Sometimes we had to get creative to catch any kind of sleep. On the rare mornings when no officers came barking orders at us and no nurses needed us to clean up a mess or wrap another body, Stew and I would sneak short naps in the 2-East laundry room, wrapped in thin hospital covers, praying for peace and sleep. Stew was a young Black kid from Jacksonville. He was humble and not big on confrontation, an excellent working partner. When he was on shift I knew I wouldn’t be doing all the work by myself. Everyone loved Stew.

There are sounds from inside that never leave you. This one started… well, you will see. At first we could not even locate the sound as it echoed through the hospital like it came from inside the walls. While writing now, I can still hear it within my quiet house.

The officer’s freaking out.
“Where in the fuck is that scream coming from?! Who the fuck is it?! Where is he? Find him!”

Upstairs in the hospital, which is always freezing, I’m trying to rest in the 2-East laundry room. I’m attempting to keep warm, ridiculously wrapped in these shitty, light blue hospital covers trying to catch some much-needed Zs.

Stew was sleeping in the back corner, that is, until the screaming started.

Startled, we both jump to our feet, which is second nature by now.

The frantic yelling of the officer has us running around every which way, up and down the halls and into every bay.

I’ve heard a lot of screams but to this day, that one still chills me. This is a raw cry of pain. Not a yell to cause fear, but a scream for help, unlike anything I’ve heard before, infused with terror and pain.

We still can’t locate the screamer.

To the officer’s credit, he’s searching as hard as we are, and just as frantically.

Suddenly, it hits Stew and me at the exact same moment: he’s in the motherfucking shower room.

The shower room has about six showers lined up on the right side of the twenty-foot room with urinals on the opposite side. Each shower is separated by a floor-to-ceiling tiled slab. Nurses and hospital permanents shower para and quadriplegic inmates, helping to slough off dead skin from bedsores as they lie on stretchers that allow the water to flow onto the bathroom floor. Later, the orderlies, meaning me and Stew, will come in and squeegee the dirty water and rotten flesh down the drains.

Today, the water running down the drain is red.

Blood red.

As we open the door, it pushes a wall of red water away, creating a wave which then rolls back toward us, splashing over our boots. In the center of the room sits a paraplegic inmate placed upon a movable toilet seat. An inmate or nurse can push the movable toilet chair over a real toilet, which allows the inmate to do his business. This inmate’s naked and screaming with blood shooting out of his ass. Seeing all of this is beyond what the mind expects on a Saturday, but I should have known. It’s a Saturday in prison.

The blood is everywhere. I mean everywhere, mixing with the water spraying from a shower head left on. It’s fucked up. The tortured man is screaming like Darby O’ Gill’s banshee. It’s beyond chilling.

Every time I think I can’t witness anything else that will shock me, prison just pitches continuous knuckle balls. Blood shooting out of an ass? What next?

Stew and I are in shock but snap out of it and rush into action, attempting to help. But what can we do? How the hell do we deal with this? Do we wheel him down the hallways with blood spraying from his asshole? Both of us begin to yell for the officer, who, having entered, is just as shocked as we are. To the officer’s credit, he immediately radios for help. Different nurses and medical staff begin to trickle in. Next thing we know, a collective of doctors rushes in, followed by a gurney. They wheel him out screaming for his mother.

Stew and I are left openmouthed. The officer is now telling us to clean up the bloody mess. Shit makes me feel like I’ve entered a scene from The Shining. Grabbing the squeegees, we work in silence.

I find out the following Monday the inmate died. From what? I still don’t know.

I do hope you read it anyway. It’s real.

There are memories from my decade inside that still wake me up at night. This is one of them.

I replay it and ask myself the same question every time: in a world that twisted, did I do the right thing, or just the least wrong thing I could live with?

This story is taken directly from my decade inside. I keep the language and prison slang as it was then, because the way we talked and what we joked about is part of a world that’s truly hard to comprehend from the outside.

Lake Butler RMC Main Unit’s a big-money camp because so many people pass through with contraband cash during the transfer process. So much money flows through the compound that most permanents have some type of hustle. Permanents are the guys assigned here long-term. Everyone pretty much just wants to spend their time hanging out, like they did on the streets. When there are drugs flowing, the officers don’t have to work so hard. There’s less fighting and they’re not shutting down the dorms and dealing with regular bullshit. Life’s easier for everyone when commerce is good.

The main focus on the pound is to get money. The pound is the compound, the whole prison yard. It’s a hustler’s dream when there isn’t a drought going on. No drugs, tobacco, and no money is a total drought. In 2012, I can tell you that tobacco’s the biggest moneymaker for inmates and staff alike. K2, a synthetic weed otherwise known as spice, is starting to get big, but it’s either tobacco or morphine that turns the most profit.

At the time of this story, there’s a drought. The whole situation’s made worse because a huge transformer on the compound blows up, killing the power to everything. This is a maximum-security prison and no power means no power to anything, including the fences and security lights. This is bad. Genie lights will be wheeled out and movement’s restricted across the entire compound. Basically, this means you aren’t going anywhere. There are so many police around that’ll kill you that to move without permission’s suicide. When there’s restricted movement for weeks, everyone’s on edge and people get pissed.

Some inmates are used to having sex with an inmate, officer, or staff member, but with the lockdown, that release is shut down. Nobody can slide out for drugs or tobacco; no secret messages or kites, prison slang for handwritten notes passed secretly between inmates, can be exchanged. Jealousy makes people do all kinds of shit. It’s already so easy to not give a fuck that some’ll take complete advantage of the situation to do what they want.

In this case, it’s rape.

Guys on the pound, some old-school chain gang rapists, want to gang-bang Jeff.

I know Jeff from the street. I went to high school with him. Honestly, though he was a friend, I didn’t like him. He had a crush on a girl I was with and would always try to hit on her through Myspace. Back then I was convinced she was it for me, to the point I wasn’t trying to fuck any of the nurses who were wanting to hook up. Even though I didn’t like Jeff, I’m not petty enough to let someone from my city be raped, and possibly killed.

There’s Jeff pushing dude. I say, “Yo, what’s up, bro?” and I call him over to me. Catching the butt pirate’s eye, I see him deflate as he realizes I’m about to educate Jeff on the prison dynamics. I inform Jeff about the situation, warning him to watch his behavior and quit pushing guys in the wheelchairs. I explain to Jeff that it’s really hard for me to move around to his dorm, so I won’t be able to help him if some serious shit goes down. Jeff just stands there looking clueless, and I know that he still might get his inexperienced self into serious trouble.

It’s confirmed about a week later when my buddy from the permanent dorm tells me about four guys trying to fuck Jeff. This shit’s going down. He tells me that he wants me to be aware because I know Jeff from the street, but it’s still impossible to slide his way.

Shit. What do I do?

So, I think... I know that this junky dude, Weasel, I’m talking with’s been on this compound for fifteen years and knows a lot of people. I know I have some power too, and I also have tobacco. I’m one of the only inmates on the pound that can move tobacco because of my hospital job. Early on I started hustling tobacco because I couldn’t stand the thought of my family sending me money after I’d already fucked up so bad; I wanted to carry my own weight in here, even if it meant getting it dirty. That’s where this guy and I are talking now as he waits to get into the ER. He faked the funk to get into the hospital because he can’t live without smoking tobacco. He knows how to move inside prison and knows every permanent on the pound. He knows that his homeboy Brady’s selling all the tobacco I bring back to the dorm.

“Okay, how about this?” I said, “I’ll give you a bomb, two cigars’ worth. You know that shit’s worth a few hundred on the compound during this dumbass drought. Tell them to leave Jeff alone.” I’m looking in Weasel’s bony little face, his shifty eyes darting around the hallway, and I can tell all he’s thinking about is getting his hands on some tobacco. He doesn’t care much about anything but getting that nicotine and the potential to make cash so he can then buy morphine, his true passion.

“All right, man, I got you,” he says too quickly, and I know his eager ass is saying he’ll do it just to get the tobacco. His head’s steadily nodding.

“Listen, bro. Check this out, dude. Let them know if they fuckin’ touch Jeff, we’re gonna come up in that bitch and crash. Stabbing someone for this here doesn’t make a difference to me. Me and a gang of permanents, we’ll tear that bitch up.”

Crash can mean a lot of things in prison. In this instance, what I meant was that we’d run in there ready to do serious violence if we had to, no talking and no warnings.

Am I bluffing? Maybe I’m not.

I move my arms when I talk anyway but they’re wild now. I’m trying to drill into this dude how serious this shit is to me. He needs to get it across to the booty bandits that I’m serious.

I don’t necessarily want to start any shit, especially for someone I hardly liked, but he was from my city, and how would it make me feel and look if I let Jeff get raped? Just that knowledge alone would be enough to make me drop my head in shame. Though my principles and values are somewhat skewed and desensitized, they aren’t numb enough to stand by and let this shit go down. I can’t let somebody I know get raped, period. I’m not cool with that. This comes from my core.

I don’t want Weasel to feel like I’m putting down on him. I’ve got to think carefully about how I phrase my words, sometimes even watching the inflection I use when I speak. I do all this lightning fast. Shit can be dangerous for me if I don’t have the presence of mind to think before I speak.

“There’re so many other fish in the sea,” I say, laughing, changing the vibe. “Jeff’s ass is as good as any ass. Tell them to find another green motherfucker. There’re plenty on the pound.”

I wasn’t sitting there hoping somebody else would get raped instead. I didn’t want anyone to get raped. But in that world, you learn to talk in the kind of cold, selfish logic predators understand. Saying “nobody should get hurt” doesn’t move anybody. Threats and twisted math do.

Weasel just laughs and says, “True.”

I really need him to deliver my message to the butt pirates. A simple conversation can be a minefield, but in my heart right now, I’ve done all I can do for Jeff and his ass.

With the agreement set, Jeff’s ass remains a virgin ass. Same bid, years later, I’m still inside but in a different prison camp. At viso, prison visitation, Mom says she ran into Jeff and he told her that I’d helped him a lot. I guess she’ll never know just how much. Yes, Jeff, I did help you a lot. Just next time, don’t hit on my girlfriend again!

I still think about this. I didn’t put my hands on anybody that day, but I used tobacco, threats, and the same cold calculus the predators used to stop what was coming. In a sane world, that’d never be the way you protect someone. In prison, it was the only move I could see. I don’t know if that makes it the right thing or just the only thing I could live with, but it’s the truth.

Confinement “recreation” cages in Baker County, Florida. I was in one of them. Yikes.

I’d been at Lawtey CI, settled into a routine, when I caught a DR, a disciplinary report for fighting. The why behind that is its own story, one I’ll tell in my memoir, COUNT TIME. Before that DR, though, life at Lawtey was about as perfect as prison life can get. I was teaching two different yoga classes that I’d created, and because there was such a long waiting list, I also taught dudes out on the recreation yard. All of us out in the sun, hitting Sun Salutations. It was magic. So real. I loved it. I was genuinely happy, for a guy enslaved in the prison system. Yoga became my passion. It changed me, mostly. Since 2010, it was the only thing that made me feel a semblance of peace, even in prison.

This memory is about what happened after they decided to ship me.

When I get to Baker, still cuffed, I’m escorted inside the compound to a holding cell in confinement. It’s a real tiny cage with just a small wooden bench. I sit there for hours replaying what I’ve done, over and over.

After a while on this hard wooden bench, I decide to toughen up and get my mind right.

Can’t be weak now. No time for that.

Getting my head back in the game needs to start right the fuck now. Who really knows what will happen to me during this latest twist? Last time I went to a Main Unit camp, I was ready for anything. Remembering that, my muscles start to tighten up.

At Lawtey, I feel like I got soft. The officers there weren’t going to hang you in your cell. Inmates would fight but no one would fucking kill you. Coming back into Baker, I need to remember there will be nothing sweet or light or easy here. I’m sure my next stop will be Taylor because it’s a fighting DR, and there’s nothing sweet about Taylor, either.

I know I have to get back to survival mode. I need to calm down, fast.

I begin to count my breaths:

Inhale

Exhale

Inhale

Exhale

I use all I’ve learned at Lawtey to help me now. My yoga breathwork. Slow inhale, hold for five seconds; slow exhale, hold for five seconds. Then lengthening the time to ten seconds each, fully expanding my lungs with each breath. Using that calming breathwork. I move on to twenty-second intervals. Simple as that. The technique does the trick.

During my time in that small, cramped cage, I feel much better. I tell myself I’m going to be fine, that my family will understand. I know that Lexi’s staying with Mom and they will help each other.

Just handle what you need to handle while you do this shit, Emmett.

