Naked as the day you were born

Uzair S. Paracha was 23 when he was arrested by the US government and charged with supplying “material support” to al-Qaeda. In the chaos of a post 9/11 landscape, his conviction was collateral to a culture of paranoia, vengeance and fervent Islamophobia. Paracha refused a plea deal and in turn was imprisoned for 17 years. The Man Who Refused to Plead Guilty (Pluto Press, 2026) is Paracha’s account of his experience before, during and after his incarceration, a meditation on injustice and recovery in the face of a wrongful conviction.

On Monday morning I thought it was going to be another round of the same thing, but I was approached by a different guy at the FBI office who might have been a senior officer. He explained that I was going to be arrested and taken in front of a judge and transferred to the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) nearby, the FBI jail in Manhattan. The thing that I was most afraid of was now a certainty that I had to accept and walk towards helplessly.

I was escorted away in handcuffs, which they covered up under some clothing. One of the agents escorting me was around thirty years old. He asked me my age. Twenty-three. He quoted some statutes to speculate that I might be as old as him by the time I get out. It sounded like forever.

I was processed and eventually taken in front of Judge Michael Mukasey, who I would soon learn through the prison grapevine was famous for always asking the government some tough questions to sound impartial and skeptical, but rarely ever refusing their requests no matter how unconventional. I walked into the courtroom and was surprised to see three of my relatives and a lawyer in court. The lawyer had no experience in terrorism cases and was a last-minute attempt to arrange some representation for me. There was also a court-appointed lawyer because everything was so last minute. I didn’t expect any of this.

The “charge” with which I was presented was a material witness warrant, which is technically just a legal excuse to keep someone behind bars for up to ninety days without charging them with any crime because they might have some information the government needs.

Before the hearing, the lawyer explained that the government wasn’t really interested in me. It was more about my father. I was emotionally and physically exhausted, but I felt he had no idea how serious things were and tried to explain to him that it was far worse than he thought.

After my court hearing I was shackled and escorted by federal marshalls to a holding cell under the court building. It was a cage with a one-piece toilet-plus-sink. The room was freezing, and the air conditioner was as loud as a plane engine. As I lay on the cold steel bench, I remembered my cousin recently telling me about the time he ended up behind bars due to an unpaid traffic ticket. He said that the holding cell was one of the worst experiences he had to endure until one of the cops at the station turned out to be a customer and processed him out quickly. I made a mental note to compare our experiences if I ever saw him again.

Another thing that ran through my head were all the old memories of me getting into trouble during high school and my early days of college. I would try to hide it from my parents but sometimes they’d find out, and the memory of their disappointment came back to mind. I messed up and got into trouble again, this time at a whole new level.

While the outside world believes that time is money and measures things in seconds and minutes, the prison world is in absolutely no hurry at all—time slows down painfully. Every single process is frustratingly slow. I also learned later that I was on cell-alone status, separated from the other prisoners who were together in the larger holding cells. I was put in handcuffs and shackles and taken to another elevator which led to a tunnel connecting the court to the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) MCC, which is probably one of the ugliest buildings that Manhattan has to offer. 

The Metropolitan Correctional Center was a 12-storey detention facility located on Park Row, Lower Manhattan. It was opened in 1975 and has been “temporarily” closed since 2021. As well as a number of Al-Qaeda affiliates, its most notable inmate in recent history was Jeffrey Epstein, who was the first recorded suicide in the building in 21 years.

I went from an office in midtown Manhattan
to solitary confinement over the weekend

From above it looks like two broken crosses, and from the street it is the ugliest shade of dark pink covered with bars and barbed wire everywhere. But at that time, I was being led through underground tunnels and would only learn about its outside appearance over time. My last name was about to become my only name and a registration number would become part of my new identity. I was taken to a changing room and a guard (known as a correctional officer or CO) there asked me to take off all my clothes. When I was down to my undergarments, I asked if that was enough. In a thick Caribbean accent he replied, “Naked as the day you were born.” After I complied, he told me to open my mouth and stick my tongue out, bend my ears forward, put my fingers through my hair, show my underarms, turn around to show the bottoms of my feet and touch my toes so they could see the rectal area. Then I was given some used orange underwear, orange socks, an orange T-shirt, an orange jumpsuit and a pair of canvas shoes that were called bust shoes.

My belongings were placed in a box to mail to my family, and I was locked in another holding cell with a Black American guy named Craig who had been in jail before. He was a friendly guy even though I was too numb with my problems to feel scared of anything else anyway. While Craig sat singing some R&B song he had been working on, I looked around at the filthy brown broken tiles on the floor, the government gray windows with heavy bars, the blinding white ceiling and walls under heavy lights and dirty wooden bench that ran all along the walls of the cell. The door to the bathroom was missing and there was a steel toilet with a leaky sink. We were waiting for a few hours while he told me about all the things that a person can learn in prison, including short courses and musical lessons.

