5. Being raped by a kid 10 years younger than you is humiliating in itself but being forced to French-kiss the kid is even worse.
“Being raped by a kid 10 years younger than you is humiliating in itself but being forced to French-kiss the kid is even worse. You learn very quickly that if you are a targeted inmate that you stop taking care of your oral hygiene. Nobody wants to kiss you if you have green teeth.”
6. I didn’t sleep, I laid on my bed clutching tweezers and shaking.
“I saw people die, I watched them go completely insane, I was in a lot of fights but nothing compares to that first night when I arrived. I was 18, blonde, and pretty and people wanted to kill me on sight. I didn’t sleep, I laid on my bed clutching tweezers and shaking. I lost a lot of hair that night, I was that scared.”
7. Watching a dude get beat senseless with a padlock in sock…over a dessert.
“Watching a dude get beat senseless with a padlock in sock…over a dessert…”
8. It was literally a torture camp run by active and open members of the KKK.
“Several moments come to mind. Like others said, getting there is terrifying. On top of that where I went is the largest prison in Florida and very very old fashioned like in the movies. Miles upon miles of fence and razor wire and gun towers everywhere. It takes a long time just sitting on your bus waiting for them to process one at a time. And then you get off in the sally port and they immediately strip you and toss all your county garb in a bag and the county guys take off. And there you are naked with 50 other guys and this enormous redneck motherfucker who has literally been doing this exact shtick for over 20 years proceeds to just attempt to humiliate and terrorize all the new inmates. Everyone who came through there had a story about this guy. You’re all naked and you all have to spread your asses and he makes you stand ‘nut to butt’ and if you aren’t close enough to the guy in front of you he will push you into him literally pushing your dick into his ass. Then you sit on a wooden bench in your new boxers for hours while these two black ladies who are the DMV ladies on steroids proceed to call people up one at a time and ask them the routine questions in the most stereotypical ghetto state employee way. There’s no translators for the nearly 1/4 of the new inmates who speak no English whatsoever so they just ask the questions louder and louder and get angry. Anyways you go through all that and then get assigned to your dorm and I’m one of the last people in this room so I’m the only one assigned to my dorm on this trip into the compound. So we walk up to I block which is this ¼-mile-long 50’s style cell block and I have to climb three flights of stairs by myself and then I’m in it. This shit is real. The officers throw some abuse at me and then tell me my bunk assignment. Wing 3 cell 32. Bottom floor end of the row. And I walk through this sliding bar door and it closes behind me and I walk down this real fucking life cell block with all these faces staring at me and into my cell. We were all youth offenders and I ended up being in the room with this pretty cool Mexican kid who immediately gave me some cigarettes and coffee which I hadn’t had in the eight months I was in county. Smoked and drank as much as I could and then spent about an hour throwing up. Stayed there for a month and it was so incredibly boring and the hottest place on earth. No windows, just open brick and bars to the elements in a concrete block building with no circulation in July. It was easily 120 degrees on most days in there. Lock down all day every day aside from chow with no books or radios. Cut a couple guys in the canteen line and they told me to get to the back and I told them to fuck off because they had all been doing it but I was white. So they jumped me the next morning when the doors rolled for breakfast. Tried to get me to give them my cigarettes the next day and I told them to fuck off again. They jumped me again the next morning. That probably would have continued for a while but I finally shipped out.
Then things took a major major turn for the worse. I arrived at my permanent ‘camp’ and it was a youth offender deal with about 1000 inmates where it’s run like a boot camp. It was literally a torture camp run by active and open members of the KKK. The resident skinheads were traditionally shit on by everyone else as being snitches because their gang leader was actually a sergeant. They got all the cushy maintenance and construction jobs. While I was there two officers killed a kid by PT’ing into a heat stroke and then beating him while he was unconscious and then dragging him into direct sunlight and leaving him. They went to jail and the ball started rolling from there. After I left the FDLE launched a massive investigation and fired and prosecuted over 30 guards for abuse. The abuse was very real and very traumatic and went on daily for the three plus years I was there. The scariest moments outside of that were when I was targeted by the Latin Kings for some perceived transgression and had a few very sleepless nights waiting for retaliation but things eventually smoothed over. There were several riots that were scary themselves but the scarier part was when the rapid response team showed up. Several hundred CO’s from surrounding institutions who are on call the squash riots. They come heavy and they come armed. All non-essential work and school assignments are cancelled and chow is the only movement allowed. One dorm at a time. You could end up eating breakfast at 11 and lunch at 4 and dinner at 9:30 at night. No phones, no canteen, no nothing. Strip searches five times a day. Full dorm searches which include taking everybody’s personal shit and just throwing it all over the fucking place.
The only riot that I actually felt personally unsafe in was when shit just kicked off randomly at chow with the dorm that was ahead of us. It was a coordinated attack on one guy by about five and as they were stabbing him shit just went nuts. Everything is flying and everyone is fighting and a bunch of us who were gang neutral just decided to GTFO. As we were running to the back door by the kitchen we just watch this kid in the kitchen get hit with this giant steel paddle for stirring grits and soup and shit and it just fucking scalps him. It was some nasty shit. We got out and hit the ground immediately and just waited for shit to settle down. I was definitely in one of the roughest institutions in the state and it was a wild ride. Coming up on six years out and I’ve stayed out of trouble since.”