I calm down and realize that I’ve been in the cage for hours. And whaddaya know? That familiar feeling starts to take over. I have to shit. Not again!

When will these dudes get me to my confinement cell? I’m worn the fuck out. All I want to do is shit and go to sleep.

That’s when I see two confinement officers coming to take me to my cell. After they close the confinement cell door, they yell, “Tatter, put your arms through the flap!”

Once they uncuff me, I run my hands over those rough, hard, red marks.

Damnit. Been here before. Let’s do this, Em.

Looking around, I see there isn’t any toilet paper to use.

Of course there isn’t.

I inspect my cell and under the bunk, I find almost a whole page ripped from a book.

Eureka!

Tearing the page in half, I do my business. I’m a master at this. Wash my hands and by this point, all I want to do is sleep. I do my nightly prayer routine and count my yoga breaths one last time.

Inhale, exhale... Then I pass out.

I don’t even dream that night.

First things first: get toilet paper.

Ask and you shall receive...sometimes.

Once that’s accomplished, my property is brought to me. The checklist is good. I have my books and yoga magazines, some food, and stamps. For lunch, I buy an extra tray with my stamps and already know this is the sweetest confinement I’ve ever been in. I see lots of fishing lines shooting across the dorm, looking like Spider-Man’s having a party in the quad.

My bunkee’s a large, black dude who’s been locked up for a knife, but he’s cool. I’m in confinement with him for about thirteen days, which unfortunately doesn’t count toward my sentenced DC time. Then I’m sent to ICT court and get screwed with a battery charge, which comes with sixty days. My intention’s to catch a regular fighting DR with only fifteen to thirty days in the box.

Such is life in the DOC.

I know I’ll be shipped soon. Because you usually are sent back to your original camp if you catch a violent DR, most inmates try to avoid such incidents. For me, that would be Taylor. They don’t tell me where I’m going, but what I’m really worried about is whether I’m going to graduate from Modality. I only have two or three weeks left until graduation. I don’t want to have to start the program all over again somewhere else. Mom steps in and sends a letter explaining that Ms. Blue had graduated me from Modality before the DR went through. That’s such a blessing. No more Modality.

Thank you, Ms. Blue, for keeping it real.

My next move from confinement at Baker is transferring to another cell, where my new roommate’s a jit. He’s a young, green inmate, just had his Youth Offender status snatched and is now in with the adults. I like the kid and think he’s really funny. He must tell me at least a thousand jokes. I don’t know how someone can remember that many jokes, but he does. I teach him some yoga, too. Poor dude though, he’s green and asks to go to confinement rec.

“Man, I wouldn’t go out there,” I warn him. “It’s barbaric. Row after row of chain-link fenced cages, like kennels for humans. Makes you feel like a deranged animal. Don’t do it, man,” I continue. “You have to count on the police doing their jobs. If they don’t bring you water, you’re gonna bake out there. Dudes next to you are arguing and gang shit’s rampant. You might think it’s impossible to fight with cuffs, but it isn’t. Dudes can slip the cuffs off and do real damage. You feel like you’re safe behind the door but if you fuck with someone out there, they can hold a grudge and stab you up later on the compound. Don’t go out there, man.”

Dude doesn’t listen. He wants to see his buddies.

He’s out there baking under the hot sun in that kennel for hours and hours and comes back red as a lobster.

“Told you, dude,” I say.

He’s a good sport about his confinement experience and is coming up on his end of sentence date, EOS. That’s the day he finally goes home.

After we have a laugh about his lobster condition, an officer, who’s pretty straight, tells me I’m going to be transferred back to Lawtey.

Fuck.

I know he must be wrong because my classification was changed when I got that DR. Just as I thought, he was wrong. I’m leaving again. Going back to Taylor.

Cuffed up and sent to the cages in the confinement rec area, I’m with about twenty others transferring.

Here we go again... Another Blue Bird. Those buses, though. Fuckin’ crazy. Same old thing.

It’s a wild scene. I see a dude I know from visitation at Lawtey. He thanks me for covering for him and his girl when they were trying to make out. I kept the officers distracted. It’s like that. Fuck the police. If I can look out and at the same time let dude and his girl have a good time... Well, it is what it is.

One day at Lake Butler, I wake up early in the morning to Sergeant Bitch tossing the dorm, tearing through every locker and bunk, searching for contraband, yet again. She’s taking all the boots and shoes that people acquired illegally. There might be a crooked property permanent who smuggled shoes from new intakes arriving from county. You may have paid another inmate who has an “in” with a nurse who was willing to write a bogus medical pass for comfortable shoes. In the DOC, we call these Doctor Comforts, prescription shoes, the ultimate hustle at Lake Butler. Doctor Comforts are big here because it’s the only camp that has them.

By then, Sergeant Bitch has two massive, plastic dumpster carts overflowing with shoes and boots that she and her officers confiscated during the night. They were hell-bent on getting more. As if that would cut down on violence or drugs or something else within the compound. However, rules are rules. Except when these same officers put a hit on you or ask you to kill someone for a pack of cigarettes and a cell phone. They’re the same ones who raid your locker or in this case, take your contraband shoes or boots. Assholes.

After seeing the boots episode for the hundredth time, I go to the chow hall to get a breakfast tray. Breakfast is my favorite meal in DOC, the ultimate best. Unlike other meals, it’s actually what it’s supposed to be. Real grits, biscuits, oatmeal, eggs. Fuck if the eggs came from a gallon-size bag. Usually, it’s real protein or carbohydrates, and this equals good in my book.

Here’s the thing, though. When I enter the chow hall, every single officer recognizes me as a hospital orderly. An inmate job assigned to me working inside the medical unit. The position has its privileges, but at times, it has a real downside.

At Lake Butler Main Unit, there are two lines for chow. I’m in the line directly to the right. I’m tired and thinking about how much I hate prison as I wait, listening to dudes jabbering on. Across from me, I see an older guy, maybe about forty-five. I’m twenty-three, so all I know is he’s older than me. He looks really pale, staring off into the distance, unsteady on his wobbly legs.

Standing there watching him, my sixth sense as an orderly starts to kick in but my tired, hating-prison-self overrides the trained hospital worker. I normally would have clearly recognized that this dude’s off in some type of way that means danger or trouble. Slowly, my focus begins to shift from the surrounding jabbering and the shouting officer who separates the two lines, and I come out of my dark thoughts just enough to wonder if I should try to help this guy.

Time slows down as the guy wavers in the line across from me but then speeds up like a motherfucker as he falls forward, his line of sight never changing. His head travels fast toward the hard, brick floor. I’m sure he wasn’t aware, but what the fuck was he looking at?

Smack.

His head’s the first thing to hit. Every one of us knows that sound, the pop of flesh hitting hard. Most times, chow halls are silent as long as the officers are “on that bullshit” at the time, but this morning, everyone is unusually loud. They must be short-staffed. Still, this smack echoes throughout the entire chow hall.

The sound of a face hitting bricks makes everyone pause.

He fell directly in front of the officer and I’m right there, still in line like an asshole. We both look down at him silently, wondering if he’s going to get up or if he’s faking.

What is the next play here?

Our questions are answered when blood begins to pool around his head, slowly at first, and then quickly forms a dark pond around him, its tributaries stretching out across the brick floor in multiple directions. Heading right for the officer’s heavy, black boots.

I see it all go down, but by this point, I’ve cleaned up after so many blood spills, bodies, psych episodes, and the like, that the only thing in my mind is the hope this police officer doesn’t recognize me as an orderly. No more breakfast for me. I turn my face slightly to the side, trying to escape his line of sight, hoping I’m not too slow.

I am.

“You, inmate. Don’t you work in the hospital?” he asks me.

I can’t believe this shit. Now I’ll miss my favorite fucking meal. Damn.

“Yes sir, I do. Do you want me to clean that up?”

We stand there looking down at the guy, face planted in a pool of his own blood. Blood has spread to the people in the line directly in front of him while inmates are walking around him, giving him a wide berth so blood won’t soil their shoes. Some are laughing and others, who are probably new to prison, are open-mouthed, because in here, this is nothing, honestly. To someone who is green, it has to be horrifying. It’s just another day for me, but holy shit, is the weekend really gonna take this route?

It does.

It only gets worse, or funnier, depending on your perspective.

After walking into the hospital and getting a friend to help me put the bloody man on a stretcher, we deliver him to the ER, where I’m told to report upstairs. There’s a body to wrap. An inmate diabetic.

“Motherfucker!”

After taking the diabetic to the morgue and making the bed for a future inmate on the Death Row hallway, I’m told by the security station downstairs to wheel another inmate from the hospital upstairs to the visitation park. He has a family visit, and he’s able to see them there. We call the visitation area Up Top. That’s the outdoor area where inmates could sit with their families, catch a breeze, maybe some much needed sunshine. As an inmate’s illness progresses, families will be escorted to the hospital wing to visit their loved one. This guy isn’t that sick, or so I think.

I pick the dude up and place him into a wheelchair. As I walk him Up Top, I’m making small talk and find out that his whole family has come to see him. Parents, aunts and uncles, cousins and nieces, the whole clan. I tell him that that is badass and walk away as an officer takes over and wheels him into the search room. He has to be searched before he’s allowed into the viso (visitation) room to see the whole tribe.

Immediately upon my entry back into the hospital, an officer rushes toward me, saying that I need to get out to C-dorm on the compound with a cart. That means I will most likely be cleaning up a blood spill, so I’ll need a mop and bucket, some towels, cleaning agents, and bleach, which are highly regulated in prison. Oh yeah, and some red biohazard bags, too.

I can only imagine what happened out there at C-dorm, but what’s the point, honestly? My day, which is supposed to be chill because it’s the weekend, is already fucked. There I am thinking I could maybe flirt with a nurse or sleep in the laundry room, but instead I’m walking towards God knows what at C-dorm.

It turns out that it’s an old dude in a wheelchair whose head was bashed in with a lock. It looks like he was hit twice. You might have heard the whole lock in a sock thing or seen the movie Full Metal Jacket. In the movie, the platoon wraps towels around bars of soap and take turns beating a dude senseless.

In prison, however, this is usually done with a lock dropped into a canteen bag. A true vet knows that the lock can fly out of the bag, sometimes after the first strike. A lock attached to a belt is the best way to bash someone’s head in. It looks like that is what happened to the old dude bleeding out in his wheelchair, silent as a mute.

It’s best not to speculate on what the dude did. He looks to be about seventy years old. Honestly, what could he really have done? Maybe he’s a pedophile or has a lot of money on his canteen books, or perhaps he wasn’t allowing a gang or a rapist to put down on him. He could have snitched or been in the wrong place or said the wrong shit out loud at the wrong time. That would explain his silence.

When you enter a Lake Butler dorm, you usually come through the day room first and then through an open doorway into an open bay dorm, which houses about ninety inmates. I know the officer stationed there and he doesn’t give a shit.

He unlocks the door for me and laughingly tells me, “It’s a mess.”

The old dude is seated in a wheelchair, already waiting in the day room. Blood streaks the walls and puddles on the floor. It’s a crime scene, but it’s business as usual. There’s the patient, bare-chested and covered in blood from what looks like two wounds. One to the top of his head right above the forehead and the other above his left eyebrow. Blood is flowing copiously down his face and chest, pooling in his lap.

Some guys in the room are still playing card games. Others are playing chess at the game tables. Dudes are standing around talking like it’s any other day, because it is.

It be like that sometimes—a common, classic, prison phrase.

About ten different dudes call out. “Yo, bro, can I get some chemicals?”

Me being me, of course, I have brought extra. Inmates hate not being able to clean the toilets or their area properly because chemicals aren’t made available like they should be. As I’m letting the dudes fill water bottles with bleach and the other chemicals I brought, I start to clean up the blood splattered across the walls while May, the other orderly, focuses on the man’s wounds.

“Here, bro, hold this towel against your head, man. You’re bleeding everywhere.”

May places a towel on the dude’s forehead to stop the blood flow and turns back to the cart to reach for another before realizing he’s totally unresponsive. The towel has dropped to his bloody lap while the old man continues to stare straight ahead, conscious but unblinking. May gets on with the job, heading out to the ER with his unresponsive cargo.

This dude got lit up, I’m thinking as I mop up the gore.

“Emmett!” I hear. Who the fuck is calling me by my birth name? Absolutely nobody calls me that in here. I am known as Tatter or Inmate, but the redneck officers find it hilarious to call me Tater. I realize it has to be someone I know from the streets.

It turns out it’s someone I vaguely know named JJ. He wants to fill me in about his case and all this other shit I really don’t care about. Most of the time, it’s nice to see someone you know from your hometown. They tell you everything that’s happening with everyone in your city.

