Rapper Kodak Black and his legal team are suing the Federal Bureau of Prisons, alleging that the treatment he’s receiving in a Kentucky prison amounts to torture. The 23-year-old rap star, born Dieuson Octave but who legally changed his name to Bill Kapri, was sentenced to 46 months on federal gun charges in December 2019, according to the New York Times.
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TMZ reports that The “Dying to Live” artist has been in the Big Sandy federal prison in Kentucky since Oct. 2019, when he was transferred there from a Miami, Florida facility after a fight with another inmate that resulted in an injury to a corrections officer. Big Sandy is a maximum-security prison in Inez, Kentucky.
Black alleges that since he’s been in Kentucky, he’s been “tortured,” citing several incidents of abuse. He says he was put in a four-point restraint in a backless hospital gown for over 6 hours without bathroom access and as a result, urinated and defecated on himself. He says correction officers joked and laughed during the incident.
He says that medical records document that he suffered with vomiting, mouth bleeding and lacerations. He also alleges that he received a “gang beating” when he first got to the prison as retaliation for the officer being injured in Florida. He says guards “flicked” his testicles in the beating.
He alleges as well, reports TMZ, that he’s been placed on his knees “execution-style” while wet, which has humiliated and injured him. A practicing Hebrew Israelite, Black has also been denied access to a rabbi although he alleges other prisoners have received access to the clergy.
However, according to the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, many Hebrew Israelite sects are classified as hate groups and are anti-Semitic in their beliefs.
Kodak, a 2018 Grammy nominee for Cardi B‘s “Bodak Yellow,” had released two albums before his imprisonment, Painting Pictures which went to #3 in 2017, and Dying to Live which was #1 in 2018. He grew up with reigning NFL MVP Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson in Pompano Beach, Florida.
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While imprisoned on gun charges, Black has a pending sexual assault case in South Carolina, stemming from an allegation of assaulting a woman in a hotel room after a show in Florence in 2016.