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With temperatures hovering near zero and windchills approaching minus 20 degrees, Spain Bady was ordered to leave his cell at Algoa Correctional Center on Saturday morning and clear snow from prison walkways.

He refused, telling the corrections officer directing him to go outside that he has been enrolled in education programs and is exempt from labor assignments. That is not what the prison records showed, was the response, and he had two options — go to work or go to administrative segregation.

“So they locked me up, cuffed me up, took me down to the hole, stripped me naked and left me there exposed to the elements in a building that is not heated,” Bady said Monday afternoon in an interview with The Independent.

The storm that covered most of Missouri in snow between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon left approximately 6 inches on the ground at Algoa in Jefferson City.

While the storm was still underway, prisoner activist Dena Notz, founder of the organization Collectively Changing Corrections, began fielding reports about prisoners being sent out to shovel snow at all hours of the day while small utility vehicles with snow plows and brushes remained idle.

Along with the report about Bady being punished for refusing, Notz fielded reports of people being rousted from their beds at Moberly Correctional Center for three-hour shifts ending at midnight, then being called out again before dawn to do the same job.

“I don’t think they should be able to force me to go out there and shovel snow at midnight, at negative 12 degrees, for hours,” Wesley Hays, who is in custody at the Moberly prison, said in an interview with The Independent. “I can’t argue with them, because I get in trouble, then I get disciplined for something that I don’t think we should be doing anyway.”

The air temperature was below 10 degrees and the wind-chill in central Missouri was minus 10 degrees or lower continuously from Friday morning until Sunday afternoon.

“The officers have warm clothes to wear, and they have........

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