He’s jabbering on about how this dude got locked up for this, and somebody else did this and that, and guess what? It’s a boring, never-ending conversation and I just fill in the stock answers. “Oh yeah? That’s crazy! Damn, homie. That’s fucked up.” Shit like that.

Still, I’m attending to cleaning streaks of blood off the wall and mopping up a pool of it from the floor. This shit is real. Prison’s my life now, and I’m just doing my job.

JJ doesn’t get it. Him running his mouth is him being a new cock. He doesn’t know shit. He’s too talkative because he’s excited to see someone from the outside. I get it. I was him a couple of years ago. He doesn’t understand what doing real time is. He’s too green. JJ’s still filled with the streets, concerned about all the wrong things. His head’s still in the free world, but he’ll learn.

After I drop the old mop head into the red, biohazard bag, I interrupt JJ and tell him I have to split. I’m all packed and ready to cart my gruesome baggage back to the hospital and maybe get a little shut-eye, but wait. The dorm officer tells me I have to go Up Top and clean something up.

“What is it, Sir?”

He just shrugs his shoulders, turns, and leaves after letting me out of the dorm.

As I walk away, JJ’s still talking to me. Yelling out the window, even. I think, Holy shit, as I walk toward viso.

When I get to viso, I’m ordered to bring the cart to the outside visiting area. There, junk food and candy are sold to visitors. Up Top’s a nice place to sit with your family and catch a breeze, maybe some sunshine. However, I walk out to a different scene.

The guy that I wheeled up here earlier has thrown up candy-colored vomit all over the place, even underneath the outdoor gazebo. Perhaps too many Skittles? He and his family apologize and I tell them it’s nothing. They offer to buy me an ice cream, but I can’t eat. The day has already been too much.

After the Skittles episode, I return to the hospital to yet another panic.

An officer runs up to me. “Tatter, where the fuck were you? Get your ass to the ER. They need you, fast. Hurry the fuck up!”

I push the cart to the side and rush to the ER.

When I walk into the ER, two nurses are freaking out. They aren’t qualified to handle shit. One is covering for her friend, who’s off doing whatever because she thinks that the weekend will be chill. We were both wrong.

“Tatter, you have to do something! I have no idea where this bitch is. I’m covering for her. Her ass ran off somewhere. This dude won’t stop bleeding. I don’t know what to do!”

The other nurse says she called for a transfer to the outside hospital and is waiting for some transfer officers to show up.

Meanwhile, my buddy May’s still struggling to hold bandages to the same old dude’s head. I walk over to the shelf and grab everything I need. Special gauze, tape, and bandages so I can assist May in his mission to at least prevent the dude from bleeding out and being taken to the morgue.

These nurses are worthless. May and I do our best. The old guy probably has a concussion. As I watch, a stream of blood forms in his eye socket and spills into the sclera of his eye. The white of his eye instantly turns red. The weird thing is that I can still see myself mirrored in the iris as it fills with blood until my reflection disappears.

Finally, the transfer officers arrive.

Since my day is already fucked, I tell May that I’ll wheel the inmate up to the reception area of the garage, where a van awaits to take him to an outside hospital.

I’ve never been in the reception area when it was empty. It’s odd being there without the Monster welcoming new inmates with humiliation and abuse. I feel like a cowboy riding into a ghost town. Police open a locked door leading to the garage and pickup area. A metal detector beeps, sensing the wheelchair and the officer’s belts.

I make it to the van, where one officer does the walk-around check and the other orders me to lift the patient into the van. He barely weighs anything. Closing the door, I can see my reflection in the old man’s eyes once again. I don’t think this dude has blinked once through the whole ordeal.

Watching the van pull away, I wish it’s me leaving through the garage door. Watching it close reminds me of the one at my parents’ house. I can’t help but think of my family and home. I want to leave, but at least it isn’t my head busted in by a lock.

I turn to walk away from the garage. The door is almost closed when I realize I am locked in. I won’t be able to report back to the hospital.

What the fuck? I run to the door as it’s closing and yell to the officers in the van, but all I see are the tires as they pull away, unsympathetic to my new plight.

Fuck!

It’s just me and eerie silence. What will I do now?

I run back and forth from the caged bars down the hall, past the metal detector that beeps with every pass, to the closed garage doors. I do this about four or five times, as if it can change the fact that I am locked in the garage of the closed reception area. This isn’t good. This is very, very bad.

This is a restricted area and the situation only worsens because it’s nearing afternoon count time. I begin to panic. Fuck sweating; I worry that I will shit my pants. These fucking cops are gonna lock me up and give me more time for trying to escape, because that’s exactly what they’re going to think. There’s no credible reason for me to be locked in here and most officers won’t be willing to admit their mistake in forgetting me.

Could hell be worse than this?

I stand at the bars yelling for any officer. These police could kill me for this shit!

There occasionally comes a time when you realize you’re so fucked that you just say “fuck it.” I’ve always been a fighter, though, and when I’m angry, I really fight. One last time, I yell out, “YO, MOTHERRRRFUCKERRRS! FUCKKK YOUUU BITCHESSS!”

Guess what happens?

An officer who happens to be looking for a fresh pair of inmate blues (our standard issue prison uniforms) says, “What the fuck did you just say, Inmate?”

I see her take in the strangeness of the situation. Thankfully, she’s one of the cooler officers and she knows and likes me, too. She walks into the reception room and says, “Tatter, is that you?”

I laugh out loud, I’m so relieved.

And then, just like that, I’m out.

At times like these, when something goes right against all odds, I can’t help but feel I’ve got help from above. This time, it’s Katie—my guardian angel. She passed away right before I was sent to prison, but I still feel her looking out for me. Having this officer get me out of that fucking garage? That’s Katie.

Katie’s more than a best friend. She’s like the little sister I never had. She can walk into a room and brighten it. Her infectious laugh coupled with a carefree spirit makes her seem like a 115-pound hippie chick who belongs on a beach, or a festival someplace, swimming or bicycling with wind blowing in her blonde hair. Time isn’t a constraint. It doesn’t matter if a week, a month, or years pass between meetups. The night before my arrest, I gave her a giant hug goodbye, and I promised to call her. I could sense that something wasn’t right and that she needed my help.

While I’m in the county jail, I’m consumed with worry for Katie, begging my mom, my older brother, anyone to contact her. My pleas go unheeded, for understandable reasons. As far as anyone else is concerned, I’ve my own problems to worry about. Then comes the devastating news from my mom.

“Emmett, are you sitting?” she asks.

I reply, “No, I’m not sitting down, Mom. I’m standing up against a wall trying to hear you through this jail phone, while everyone is screaming their heads off. Trying not to think about facing life in here. What is it? Just tell me.”

A pause...

“Mom.”

“Katie is dead.”

My mind flashes to a dream I had a few nights before, dreaming that she was in trouble, and needed me. I begged someone to call her for me after I woke up. Nobody would do it.

I managed, “Mom, I told you, she needed me...” and sliding down the wall, I hear her say, “Emmett, I am so sorry,” before hanging up.

The grief is indescribable, made worse by the harsh prison environment where there’s no space to grieve privately, no comfort to be found. I can’t cry, can’t process the loss, and the numbness that settles over me feels like the final nail in my coffin. Not being able to go to her funeral, to say goodbye the right way, is its own kind of torture.

Grieving in prison is a unique kind of torture. I’m surrounded by people, yet utterly alone in my pain. The lack of privacy, the constant presence of others, and never wanting to appear weak make it nearly impossible to express my emotions freely. I compartmentalize my feelings and build a wall around my pain, just to survive.

But even in death, Katie still finds ways to look out for me. Throughout my sentence, she’s with me. All the many, dangerous situations where I shouldn’t survive, I feel her presence as my guardian angel. In those challenging times, I think, Thank you, Katie.

Back in that garage. Back in my body. Back to surviving.

“Yes, it’s me. What the fuck, yo?” I explain what happened and she cracks up with laughter and tells me to mention this shit to absolutely no one.

“Emmett, this is bad. You’re lucky I saw you,” she says, and we laugh again. She tells me to go back to the hospital, get a hospital cart, and rush back up to the viso park to clean up a mess. I ask what it is, and all she says to me is that it’s, “fucked up.” It was real fucked up. A complete disaster.

After rushing to get the cart from the hospital, I make it back to the inside visitation area. The same officer who was laughing at me before was yelling at me, demanding that I go handle the stranger-than-fiction situation taking place.

“Where the fuck was you?” she screamed. I explained I had to restock the cart and grab May to help.

A bunch of my homeboys from the pound were outside the visitation bathroom laughing at me and May, saying shit like, “Hey, Tatter, have fun, bro,” followed by giggles and shit.

What the fuck?

May and I looked at each other as the officer led us to the bathroom door.

I recognized the family of the Skittle throw-up dude clustered outside. All of them were profusely apologizing, so I told them not to worry, but that was before I opened the door.

Nothing could have prepared me for that war zone.

The Skittle dude, who was paralyzed from the waist down, was seated on a toilet. He was completely soaked. Wet all over and covered in feces. There was shitty water all over the bathroom and the shell-shocked Skittle guy was telling us how sorry he was. I couldn’t believe he was apologizing. I was the one who felt sorry for him but at the same time, it was entirely too much for the senses to process.

It took a few moments to compute what I was seeing. Then it hit me. I was standing on shit and the goo dripping from the ceiling was shit too. How was this shit show even possible? My brain was telling me to get the fuck out of there before my feet could even catch up.

May and I rushed out of the bathroom, breathing heavily.

We know we both must have looked traumatized to everyone in visitation, especially to Skittles’ family. We realize we are alarming them. In order to cool the bizarre situation down, we reassessed our choices. I whisper to May that we should begin by cleaning up Skittles and getting him into new blues.

He agrees and adds that it was important to get dude out to his family before we tackled the bathroom situation.

Steeling ourselves, we went back in to tell Skittles the plan. He was still apologizing and I felt like shit for him. With my heart heavy, I said, “don’t worry, bro.”

May made it to him first and told me to go back to get another wheelchair. I was in mid-turn to leave when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw May’s pale hand inching toward the toilet handle. Time slowed as my brain registered what could happen to the paralyzed guy still seated if May flushed.

Before I could yell, May pulled the lever.

To this day, I have no idea how he thought flushing could improve the situation.

It was the movie Poltergeist in the flesh. I’d never seen anything like it. Immediately after the flush, a geyser of water shot up from underneath him and Skittles’ screams were shattering. My question of how the shit and water came to be dripping from the ceiling was answered.

It was, simply put, unbelievable.

Filthy, shitty water shot up from between the seated man’s legs and around him, all the way to the ceiling. The force had to have been tremendous!

May and I hightailed it out of the bathroom, leaving the seated man stranded. What the fuck was going on? Everyone in the viso park was staring at us, including the poor man’s family. I wasn’t prepared for all this.

By this point, I had become used to the daily violence we all lived with, but a poltergeist in the toilet? I couldn’t even fathom something like that happening to me. I would have died right then and there. May and I definitely underestimated the entire situation. We had to come up with a plan of attack. We were outgunned, so to speak.

I run to a closet past the viso area to get blankets and towels, a lot more bleach, and gloves and trash bags. There is a checklist going on within my struggling mind.

This disabled dude was covered in shit, the poor guy. His family was out there. He was dying and was housed in the hospital on 2 East/Death Row.

Fuck, man, this sucks bad. Fuck this day.

Thank God we had access to extra mop buckets, gallons of hand soap, and fresh water to bathe the shit-soaked man. Getting him dressed in fresh blues and out to his anxious family felt so gratifying. They were beyond thankful.

“No problem. Don’t even worry about it. Y’all have a good visit.”

I couldn’t even be mad or grossed out about the next part of the mission. I went back into the war zone. Masked and suited up. Feeling like Ghostbusters, May and I were ready to face the poltergeist.

And that’s what you do in there. I sat up. I went back in. I thought, Thank you, Katie.

I’ll be honest with you.

Today I spent money I didn’t have to spend and I don’t regret a single penny of it. I went to Apple TV and bought The Alabama Solution (2025) even though I already have an HBO Max subscription where it streams for free. This film was Oscar nominated for Best Documentary Feature and it lost. It lost. I wrote about that on this Substack, When The Oscars Looked Away, because that loss meant something. It meant that a film made by people who smuggled phones past guards who would’ve killed them for it, a film that showed the world the deadliest prison system in America from the inside, wasn’t deemed important enough for the most watched awards show on the planet. So I bought it again. On purpose. Because some things deserve more than a stream.