The COs opened a slot in the cell door and gave us two trays of meatloaf. As soon as I put a piece of my first prison meal in my mouth, I threw it right back out. I walked to the bathroom that had no door and flushed the food down the toilet so that they didn’t know I had not eaten anything. There was a heavily barred window that looked out onto a small side street a few floors down, and pedestrians were walking in both directions. The normalcy of their daily routine seemed so alien to the situation I was in now. I still had free air in my lungs, but I had no idea what lay ahead of me—only that it didn’t look good.

After a few hours with Craig, I was shown to a physician’s assistant. He asked me if I was from Pakistan, and I nodded. He asked me if I spoke Urdu, and I nodded again. He asked me if I knew what they thought I had done, and I numbly shook my head. He showed me the top part of a piece of paper he had on his desk where someone had written the words: “conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.” I was too tired to give any visible reaction but inside it only felt worse. He asked me if it was true. I shook my head. He told me that therefore I shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

As of 2019, over 97% of criminal convictions in the US do not see a trial. Instead, prosecutors encourage – and in some cases coerce – defendants into taking a plea deal in exchange for a shorter sentence than if they had gone to trial and been found guilty. Although a fair trial is enshrined in the US Constitution, the plea deal is a remarkably common means of circumnavigating the trial in the name of efficiency.

After some more waiting, I sat with another CO, and he asked me if I wanted to call anyone. I said yes. “Wise choice grasshopper.” Sometimes you remember the little things. I gave him my cousin’s number and he answered the phone while we stayed on speaker. I asked my cousin how my mother was doing. He sounded worried himself while he was telling me not to worry and he told me that my mother was fine. I was confused. How could she be fine if my father had just been captured? I asked him how my father was doing, and he said that he was also fine but everyone was just worried about me. It seemed that my father was still safe in Pakistan. This was an unexpected relief. My cousin told me not to worry and that they were trying to get me a good lawyer. Then the CO said that was enough.

After waiting for someone to come and take us, I was cuffed from behind and taken up the elevator. Craig was wearing a brown jumpsuit, and he wasn’t in handcuffs and they put us in separate elevators. I was taken to the Special Housing Unit also known as the SHU (pronounced shoe) in 9 South, which is a sanitized way of describing solitary confinement. I was being placed under administrative detention, which basically meant that I was being placed in solitary confinement after someone had decided that I needed to be separated from other prisoners. No music lessons for me.

I was taken to a pretty dilapidated hallway and eventually to an open cell door. The door was closed behind me and a slot was opened. I was asked to back up my handcuffed wrists through the slot to uncuff me. Then I was alone in what was probably an eight-by ten-foot cell with steel sheets for walls that turned the cell into an icebox in the early April cold. There was a double bunk, but I was alone. There was a small steel desk with a pullout stool, the window was heavily barred with a grill on top of it, and the glass was frosted so I couldn’t see anything outside.

My booking process had started early in the morning and other than a few minutes in court and a few minutes to process me at each stage, I had spent the entire day and half the night just waiting to be moved from one locked cell to another. These people made the Department of Motor Vehicles wait look like a roller coaster ride.

Many things are blurry, but I still remember that as soon as the cell door closed behind me the reality started to sink in deeper and deeper that the life that I had built over twenty-three years had fallen apart. I went from an office in midtown Manhattan to solitary confinement over the weekend. In January 2003 I had my last comprehensive exam, in February I was unexpectedly in New York and in March I was in an interrogation room headed for solitary confinement by the first of April.

The room wasn’t a full rectangle, so it was even less than eight by ten, with a large section cut out for the ventilation system and another for the plumbing behind the toilet. This brings me to the first thing I noticed in the room. I was relieved (no pun intended) that there was a stainless steel toilet with a sink attached to it. The seat would turn extremely cold when it was flushed so inmates would try to keep it to a minimum to prevent it from being too uncomfortable to sit on.

There was a camera in the corner to watch me 24/7, which had an unobstructed view of the toilet. The cut-off sections, toilet, desk and bunks barely left any room to walk around, and a small guy like me might even be a tight fit while trying to do push-ups. But after  the worst weekend of my life, I just went straight to bed. .

Paracha’s father Saifullah was held without charge in Guantanamo Bay, also suspected of involvement with Al-Qaeda. It was on the back of Uzair’s release that his father was able to return home. Now, the pair both live in Karachi, Pakistan.