the offence on five inmates separately on at least five occasions in November and December last year at the Oklahoma County Jail.
An affidavit stated that Miles and Butler would punish an inmate by bringing him into an empty attorney visitation room before handcuffing him against the wall.
An internal investigation preceding the criminal charges found that the inmate would be forced to stand for as long as two hours while Miles and Butler blared Baby Shark from a computer.
Miles later told investigators that the song reflected an inside joke between him and Butler.
The duo further added to the prisoners’ suffering by dragging one of them out of bed into the room at 2am followed by another at 3am.
Miles, Butler, and their former supervisor Christopher Hendershott, 50, were charged at the Oklahoma County District Court on Monday with cruelty to prisoners, corporal punishment to an inmate, and conspiracy.
Hendershott reportedly knew that Miles and Butler were carrying out the musical torture but did nothing to stop it.
Oklahoma County district attorney David Prater described the Baby Shark punishment as “cruel and inhumane,” adding that it put “undue emotional stress on the inmates who were most likely already suffering.”
Prater said that Miles and Butler possess a long history of mistreatment and were the subjects of numerous inmate complaints throughout their career.
While the use of a children’s song for punishment might seem like a comical act, sonic torture has a dark history of being wielded by prison authorities to corner people into submission.
A 2008 report by The Guardian states that inmates in Guantanamo Bay were forced to listen to Metallica’s Enter Sandman on loop while Deicide’s F**k Your God has been used by the American military to psychologically torture prisoners in Iraq.