I served an 8.5 year bid inside the Florida Department of Corrections on a ten year mandatory sentence. There’s a difference. I know what it feels like to be a body in a system that sees you as a dollar sign or a data point. And watching Alabama did something to me. It made me realize that Alabama’s under a microscope right now, but Florida? Florida is a black hole. Nobody’s looking. And that’s not an accident. Alabama’s system is broken. Florida’s system is a masterclass in cooking the books. And I’ve got receipts.

I’ll tell you something that happened just this week that says everything you need to know about how this system operates when it knows people are watching.

On March 23rd I co-lectured with Dr. Kelly Vannan at Flagler College for the Lifelong Learning Institute. Yesterday, that same group visited Union Correctional Institution in Florida. They smelled freshly painted walls. They visited the death row area. They saw the chapel. They heard the officers say they run a tight ship, that they go out of their way to fix toilets and tend to the needs of their inmates. And they heard the phrase We Never Walk Alone a lot.

A lot, lot.

I’ll bet they did.

I’m not going to tell you Union is a hellhole. I’m not going to lie to you like that. I served an 8.5 year bid in Florida and I know exactly what Union is. I know that the older inmates, the long-timers, the guys who’ve been in the system long enough to know the difference, they want to transfer to Union. It’s quieter. It’s got senior dorms. For an older man trying to do his time without getting killed or be around the bullshit, Union is genuinely better than a lot of what Florida has to offer. I know that. I lived it.

But here’s what I also know. There isn’t a single inmate at Union Correctional Institution who would’ve had the fucking chance to do what the men in The Alabama Solution did. Pass a phone number. Whisper the truth to a reporter. Tell somebody on the outside what’s actually happening. Not a chance. Not there. Not in Florida. The officers who gave that tour knew exactly what they were doing. The freshly painted walls knew exactly what they were doing. What that group saw yesterday wasn’t Union Correctional Institution. It was a Broadway show. A really good one. And I wasn’t surprised, not for a single second when I heard their description sounded nothing like what I described to them on March 23rd.

Not in the fucking least.

That’s the entire point. That is Florida. Smoke and mirrors, front to back, top to bottom, every single time someone shows up with a clipboard or a camera or a group of well-meaning people from a lifelong learning program. The moment they know you’re coming, the moment they can control what you see, you aren’t seeing a prison. You’re seeing a performance.

Alabama got caught because nobody knew the cameras were coming.

Florida, however, never gets caught because Florida never lets the cameras in.

And as for We Never Walk Alone. If you’ve been on the inside, you already know exactly what that means. It’s not a motto. It’s a warning.

In Florida, the most powerful and dangerous gang doesn’t wear colors. They wear badges. I’m not being dramatic. The official Florida Department of Corrections slogan is We Never Walk Alone, and I just told you what that means. It’s a code. It’s a good old boy network that protects its own at any cost, and it’s been doing so for decades. In 2015, an investigation into a foiled murder plot revealed that three Florida prison guards were active members of the KKK. Three. Active members. Guards. Sit with that for a second. Like, really fucking sit with that. That was just the case that got caught. Don’t mistake 2015 for ancient history either. Officer misconduct, retaliatory transfers, and staff-sanctioned abuse kept surfacing in Florida Department of Corrections facilities well into the 2020s. The names change. The culture doesn’t. It never does.

I was at Taylor Correctional Institution. And I want to tell you what I saw there with my own eyes and what I was told by the man it happened to directly.

At night, through the dorm windows, you could see out beyond the wood-line. And on more than one occasion, what you saw out there in the dark were crosses burning. Not rumor. Not prison legend. Crosses. On fire. In the woods outside a Florida state correctional facility! I saw it. Other inmates saw it. And not one person in that institution acted like it was surprising.

Not one.

An inmate at Taylor told me personally that an officer had left a noose on his bed. He wasn’t confused about what it meant. Nobody in that dorm was confused about what it meant, uh-uh. It meant exactly what it’s always meant. And nothing happened. No investigation. No termination. No accountability. Just another day inside the Florida Department of Corrections.

I’m not the only one saying this. In 2015, three Florida Department of Corrections officers were caught on FBI recordings plotting to murder a Black inmate. They were KKK members. Active ones. They used a fellow corrections officer as an accomplice and an FBI informant posing as a Klan hitman to carry out the killing. They were convicted of first degree murder conspiracy in 2017. Three. Uniformed. Officers. A 2021 Associated Press investigation confirmed that white supremacist guards operate throughout Florida prisons with what the reporters called impunity, that incident reports alleging officer misconduct are routinely buried by supervisors, and that the Inspector General’s office regularly refuses to investigate. Officers at Jackson Correctional Institution were documented carrying noose keychains to intimidate Black inmates and colleagues. The state investigated. They cleared every single one of them.

Every single last fucking one.

This is the system that tells you it’s got a zero tolerance policy for discrimination. This is the very system that tells you its inmates are the problem. This is the system that burns crosses in the wood-line at night and puts nooses on beds in the morning and calls it a correctional facility.

What?

Here’s how the rest of the lie works. They know they’re lying. Every single one of them knows. They consciously align their stories so the official paperwork matches. Because in Florida, if the paperwork matches the story, then as far as the state’s concerned, that’s what happened. Period. It doesn’t matter what really went down. Uh-uh. It doesn’t matter who saw it. The truth doesn’t stand a chance against a unified, written lie. I watched it happen. I lived inside it. Day after day after day after day.

Here’s something that should stop you cold. The Florida Department of Corrections answers to itself. There’s no independent oversight body with real sharp teeth dripping blood sitting above them. No outside commission with subpoena power reviewing what happens inside those walls on a daily basis. No civilian board that can walk into any facility unannounced and demand answers. What exists instead is an internal affairs process where the agency investigates itself, an Inspector General’s office that has been documented repeatedly refusing to pursue complaints, and a reporting structure where as long as the paperwork looks right, that is what happened. Full stop. What in the fuck. That’s what gets handed up to their superiors. That’s what gets read to the news anchor in whatever county the facility occupies. That’s the official record.

Think about what that means in practice. An inmate dies. Officers write the report. Supervisors review the report. The Inspector General receives the report. If everyone’s story matches, the case closes. Nobody from the outside ever sees the inside of that dorm. Nobody interviews the inmates who were there. Nobody pulls the camera footage that may or may not still exist. The paperwork is the truth. The paperwork has always been the truth. And the people writing the paperwork are the same people whose careers depend on the paperwork saying the right thing.

That’s not a checks and balances system. That’s a closed loop. And it was built that way on purpose.

Fuck man, I have to give them credit. How diabolical is this system? Makes me want to scream.

But it gets worse.

The Florida Department of Corrections officially claims around 89,000 inmates. I call bullllshit, like I’ve mentioned before in different articles. The state runs a constant shell game of transfers through five major distribution hubs. Washington Correctional Institution. Lake Butler Reception and Medical Center. Orlando CI. Miami-Dade CI. Here’s what the fuck they don’t tell you. On the day you get transferred, you aren’t at your main facility. You might be on a bus. You might be in a holding cell. You might be sitting in a hub for days, weeks, or even months. And because you aren’t physically in a cell at a specific facility during the morning census, you don’t show up in the official occupancy counts. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. Crumbling, over-capacity prisons get to claim they’re legally full on paper while people are packed like sardines in reality. People think the prison system costs money. That’s exactly what they want you to believe.

They want you to get mad about it too.

The Florida Department of Corrections runs on a $3.8 billion annual budget. It’s the third largest state prison system in the entire country. A 2023 report commissioned by the state itself found it’ll cost Florida taxpayers between $6.3 billion and $11.8 billion over the next twenty years just to keep the facilities from falling apart. Nationally, mass incarceration generates over $445 billion a year when you count every piece of the machine.

And I mean every piece.

Private prison companies like GEO Group, CoreCivic, and Management and Training Corporation charge the state per body per bed. That’s the contract. That’s the language. Not per rehabilitated person. Uh-uh. Not a chance. Not per successful reentry. Per body. Per bed. Which means an empty bed is lost revenue. Which means keeping those beds full isn’t just a priority, uh-uh, it’s a financial obligation to their shareholders. Collecting a combined $236 million in Florida state funds every single year. Phone companies holding monopoly contracts, and isn’t monopoly supposed to be illegal in the United States, charging families outrageous rates just to hear their son’s or daughters voice. Just to hear him say I love you. Fifteen minutes. Gone. And the state gets a cut of every single call. Every I love you’s. Email fees. Video visit fees. Money transfer fees. Food service companies billing the state for quality meals while serving documented rot. Healthcare contractors paid a flat rate per inmate per year with every financial incentive to provide as little care as possible. Commissary vendors marking up a bar of soap three hundred percent because the person buying it’s got nowhere else to go. Construction companies. Bond investors. Surveillance tech. Drug testing labs. Electronic monitoring. Every single one of them feeding off the same body.

Pause.

Sorry, I just threw up.

And underneath all of it, inmate labor leased to private companies for pennies an hour. Sometimes for nothing. While those companies sell the finished product at full market price.

This isn’t a government expense. This is an economy. Boyyy, does it make some money. And the people inside it aren’t just inmates. They’re assets. They’re profit. The longer the sentence, the more the machine makes. That’s not a side effect. That’s the fucking point. That has always been the point.

Florida law guarantees private prison companies minimum occupancy payments. Bay Correctional Facility’s contract literally guarantees payment for 90% occupancy whether the beds are full or not. Think about that. I know it’s hard to process, but please think about that. I implore you. The state is contractually obligated to keep those beds filled. With people! That’s not a corrections policy. That’s a financial incentive to warehouse human beings.

Then there’s PRIDE Enterprises, Florida’s prison labor program, which generated $65.7 million in revenue in 2022 on the backs of people earning zero wages. Oh, excuse me, 20 to 55 cents per hour. Zero. The state’s running a multi-million dollar agricultural and industrial operation on unpaid labor while simultaneously guaranteeing private companies a profit for holding the workforce captive.

You want to call it something? Call it what it is. That is state-sponsored human trafficking.

Holy smokes!

That’s the best magic trick every played on the American people.

And don’t even get me started on the immigration situation. You think the model that exists now is profitable? You may not even believe me now, but when you hear those numbers you really wouldn’t believe me then.

Just a little peaky-boo.

152 dollars per person per day to detain an immigrant. Not rehabilitate. Not educate. Detain. ICE was holding 68,000 people as of February 2026, up from 40,000 the day Trump walked back into the White House. The goal is 100,000 beds. One hundred thousand. GEO Group reported $2.6 billion in revenue in 2025. CoreCivic reported $2.2 billion. Both posted record numbers. Both opened new facilities. The reconciliation package allocated $45 billion to expand detention capacity over four years. Forty-five billion dollars. And alternatives to detention, electronic monitoring, cost less than $10 a day. But electronic monitoring doesn’t have shareholders. It doesn’t have lobbyists. It doesn’t have contracts guaranteeing occupancy.

Now do you believe me?

Again, call it what it is. That is another round of state-sponsored human trafficking.

You know how we take down mob bosses? You know how we bring down drug lords and cartel kingpins and organized crime networks that have operated for decades? We follow the money. That’s it. That’s always been it. You follow the money and the truth has nowhere left to hide.

Pause.

I’m sorry, my stomach is really acting up here.

I wonder what would happen if somebody actually did that with the Florida Department of Corrections.

Not the budget numbers they publish. Not the annual report with the glossy cover. I mean really followed it. Every private prison contract. Every JPay transaction. Every commissary markup. Every food service invoice. Every medical contractor payment. Every phone call fee. Every money transfer cut. Every bond issued to build a new facility. Every dollar of inmate labor that went into a product sold at full market price. Every cent that moved through PRIDE Enterprises on the backs of people earning nothing.

Damn, watch out Jack!

Follow all of it. Every single dollar from the moment it enters the system to the moment it lands in somebody’s pocket.

You want to know what they’d find? That’s exactly why nobody’s looking. Because the same people who would have to authorize that investigation are the same people whose names are on the contracts. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s just following the money to its logical conclusion. And in Florida, that road leads straight back to Tallahassee every single time. And then where does it go?

Ouchy. I have a boo-boo.

The mob would be impressed. They probably fucking are. I’m serious. Who the fuck do you think teaches drug cartels how to operate? The structure, the silence, the paperwork, the insulation from accountability. It’s not sloppy. It’s not accidental. It’s a machine that was engineered by people who understood exactly how to build something that couldn’t easily be taken apart.

Yeah, I just threw-up again.

If you’re not a little nauseated right now, you haven’t been paying attention.

And the most infuriating part? It’s all legal. Most of it anyway. That’s the part that should keep you up at night.

The laws were written this way on purpose.

And then there’s the mail.

Jeez, how much is there?

In January 2022, the Florida Department of Corrections banned physical mail at all 128 of its facilities. Every handwritten letter. Every birthday card. Every photograph a mother sent to her son or daughter. All of it is now intercepted, scanned by JPay, the for-profit contractor that also controls the phones, the emails, the video visits, and the money transfers, and delivered as a digital copy on a tablet. Families can’t send stamps anymore. They can’t send greeting cards. The state’s official reason was contraband reduction. Missouri documented that overdose rates actually rose after implementing the exact same policy.

So much for that argument.

Florida’s not even the worst offender anymore. As of early 2026, most prisoners in the United States are barred from receiving physical mail as it was sent. Only fourteen states and Washington D.C. still let a letter arrive as a letter. Everyone else runs it through a scanner owned by a company that charges fees at every step of the process.

My god, what next?

There’s a reason Bryce Courtenay made mail, letters, the written word, the ability to reach through a wall and touch someone you love, central to The Power of One, which, fun fact, I read in prison after my mom sent it to me. In apartheid South Africa’s prisons, they understood that cutting off communication wasn’t about safety. It was about control. It was about erasure. It was about making a person disappear even while they were still breathing.

We read that book and we call it a tragedy. We teach it in schools. Except now we’re banning books in schools too. Thousands of them. All across this country. So I guess we’re not even doing that anymore. And then we do the same thing to people behind a fence and call it contraband reduction.

And if you want to visit someone inside a Florida prison, you’d better not have a record. You’d better not be on probation. You’d better not have been incarcerated at the same facility within the last five years. Florida caps approved visitors at fifteen people total per inmate. Fifteen. If you’re a felon, you’re likely disqualified. Think about what that means in communities where incarceration has touched multiple generations of the same family. The people who love someone inside the most, the ones who grew up with them, did time themselves, know the system from the inside out, are systematically cut off from any ability to be there for them. Not because they’re a threat. Because a rule says so.

Here’s what I want you to think about. The one form of communication that used to cost absolutely nothing, that required no account, no approved list, no login, no fee, was a letter. A grandmother who can’t navigate a tablet app could still reach her grandson with a stamp and an envelope. A kid who wanted to send a drawing to his dad could do it for free. That’s gone now. Every single interaction between a person inside and the people who love them on the outside now runs through a company taking a cut. And every barrier to that communication is a barrier between the outside world and what’s actually happening in there. The fewer people with direct, unfiltered contact with someone on the inside, the smaller the group of people who have any reason to demand change.

That’s not an accident. That is the architecture of silence. And Florida built it on purpose.

Sorry, it gets worse.

Florida recorded a record 428 in-custody deaths in 2017. A 20% spike in a single year. Inmates were dying younger than in any prior recorded period. The Florida Department of Corrections responded with an internal investigation and a press release blaming, I swear to God, “complex substance use disorders.”

That was their answer. A damn press release.

But you’ve got to go back to 2012 to really understand how deep this goes, and probably deeper than that. That year wasn’t an anomaly. It was a window. The Florida Department of Corrections didn’t suddenly become corrupt in 2012. The Miami Herald just started looking. Which, those people are badass, and I wish Carl Hiaasen was still writing for them too.

On June 23, 2012, a mentally ill man named Darren Rainey was serving two years for cocaine possession at Dade Correctional Institution. Two years. For cocaine possession. Guards locked him in a scalding shower as punishment for defecating in his cell. Fellow inmates said he screamed for mercy for hours while the guards stood outside and taunted him. The shower was so hot it separated skin from his body. The Florida Department of Corrections ran its own internal investigation and went quiet. Miami-Dade homicide detectives weren’t even brought in until 2014, when the Miami Herald was about to publish the story.

Two years.

They freaking waited two years.

At Franklin Correctional Institution, inmate Randall Jordan-Aparo was originally ruled a death from a rare blood disorder. Investigators went back in 2013 and found out that corrections officers and supervisors had covered up evidence and fabricated reports to match the official story. He’d been put in solitary and repeatedly gassed by guards until he died. Gassed by Black Jesus, their name for it. Until he died. And the paperwork said blood disorder.

Please, no more.

I was transferred to Suwannee Correctional Institution in July of 2012. This was Suwannee’s worst year for unexplained deaths. I was there. I know what that place felt like in your chest when you walked into it. Inmate Shawn Gooden, 33 years old, died under mysterious circumstances the following year. There’d been a riot in October 2013 that everyone inside understood was a desperate reaction to what was being done to people in that facility. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement arrested former Suwannee Correctional Institution officer Michael Dale Lindblade on charges of official misconduct. Officers Kiree Twiggs and Jo Ann Lopez were charged in 2015 with using excessive force on prisoners and then falsifying the incident reports afterward.

Falsifying. The reports. Afterward.

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

That’s the paperwork-matching behavior I just described. It isn’t occasional. It’s institutional. It’s the system working exactly as designed.

I want to tell you about a man I knew at Lake Butler when I worked in their hospital wrapping bodies and helping inmates. He went by Lupo.

As I walk through the open double doors of the 2-East 3rd Bay, I’m pushing a dust mop when I’m stopped by this man in the first bed to my left. He’s Latino, a Cuban. On the pound, he goes by Lupo. I find out later he has multiple life sentences. He’s an old school chico from Miami and has the gold around his neck to prove it. I don’t know how the police allowed it, but it says one thing. Lupo has money. A lot of money and power. Cash in prison is power, the same as any place in the world.

There he is, all 230 pounds of him, wrapped snugly under thick, heavy hospital blankets. Lupo’s shaved, bald head shines under the harsh fluorescent lights, and his puffy eyes are closed, giving him a deceptively peaceful look. His pale Cuban skin tells the story of a man who hasn’t felt the sun’s warmth in a very long time.

Looking more closely, I know he’s all messed up. His closed eyes and peaceful breathing look more rough and haggard, pained even. As I pass him, pushing my dust mop, his eyes remain shut, but his lips part slightly and he whispers...

“Hey, Permanent.”

I turn and face him.

“Hermano, bro, will you please help me, man? I cannot feel my leg, yo. It must be asleep or something.”

Of course I say, “Sure, bro, I got you. Which leg is it?”

His legs are hidden under more than a few blankets, the outline of what I assume are his limbs barely visible beneath the fabric.

“It’s the left one, homie. Please, yo. It hurts really bad. Mierda.”

As I move toward him, all I’m thinking about is my job. I help inmates in the hospital or wrap them up and close the freezer door after placing their dead bodies inside of it. So, it’s nothing to me when I reach for his left leg. I grab the edge of the blanket, ready to pull it back, but Lupo stops me.

“Nah, hermano, just lift it. It’s too cold to take the blanket off.”

I nod. Whatever, dude.

My hands move to where his left thigh is, fingers curling to grip his solid limb. But as I start to lift, my hands close on nothing but air. The blanket sinks, following the shape of the mattress rather than a leg. I can barely grasp what happened. A “what the fuck” escapes my mouth as the imaginary leg seems to disintegrate and vanish under my touch.

“HAHAHAHAHAJAJAJA.” Lupo’s laughing his ass off as he says, “Hermano, yo, I ain’t got no leg!” cackling to himself.

It turns out Lupo’s a diabetic with a huge honey bun addiction. He trades his morphine pills for honey buns slathered with icing.

“I ain’t got no leg, hahahahaha,” he says again.

After I manage to scrape together some measure of composure, I turn around in a daze. He shows me the bloody stump. The leg was freshly cut off a couple days prior at an outside hospital.

The same guy, about eight months later, will ask me again to help him move his other leg and prank me again. His other leg was cut off, too.

“Hahahahahahahaha, I ain’t got NOOOOO legs homie, hahahahahahaha,” Lupo says as he kicks both stumps up and down, laughing hysterically.

I’m glad to see he has such a positive attitude about having no legs.

This time, I laugh with him. I’m in on the joke. The joke’s no longer on me; it’s on life.

Lupo’s demise came from K-2, a dangerous synthetic drug often called “Spice” or “synthetic marijuana.” K-2 is made from chemicals sprayed onto plant material. It can cause unpredictable and deadly reactions such as rapid heart rate, seizures, heart attacks, kidney failure, and sometimes sudden death. Nobody ever really knows what’s in a batch until it’s too late.

He smoked it and his heart blew up.

End of Lupo.

His story isn’t unique.

It’s the story of what the Florida Department of Corrections’ drug economy does to people. And it’s a story the state has spent a lot of money and effort making sure you never hear.

Before I go further, I need to say something and I need to mean it. I always try to give a shout out to the officers. Always. Because I know what most people don’t. I know that we’re all in there together, inmate and officer alike, just trying to survive the same damn world from different sides of the same door.

There are amazing corrections officers in the Florida Department of Corrections. I met them. I know they exist, they are not just a rumor. Officers who looked at you like a human being. Who knew, on some level they’d never say out loud, that the line between them and the man in the prison blues was thinner than most people on the outside would ever believe. Officers who were fair. Who were decent. Who did a fucked up job with some measure of dignity and went home and tried to leave it at the gate.

Think about what that job actually is. Twelve hour shifts. Locked inside the same walls as the people you’re guarding. Half your career, if you make it to retirement, is spent being incarcerated right alongside us. I’m sure that irks a lot of officers. They just get to go home at the end of their shift. Most of the time. The desensitization that happens to an inmate over years? It happens to the officers too. It has to. You cannot witness what goes on inside those facilities day after day, year after year, and stay the same person you were when you walked in for the first time. Uh-uh. That world changes everyone it touches.

Everyone.

And here’s something else that doesn’t get said enough. Most of these officers are regular citizens trying to earn a paycheck and support their families. That’s it. That’s the whole story for a lot of them. They took a state job with benefits because they needed one. They didn’t sign up to be part of a corrupt system. At least I hope they didn’t. And when the system around them is rotten, staying clean inside it takes a kind of courage that most people will never be tested on.

So, shout out to y’all.

The truth is that what happens inside a prison stays inside a prison on both sides of the badge. The officer doesn’t go home and tell his wife what he saw in the shower block that afternoon. The inmate doesn’t call his mother and describe what he watched happen in the dorm at count. You experience it and you carry it alone. Because you can’t explain it to someone who hasn’t lived it. But I will try. The words don’t translate. The world in there and the world out here don’t speak the same language.

There are good people and bad people everywhere. Good inmates and bad inmates. Good officers and bad officers. Good staff and corrupt staff. That’s not a prison thing. That’s a life thing. It’s everywhere. It’s always been everywhere. What matters is who we truly are. What we do with the life we’ve been given. How we make it count. Most people, inmate or officer, we’re all just trying to get through the day and do right by the people we love. I believe that. I’ve always believed that.

But I also know there are really bad ones. Like a fucking cancer. Officers who shouldn’t be within a hundred miles of that kind of power over another human being. Just like there are inmates who make it dangerous and impossible for everyone around them. That’s the reality too and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

What I’m writing about isn’t the individual standing in that dorm at count. It’s the machine that put him there and then left him to either survive it or become it. The institution protects itself. Not the officers. Not the inmates. Itself. And that’s what has to change.

Now here’s the part that should make every person in Tallahassee deeply uncomfortable.

You’ll hear the Florida Department of Corrections say that drugs come in through visitation. That’s the official story. It’s also mostly a lie. Ask anyone who’s actually been inside. The people who primarily bring drugs into Florida prisons are officers and staff. It’s a business. It’s always been a business. And it got a massive turbo boost in late 2011 when the Florida Department of Corrections removed tobacco from the canteen.

Think about what that decision did overnight. A pack of cigarettes that cost a few bucks on the street suddenly became worth hundreds of dollars behind the fence. A single cigarette could be traded for stamps, food, favors, protection. The math was right there in front of every officer walking through those gates every single morning. The ban didn’t end the tobacco trade. It exploded it. And it moved the whole operation entirely into the hands of the people with the keys.

And it’s not just tobacco. Corrections officers are selling cell phones to inmates for thousands of dollars apiece. One phone inside a Florida prison can go for anywhere between one and five thousand dollars depending on the facility and how bad someone needs it. But don’t picture cash changing hands in a dark hallway. Uh-uh. This isn’t the movies. The transaction happens through MoneyGram, Cash App, Venmo, prepaid debit cards, and whatever else puts enough distance between a name and a dollar amount. The money hits an outside account first. Once it clears, the phone gets delivered. Clean. Hard to trace. Almost impossible to connect back to the officer who set it up. And let’s be real, they may allow an inmate to talk them into it.

This isn’t a few bad apples doing something reckless. This is an organized operation. And the Florida Department of Corrections built every single condition that made it possible.

Then K-2 hit the system and it changed everything. Synthetic marijuana came in and replaced the weed market almost overnight because it was harder to detect on a drug test and easier to smuggle. What nobody told the public was what K-2 actually does to a person. It doesn’t mellow you out. It can make someone stab their best friend over nothing. It causes psychotic breaks, seizures, cardiac events. It kills people. It killed Lupo. And the Florida Department of Corrections, which controls every single item that enters those facilities, was either letting it happen or so catastrophically incapable of stopping it that the result was the same.

Neither answer is okay.

Then add Subutex and Suboxone into that mix. Medications used on the outside for legitimate opioid treatment that Florida’s prisons largely refused to offer their own inmates, which didn’t stop those same medications from flooding the compound anyway. A single strip was worth a fortune. Officers brought them in. Inmates found ways to smuggle them in too, at an alarming rate. And the damn state, which had access to every overdose number climbing inside its own facilities, kept issuing press releases about the complex substance use disorders of its inmates instead of investigating the supply chain running straight through its own employees.

Here’s what nobody in Tallahassee wants to say out loud. Florida corrections officers are overworked, understaffed, and chronically underpaid for one of the most psychologically fucked jobs in the state. They go home stressed and stretched thin and quietly furious at a system that burns through them as efficiently as it burns through the inmates. And then they come back the next morning and the temptation’s just sitting right there. An inmate with family money on the outside who desperately needs a phone to hear his kid’s voice. A pack of tobacco worth three hundred dollars, or more. A strip of Suboxone that takes a second to slide into a pocket. The Florida Department of Corrections created every single one of these conditions. It refuses to address the pay crisis and the staffing crisis driving the behavior, and then it turns around and points at the inmates when the contraband economy it built falls into public view.

Yes, inmates are ingenious. I know that better than most. People find ways to survive and build economies out of nothing because that’s what human beings do when they’re desperate and resourceful at the same time. But the idea that tobacco, K-2, cell phones, and prescription opioids are pouring into over a hundred facilities because of inmate ingenuity alone isn’t just a lie.

It’s an insult to every person who’s lived inside those walls and watched the deposit clear before the package moved.

Lupo wasn’t a statistic. He was a man with a laugh that could fill a hospital bay. He was also a number the Florida Department of Corrections filed under natural causes, or just fucking pending.

I’ve tried to compare Florida’s death numbers to Texas, California, New York, Alabama, and North Carolina. I’ve tried. Every researcher who’s attempted the same thing hits the exact same wall. And here’s why that wall exists and why it was built.

There’s no standardized national definition of an in-custody death. Every state self-reports to the Bureau of Justice Statistics under the Death in Custody Reporting Act. But the law has no enforcement mechanism. States that don’t report face no penalty. Nothing. Yeah, that’s right. Florida’s among the states with the worst history of late, incomplete, and pending filings. When a death’s under investigation, it doesn’t get finalized in the official statistics until the case closes. Some of those investigations drag on for years. Some of them never close. In 2023, Florida recorded 346 inmate deaths. More than half, one hundred and seventy-six of them, had no cause of death listed at all.

More than fifty percent. Unexplained or pending investigation.

Ask yourself why.

Like, how in the fuck is this at all possible?

What Florida calls a natural cause, another state calls illness linked to inadequate medical care. What one state records as suicide, another records as undetermined. Overdoses get reclassified as natural causes during pending investigations all the time. Deaths at private facilities run by GEO Group and CoreCivic get reported to the state sometimes, to the federal government sometimes, and sometimes to nobody. County jail deaths get counted separately from prison deaths in some states and bundled together in others.

The Marshall Project analyzed the Justice Department’s own in-custody death dataset and found that nearly one-third of all jail death records had no cause of death listed whatsoever. In more than one-third of cases, the listed cause of death did not fucking match what was written in the description field of the same record. The official classification contradicted the actual fucking circumstances of the death. In the same dataset, the most commonly listed manner of death across all American jails wasn’t homicide. It wasn’t suicide. It wasn’t overdose. It was this: unavailable, investigation pending. And at least 681 deaths were missing from the federal count entirely. Not miscategorized. Not pending. Gone.

The UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars database found that in 2020 alone, at least 6,182 people died in U.S. prisons. That’s a 46% increase from 2019. In a year when the prison population dropped 10%.

Are you fucking kidding me?

The comparison problem isn’t a research limitation. It’s a design feature. Every state that classifies deaths differently, every private facility that files its own paperwork, every natural cause stamped onto a suspicious death certificate is another brick in the same wall, Pink Fucking Floyd, making the true number impossible to calculate, impossible to compare, and impossible to prosecute.

That wall didn’t build itself.

Yep, we have a real problem.

I want every reader to do something. Pull Florida’s official death statistics from the Florida Department of Corrections website. Then pull the medical examiner records from Alachua, Marion, and Polk counties, some of the counties where the largest facilities operate. Look at both numbers. What you find in the gap between them is the real story. And then research the entire panhandle of Florida. Throw in Union County, where Reception and Medical Center sits, the facility every man entering the Florida DOC passes through first. Throw in Suwannee, for shits and giggles. The FBI did.

Spoiler.

It’ll show who controls the pen.

The DOC writes its own numbers. The medical examiners, when they get access at all, write different ones. And the private contractors who employed the doctors who signed the certificates spent years in court arguing nobody had the right to see them.

The paragraph I wrote isn’t a research prompt.

It’s a trap.

And any reader who follows those instructions will spring it themselves.

And ask yourself this. Alabama had whistleblowers with contraband phones. Why hasn’t that happened in Florida? Retaliatory transfers, solitary confinement, and the loss of gain time are the answers they’ll give you in public. Those of us who got out of the Florida Department of Corrections alive know the silence runs a lot deeper than paperwork. But in Florida, you can’t prove what you can’t live to report.

If you want to see the darkest corner of this entire system, look at Lowell Correctional Institution. It’s the largest women’s prison in the country and it’s a nightmare by design. Not by accident. Not by neglect. By design. A U.S. Department of Justice report revealed over a decade of systemic sexual abuse, including rape and extortion by staff, that the institution’s own leadership knew about and buried. In Ocala’s brutal summers, pregnant women have lived in dorms hitting 115 degrees with no air conditioning. For years the state knew the drinking water at Lowell was contaminated with hazardous chemicals and let those women keep drinking it anyway.

Lowell isn’t an outlier. Uh-uh. It’s the logical conclusion of a system built on secrecy, impunity, and profit.

I wrote COUNT TIME to close the gap between those of us who survived this system and the people on the outside who only ever see the Florida Department of Corrections’ polished press releases. Every chapter in this piece is a human being. Every loophole is a deliberate choice made by someone who knew better. Lupo was one of those human beings. And there are others, men whose names are already part of the public record, men whose deaths became headlines, whose cases became lawsuits, whose stories got told because someone on the outside finally paid attention. My book is about the ones nobody paid attention to. And it’s about finding the keys to your own prison. My stories, you may not relate to them directly. But they’ll make you think. Because underneath all of it, we are all just people who want to be happy. That part isn’t a prison story. That part is yours too.

And I want to be clear about something. This is only the tip of the iceberg. I only shared what I thought people might be able to stomach in one sitting.

Support The Alabama Solution. Buy it, watch it, share it. But then turn your eyes toward Florida. Because the solution isn’t just a movie title. It’s something we’ve got to fight for, loudly and without stopping, for the 89,000 souls the state admits are still trapped in the dark, and for every single one they aren’t counting.

If you want to do something, follow the Florida Justice Institute at fji.law. Follow the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida’s National Prison Project. Follow the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. And if you’ve been inside the Florida Department (hell) of Corrections, I want to hear from you. Inmate or officer. Reply to this post or reach out directly. Your story matters. Even if you’ve never been to prison before. Your voice matters. Your comments matter. Your light matters.

It always has.

I know plenty of people have had it worse than me, even on my worst day. That’s not why I write. I write because I feel obligated to tell the truth and to say, enough is enough. People are still suffering in these places right now. I do this for them, and for all of us, as a way of saying, I see you. I understand.

I also hope. No, scratch that. I want these stories to give people something to stand on, a little more courage, a little more perspective. I want them to be proof that you can live through some dark shit and still find your way back to breath, yoga, books, love, community. If anything I’ve lived helps someone feel less alone or speak up against this system, then it’s worth putting it out there.

When I first came home, people naturally wanted to know what it was like. At the same time, most of the free world population doesn’t want to hear about prison all the damn time. I’d hear someone tell a story from their past and try to relate, but all my mind knew for the last decade was prison, so I answered with prison stories. Over time, I could see some people thought I was glorifying it or trying to sound tough. I wasn’t. I was just grabbing from the only stories my nervous system had. After all, I was inside for a fucking decade.

This one isn’t about being tough. It’s about one of the places I rarely talk about at all, the box at Taylor CI. And I damn sure hardly talk about Suwannee CI, since that was even worse.

I’d met the Monster years earlier, the hard way. He was the property sergeant at Lake Butler, the guy who helped process new inmates and load buses, and the last time I’d seen him I was cuffed from behind, getting bitch smacked for wearing an illegal pair of basketball shorts he knew had been smuggled out of property. He wanted me to tell on the inmate who shot them my way. I refused. Still standing there cuffed, I listened to him threaten to beat my ass and tell me Suwannee would make Lake Butler look soft, that he had friends there and I should think of him when I stepped onto that compound. Think of me, motherfucker!

Finally, after a week of Lake Butler misery in the box, I’m being transferred to confinement at Taylor and I’m on my way there yet again, years after that first run‑in with the Monster. After being escorted back up top to where the buses wait, I see him. He’s docile this time. I get my bag of property and start to look through it. That’s when I realize I have a real problem.

Dammit, my lock isn’t with my property. Did Sergeant Colon remove it? This is the same officer who’d put a hit on me years earlier after a dispute, the one who hated me. In Florida prisons, we call locks fire. No lock means no fire, no protection. Feeling like I have no choice, I walk up to the Monster.

“Sir, I don’t mean any disrespect, but I don’t have my combination lock with my property. Sir, I don’t even care if the lock unlocks or not, but I don’t want to be left naked out on the pound when I get back to Taylor.”

In Florida prisons, being naked on a new pound means you’ve got nothing to defend yourself with. No lock, no fire, no knife, no protection. He knows that. Every officer does.

The Monster looks at me with his beady eyes and says, “You’re shit outta luck.”

Walking away dejected, I hear him call me back. He lays out a few locks on his desk and says, “Tatter, listen, take one of these, but I don’t have the combinations.”

I tell him that that doesn’t matter. I just don’t want to walk on the pound without something I can put into a belt. He understands and throws me a lock. I guess the Monster and I have gotten over our beef.

Surprised, I say, “Thank you, sir.”

“Fuhgedd aboudit,” he replies, mimicking an old mafioso, and I’m loaded onto a bus.

I remember getting out my MP3 player and listening to Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds. It makes me feel like I’m going to be straight.

It drowns out everything else.

Taylor CI Main Unit, they say to me.

Walking to the box in shackles, I look at how big the prison is. It makes me feel better that the Monster’s hooked me up with my fire. I remember Taylor from our last encounter. I doubt the Main Unit will be any different from the Annex, there across an open field surrounded by razor wire. I feel like I’m ready for whatever. I remember this type of time; I can do this.

Yoga, Emmett. Chill.

Confinement at the Main Unit’s set up in the shape of a butterfly wing. The old school kind, kind of like a honeycomb. Those butterfly-style units have four quads and can be terrifying for someone first entering the system. Might be terrifying for anyone, actually. I’m sure my family’s terrified for me. Anything can happen in a place as massive as Taylor. It’s nothing to lose your life inside one of the quads or on the compound, for a million and one reasons. You’re a dime a dozen in here.

So, let’s do it.

I’m placed into Quad 1’s shower, and right away, there’s a disturbance. A man’s being escorted by about six officers to another shower across from me. He’s completely orange, drenched in pepper spray, aka Black Jesus, choking and coughing his lungs out. They’ve got him under cold water. That’s the closest thing to mercy he’s getting today. At Suwannee, they use hot water to make it burn more. He’s yelling that they fired his ass up out on the compound. He’s calling the cops fuck boys as they videotape him showering off. Out in the free world, a fuck boy is some dude who plays with people’s hearts. In here, being called a fuck boy is one of the biggest forms of disrespect. You call the wrong man that in prison, you might die.

I can relate to his pain. I know what he’s experiencing. His fire and rage are still there. Seems to me that he’s a survivor. He’ll probably make it home unless he has an extremely long sentence. I know he’ll never show the pain he keeps beneath the surface. He won’t allow the police to see him cry. Maybe later in the night, using a blanket to cover tears, an inmate may cry. Most of our tears though, are held on the inside and kept in check.

Once he’s escorted to another cell, an officer comes to my shower and tells me to cuff up. I place my hands out of the shower flap to be cuffed. By now, my wrists have had the chance to get some calluses and are rough. They don’t even have any red marks on them. With an officer holding my arm, I’m taken to a corner cell at the end of the row. For me, it’s a good cell. I like the ones in the corner. In the honeycomb setup, they have just a little more space. You can get in a couple more walking steps.

Stepping in, I size up my bunkee, a short, white dude. He looks to weigh around 160 with tattoos everywhere, and I immediately peg him as a bug. In prison, that’s what we call someone who’s just off, lame, weird, batshit crazy, or giving off seriously creepy vibes. This dude fits the bill.

After I’m uncuffed, my new cellie walks to the door and is uncuffed as well. Once alone, we get to vibing. I never perceive him as a threat. Throughout the time he’s in the room with me, his main concern is not getting busted by the police during a room search for buck, the inmate’s homemade answer to alcohol. I don’t drink buck and I’m actually hoping they don’t find it. We’d both get blamed for it, another sixty day DR, but if that happens, I won’t say anything. Hopefully, buddy would own his own shit.

I really wanted to get out and call home after my box time. When he leaves a few days later, I breathe a sigh of relief. Maybe I have a shot at using the phone sooner, but I have to keep that thought down. Missing people hurts too bad.

We’re escorted to the showers every other day, and one night, I hear a shout from the quad’s upper tier. Someone’s yelling, “Tatter, Tatter!”

Cuffed from behind with an officer gripping my arm, I look over both of our shoulders, and I’m delighted to see my muthafuckin dawg, Juice.

From the corner of my eye, I can see his excitement, too. We’ve known each other for years now. From Taylor Annex to Lawtey and now back to Taylor. Solidly built, with an intelligent face, he’s always positive. Even though he has a twenty year sentence, he’s always cheerful and has a good attitude. Some people might try to take advantage of someone with a good nature, but I wouldn’t try that with him because I know how he gets down. It’s not like we’re in confinement for being angels.

There are some real asshole cops working confinement. I can’t tell you how mad they make me when they play their stupid games. They withhold the mail if someone pisses them off. They do this by not passing it out that night. They search someone’s cell and plant a knife on them if they’ve done any little thing that makes them mad. Give ’em CM time. I’ve seen them search a room and plant drugs or whatever so they can win. They can do that while we’re in the showers and get away with it because there are no cameras in the cells. In Florida DOC, CM time means Close Management, where they can lock you in confinement for years and years.

Some of the officers really feel like they’re winning by setting you up. Always trying to make you out to be the loser. It’s all a stupid game. What I hate most is watching another inmate going through it mentally, then seeing the police roll out another body bag. Seeing that someone’s committed suicide with a smuggled razor or hung themselves in the cell right next to mine really bugs me.

While writing a letter, I hear through the wall what sounds like a scuffle. It isn’t a scuffle. It’s the inmate’s feet bouncing off the wall because he’s hanging himself in the cell to the left of mine. I watch the police bring him out and they’re cracking jokes about it. What would possess someone to make jokes about a person so depressed that he hung himself? For me, it highlights their positional power over us, like we aren’t even human.

Around this time, the police could kill you in confinement. It’s harder for them to get away with it now because Florida DOC decided to get serious with the Prison Rape Elimination Act. When I first fell, you could be locked in a cell with someone who might outweigh you by a hundred pounds, and nobody cared. Back then, the police could skip their regular thirty-minute walks for an entire shift. The new policy of actually making the officers follow the rules and regulations really pisses some of them off. Now all confinement areas have cameras with audio mounted in them. It’s more difficult to set someone up, but they manage anyway.

Damn though, why? Why laugh and joke about someone ending their life like it’s a freaking comedy? Shit isn’t funny. I write and vent about the dude killing himself and about how the police act toward it all. I know, though, that I just need to breathe this one out. The police have me wanting to get buck wild.

Breathe in, breathe out. Inhale, exhale. Let it all out. Clear your mind of this bullshit happening around you.

Shortly after, I watch another dude get wheeled out with blood trails flowing from his wrists. Blood splatters on a cold, concrete floor as he’s wheeled toward the morgue.

Is this justice?

This piece is only a glimmer of what the box, what confinement, is really like, but it’s a start. There’s so much I still haven’t said, and maybe never will, but this is one true slice of it.

On the outside, people sometimes ask for prison stories like they’re episodes. Inside, this was just a Tuesday at Taylor. A borrowed lock, a pepper sprayed man, a bug cellie with buck, a friend yelling my name from the tier, two suicides, and officers who thought it was all hilarious.

I know this is heavy. I wish I could dress it up, but I can’t. This is what confinement looked like where I did time, and I don’t know how to tell this story without telling the truth.

If you made it this far, thank you for staying with me in it. I promise the next piece will step in a different direction, a yoga story, something lighter, but I won’t stop showing you the real side of prison. That’s the only way this makes any sense to me.

People think the worst part of prison is the violence you see. Sometimes it’s the fucked up stories our own minds tell us before anything even happens.

Time always passes and eventually, I find myself working the 3:30 a.m. early kitchen shift. Yes, it’s miserable waking up with little sleep every morning except for Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but what can I do? I know I can avoid work or anything I don’t want to do by going to the box. The box is confinement, prison’s version of solitary. The box doesn’t worry me at all. Sometimes there’s more comfort there than being on the pound with all its chaos. If I hadn’t started to read those Alatriste books, I’m not so certain I’d sacrifice what I want for the good of myself and my family. I really don’t want to do the morning shift. Back then, the idea of doing something just because it was good for me later still felt like a foreign language.

Chow has two cafeterias, one North and one South, with two separate kitchens. The kitchen staff serving these two lines are constantly warring with each other to serve faster, better, and steal shit to sell on the compound. On top of it all, most are gang members so there are egos and reps to uphold. Arguments are constant. Fights are normal. For the most part, dudes get along, but there’s always potential for violence to break out. It’s called getting rec or shooting a friendly. It’s when opponents fight each other for sport. It happens almost every day. It’s a way to test your hands and keep them up to date, always ready. The whole place smells like burnt grease, sweat, old blood, and whatever gross mystery meat they’re cooking that day.

This atmosphere is a constant.

There are times when guys get punked out. Water’s poured on top of their heads, or some random guy’s wrestled to the floor, picked up, and thrown into the huge kettle cooker full of water. All types of shit happens. Sometimes real fights pop off between us, but we have to wait until chow’s been served to deal with it. Most prisoners aren’t trying to crash and go to confinement. Inmates consider that a check-in move, punching another prisoner in front of an officer, unless that officer’s given you the go-ahead.

After chow’s been served, the kitchen officer’s always preoccupied in her office. After everyone from the compound’s eaten, the kitchen staff’s allowed to grab as much food as they want and eat in the cafeteria alone, without the officer. Now the simmering tensions can really pop off. Crazy times.

This isn’t even accounting for the female kitchen employees who aren’t officers. This always intensifies things. Guys are constantly trying to engage the women to either fuck or be in a real relationship or gun them. Gunning is when a dude stands at a window or doorway and jacks off at a woman who works for the prison, aiming his body at her while she’s on duty. Sometimes she knows and plays into it, sometimes it starts as flirting, but a lot of the time she doesn’t know at all. When he’s doing it from a distance, hiding and aiming at her while she’s just trying to do her job, we call him a sniper. It’s gross and fucked up, but it really happens, and in here it’s treated like just another part of the landscape. Maybe they get them to bring in dope. It’s all fucked up, and it’s done to dudes too, so there’s that. When a relationship of some sort begins and feelings get involved, it becomes a deadly situation. Messing with someone’s girl can get you killed or stabbed. Many of the inmates working in the chow hall are younger too, with a jit mentality. A jit is a young inmate, usually wild, impulsive, and trying to prove himself. The chow hall’s a highly charged, fun, scary, dangerous, wild, combustible place to be. It’s like working inside a pressure cooker and pretending it’s just a job.

I navigate through this crazy world the best I can. It isn’t always easy. I remember that first early bird morning like it was yesterday.

Before Q-dorm, I’d already been through some shit. They found a knife that wasn’t mine stuffed in a vent over the bunk my bunkee and I shared during a search after a dorm riot, and they yanked both of us out of M-dorm, locked us up under investigation, and sent us to confinement in J-dorm, which on the pound we called Jamrock, like the Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley song “Welcome to Jamrock.” They sat us there for about thirty days, all while threatening us with 180 days under investigation in confinement, then releasing us and doing it all over again for another 180. When they finally kicked me back out, they sent me to P-dorm, a high-custody open bay dorm where a hundred-plus men sleep in rows of bunks with no cells and no privacy, and it was its own kind of crazy. I survived that circus long enough for the investigation to die down and my custody to drop, and that’s when they moved me to Q-dorm, the kitchen dorm.

When I arrive, there are already a few people I know from the compound working in the kitchen. Firehouse, HD, Taliban, Murk, Maniac, Chino, Gino, North Carolina, and AD. That makes it more comfortable, but I learn quickly what it’ll be like working the morning shift. There are plenty of personalities to deal with. With the two serving lines and the little side skirmishes, there are some highly intense situations indeed.

Once the craziness of serving breakfast to the whole compound’s over, and I’ve finally eaten my own tray, it’s time to clean up and start prepping for lunch. I’m in what they call the pot room, which is usually where most people start. It’s known as the worst job in the kitchen.

I don’t really care. It’s Murk and I back there together and I know him from M-dorm. Now that we’re in Q-dorm, I’m able to chill with him and the time passes quickly. Murk’s a short black dude, his dark skin tatted up, and I know he’s affiliated with the Mohawks, who at the time are one of the most violent and sophisticated Orlando gangs, a Blood set. He’s the kind of dude who could stir up a lot of shit if he wanted to, but with me he’s solid, and that counts for a lot in a place like this. When we finish cleaning all of the pots and pans and other things, we post up, kind of just bullshitting and telling stories, looking out into the rest of the kitchen. There’s something remarkable about that, two completely different worlds leaning up against the same wall, simply trying to make it through the damn shift.

If you look to the left, you can clearly see all of the bakers in the kitchen. It’s a group of white guys, and these white guys have the white guy supremacist gang tattoos everywhere. I don’t know what it is about the bakery but that’s the white boy area, it seems. They might be racists but they’re the best bakers.

There are some really gigantic dudes in there too. One of them’s a huge skinhead. I notice he keeps looking my way. I’m starting to get the feeling that he doesn’t like me communicating with this little black dude with gold in his mouth. I block him out of my mind while Murk daps me up and says he’s gonna see if he can get us these homemade protein shakes that some of the guys in the kitchen make. When Murk leaves, I turn to go back into the pot room, but I’m stopped abruptly by this huge skinhead calling out to me from behind.

I hear footsteps quickly approaching.

I stop and spin around to see this giant standing directly in front of me, only a couple paces away. Having no idea why he’s approached me, I’m already positioning myself into a battle stance. My muscles tense involuntarily. I shift my weight to the balls of my feet, ready to move. My hands clench into fists at my sides; my jaw naturally tightens.

I start to think the worst and I’m becoming amped. I do a quick scan of his body for weapons, anticipating what might be coming. My heart races. I’m ready for anything. The adrenaline’s peaking when he opens his mouth and bluntly asks what race I am.

I blink, caught off guard.

“What’d you say?”

“What race are you?” he says again.

I stand there looking at him and can’t believe he’s starting in on me about some racist shit. I always think of my mom in these situations and how I was raised.

Like lightning, I find myself getting really angry, showing my youth. I’m getting aggressive and step closer to him. I say rudely, “I’m Caucasian. That cool with you, bro? I’m a motherfuckin’ Caucasian.”

I make my way around him, my arms slightly lifted, ready for whatever. I said what the fuck I said. It’s his move now, the motherfucker. It’s switched now; I’m the aggressor. In my eyes, I’ve tried him enough and expect him to swing on me.

He stands there silently for a few moments, and I feel like he’s battling a decision to fight or leave it alone.

I guess he decides to leave it alone or maybe catch me slipping later and go for a sucker punch. Maybe he’ll stab me. I come up to Murk and tell him I think buddy over there just tried me on some racist shit. The dude’s a giant and if I have to fight him, Murk should grab a pot to hit the monster with if he starts to beat me to death.

From that moment on, I can’t shake the feeling of the temperature rising in the kitchen. I keep shooting daggers in his direction, but the dude won’t look at me. Not knowing what else to do, I go over everything again in my head, replaying what he said and how he said it. I think about my reaction and start to think that maybe I was tripping. Maybe I was the one in the wrong here. I’m not sure, but I have to know because there’s no way I’m just gonna let it blow over and then possibly get knifed out on the rec yard. He could have some guys rush in the dorm when the officer pops the door and they’d hold me down while he fillets my face open with a razor. I’d be looking like a pumpkin on Halloween. No way. I have to end this right then and there. The thought of looking over my shoulder for any amount of time’s getting to me, so before I know it, my imagination’s worked me up into another frenzy.

Fuck this motherfucker.

With a sense of purpose, I step up to the giant and get right in front of him.

“Hey, bro, check this out. I don’t know if you asked me what race I am, was on some black and white shit, or if you don’t like me talking to my friend, but bro, my mom, she raised me differently. I’m not racist at all and if you think I was being disrespectful how I handled myself back there, it wasn’t my intention, but, bro, I hang out with whoever I want. I’m white, bro, but I’m not racist.”

He stands there looking at me with these gigantic blue eyes. He has this bewildered expression on his face. He opens his mouth.

“Jesus Christ, bro.”

He kind of chuckles, which starts to piss me off further until he says slowly, as though speaking to an idiot, “Bro, I wasn’t trying you on any racist shit, man. I’m French and I thought you might have French in your blood too. That’s why I was asking, man. I’m French. Are you French? That’s all I wanted to know, bro.”

I feel so stupid, and the frustration of the entire situation dies immediately. He starts to laugh, and I have to laugh too.

“Damn, bro. My bad, man,” I tell him.

“Holy shit, man,” he replies, still laughing. “I just wanted to know if you’re French, bro, that’s all.”

I just stand there, embarrassed. He walks away, laughing to himself. Even now, I remember it and start to laugh. That’s another valuable lesson I’ve learned. Don’t let your imagination run wild. And don’t be so quick to judge others, especially if you don’t like people judging you.

Being in the dorms P and Q, I learn to mind my own Ps and Qs.

To this very day I’m still learning the same thing, not to swing at ghosts. Half the battle is slowing down long enough to see what’s really there, to chill out, breathe, and let that shit go.

“It’s the little things in life.”

—Galaxy Quest

It’s the little things.

Listening to the footsteps cross the top tier’s grated metal as my cellie leaves, I’m comforted but at the same time unnerved. I’ve had someone in my room twenty‑four hours a day for a long time now, going through hell with me, and then suddenly, it’s just me. Usually, another bunkee comes in right away. Damn.

We all like our alone time, but at Suwannee CI, there aren’t any books and I’ve only a few letters to read and reread.

I’m able to jack off, but how does that Green Day song go again? I think it’s in their song “Longview” they say, “When masturbation’s lost its fun, you’re fucking lonely.” In fact, I think the song says “lazy,” but I’m lonely.

With all the other shit going on, police blowing whistles at your confinement cell’s tiny window, yelling at you to finish eating as soon as your tray’s put in, handing you an ‘air tray’ (when you take the lid off and it’s empty), and hearing the occasional suicide, it’s hard to find any peace of mind, let alone pleasure.

The sound of suicide is unforgettable. When a man hangs himself, the noise is rough and brutal, filled with choking and gargling that echoes throughout the prison wing. When suicide happens with a razor, the coppery and unpleasant smell strikes first and stirs something primal. Every sense becomes sharper. It’s fucked up and disturbing. Thoughts race and imagination takes over. Who was he? Did he have a family? Is this really happening?

Then there are the police night games. They think it’s hilarious to bang on some poor soul’s door, then go to some other poor fucker’s cell and pretend he was the one banging. Ten minutes later, another officer bangs on a different door down the tier. Then the white shirt comes back to the first poor fucker’s cell and tells him he disobeyed an order, and there you go.

That’s all it takes to be set up. In order to spray you, they have to first loosen the chains on your door, just wide enough for the pepper spray can to fit through. If they just want to fuck with your head, they wait a few beats while you mentally prepare yourself for the pain. Half the time, it’s just a cruel joke and they chain the door back, then turn and walk away, laughing. It’s kept so freezing cold in Suwannee’s confinement a bit of pepper spray helps warm you up. Then you get a warm shower, but it’s a mixed blessing because the warm water allows the spray to really get into your pores.

You can only stand to walk back and forth so many times in a confinement cell counting your paces. Without a pen and paper, it becomes impossible to keep track of your steps. I used to try to walk 10,000 steps back and forth in the cell, which is close to three to five miles, but I would always lose track at around six to seven thousand and then try again. Your mind wanders and starts thinking about other shit and then before you know it, poof, all the numbers vanish and you’re back at square one. The little things become so important.

After almost a week with no bunkee, I’m very bored and cold. I’m only thinking about my family or my ex. I know thinking about my loved ones is only gonna make my time harder, but sometimes I still need that comfort. I’m one of the younger ones in the system, a vulnerability I can’t concede. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna end up being put down on or gang banged anywhere in here.

There’s a tiny mirror attached to the wall in the cell. Not made of glass of course—maybe it’s tin; I don’t know—but you can barely see your face in it. I stand in front of that shitty, barely reflective mirror and look at myself with my shaved head and create who I need to be in here. I tell myself I’m a fuckin’ lion, a warrior, and I can handle anything. Fuck this shit. Fuck these officers. Fuck anyone who tries to fuck with me. Sometimes I even head‑butt the fucking mirror. Fuck you! I punch the wall to make my knuckles stronger. If any 300‑pound dude shows up in my cell and wants to get on me, I’ll fuckin’ kill him.

Falling back on my fuck‑it attitude has gotten me through to this point. I can handle this; I can figure it out. I have to look at it like a chess game, move by move. Being scared about what’s next can’t be an option in here. You’re young, Emmett, but don’t be stupid. There’s always someone bigger and badder than you, so outthink them.

I’ve been here for a week without talking to anyone. In this confinement, you aren’t talking to others in their cells, or you’ll be beaten or put on property strip. Let me tell you, at Suwannee, property strip’s worse than making the police run it and come into your cell for extraction.

I remember shivering for three days on the seventy‑two‑hour property strip. Everything’s taken from you—your bedroll, your clothes, your property, if you have any. You become so cold the hard metal rack’s impossible to sleep on. I find the best way to sleep is after performing a thousand jumping jacks. I become warm enough to sit down on the cold steel toilet, fold my arms across my chest as though I’m jumping from a helicopter, and lean forward into my knees, tucking myself into a ball and hopefully a little power nap. Without a blanket, these are the measures I take. It’s either that or go crazy and do something stupid like freak out and get myself another DR.

I haven’t seen an ant or a bug since being here. This cleanliness is rare because most confinement cells are like the ones at Lake Butler. A rat will walk under your door, chill with you, and then say, “What’s up, homie, you gonna eat that?”

One morning, to my surprise, an ant’s walking across my floor in what seems to be some type of planned circular pattern, designed to discover the most about her surroundings. She discovers what I know. There aren’t any crumbs on this floor. My stomach’s rumbling confirms as much.

I feel bad for her. She’s hungry, too, and maybe as lost as I am. I make a mental note to save a little of my cornbread for her from my next tray if it isn’t air. For the moment, I’m happy to watch her do her little stop‑and‑go, jerky, circular motions. She becomes my friend and yeah, I talk to her. Tell her about my day and everything. I ask the ant if she knows what would be on the tray for lunch. She moves from a circular motion to a square one.

Ahh, an ant with a sense of humor.

She’s telling me I’ll get a square meal!

I laugh out loud. To me, this is the funniest thing in the world. I want to talk to someone so badly and here I am communicating with a being they say doesn’t have a soul. Hmmm... I don’t know. I’m a believer once I see this little thing move from a circular walk to a square one.

Regardless, I watch her for quite a while doing her little ant stroll. After the square thing, the conversation gets a little one‑sided and I realize she probably wants her little ant space. Rising from my hands and knees, I continue my mission to count ten thousand steps without crushing her busy little self.

My mind wanders, just for a brief moment and then, just like she appeared before me, she’s gone. I smile now and sometimes wonder if she was there at all.

I believe she was.

As I think about the ant’s disappearance, I realize how much we have in common. Both of us are trapped in this cold, sterile environment, searching for purpose and sustenance. The ant’s determined exploration of the cell mirrors my own attempt to find meaning in this confined space. Her circular and square patterns remind me of my own repetitive routines, counting steps, doing jumping jacks, trying to stay warm. Just as she vanished without a trace, I wonder if I too am slowly disappearing, my identity eroding in this fucked place.

But then I remember her resilience, her ability to adapt and survive even in this barren cell. Perhaps there’s a lesson here. If a tiny ant can find purpose in such a desolate space, maybe I can too. Maybe my circular patterns, my routines, my self‑talk, my determination to stay strong, aren’t just ways to pass the time, but are actually keeping me alive, keeping me sane.

As I resume my pacing, I carry the memory of the ant with me. In this place where time seems to stand still, where each day bleeds into the next, our brief encounter reminds me that life goes on. Even here, in the depths of Suwannee CI, there are moments of wonder. And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough to keep me going until my own magical disappearance, the day I finally walk out of here.

✨ ✨ ✨

Thanks for walking this concrete box with me for a few minutes.

And nothing can be taken away from the heart‑wrenching, powerful documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin. That film deserves every bit of praise it’s getting. But we should not use it as a disguise for what’s happening right here on American soil, during the American Oscars. And that part is disgraceful.

A U.S.-rooted institution giving its top nonfiction prize to a film that lays out American prisoners being killed, enslaved, and retaliated against would be the Academy saying, on the world’s biggest film stage, This is what our own government is doing inside its cages. That is a level of self‑indictment they almost never choose, especially when there’s a safer horror story available somewhere else.

There are a lot of us who thought and wanted The Alabama Solution to win. It just didn’t make sense that it did not, not at an American awards show, when the horror it shows is ours. The topic’s too horrible to digest. Too fucked up. It forces us, the American public, to look at prisoners, people who commit crimes, in a whole new light. It forces America to look at the politics and decisions around prisons with new eyes. And our eyesight gets real blurry when it comes to hard topics. It shines directly on a giant multi‑billion dollar business. And we should never forget: crime is business.

Think about multi-billions? Yeah, almost impossible. How many really can? Not many. But there are people that think in billions. Right now. Thinking. Thinking. Thinking. More, more, more.

The systemic issues this film exposes are the real horror, because they go so much deeper and so much further than ‘just’ prison. Crime is horrible and I’ve seen firsthand there are people who deserve or need to be in jail. But if we talk honestly about jail and prison, does that not crack open a bigger conversation about education, mental health, funding, and the real reasons people end up committing crimes in the first place?

Fuck, I feel you, that’s a heavy question.

People don’t know how deep this story goes. It’s like an iceberg. You only see the tip on screen. But if we ever got a full view of what’s underneath the surface, there’s a hell-of-a lot more ice. Underneath is where the real stories live. That’s where the real money is, the real power, the real bodies. Change takes work, and it starts with admitting we have a giant fucking problem right under the waterline. The visible tip of the iceberg’s already bad enough to sink a ship. Imagine what the rest can do. It sinks whole fleets. The Titanic didn’t stand a chance. I guarantee that has people with real power sweating, maybe only a little, maybe not even that. But a slight ‘hmmmm, this might be worrisome if we don’t get a lid on this’ means something, because they know what their true capabilities are. Even a ‘hmmmm’ matters, until there’s sweat.

Drugs are huge, but who really controls that game? Not the little street dealer. Yes, it’s horrible to sell drugs and horrible to watch people use them, but that’s business and profit too. Who really decides who sells what? Which organizations move which product? Is it really about ‘crime,’ or is it really about control? Do we honestly believe our policymakers, our military, the top of the top brass do not know exactly what’s going on right this second?

And here’s the harder question: do we really believe if the people with real power wanted this to end, it wouldn’t end?

Fuck no, that’s silly.

The men from The Alabama Solution are true revolutionaries. Right now, this very moment, their lives are in jeopardy. Let us fucking sit with that. Let us actually picture what that looks like. These men have watched abuse, corruption, crime, and death, literally on a daily basis. They know the risks. They know that telling this story is not just ‘dangerous,’ it’s a certain kind of death sentence. They shared it anyway. These men, in my opinion, as low as that might be, are as brave as the people who stormed Normandy or fought in the Pacific islands. Oh, I know, we ‘should not’ compare them to heroes. We ‘should not’ acknowledge that kind of courage when it’s coming from men in prison. But they are facing death, torture, and every other ugly thing you can imagine, and they told the truth anyway.

Shout out to y’all, daring motherfuckers.

The people who made the film and produced it risked their lives too. People need to understand this type of shit does not only happen in Ukraine, Russia, the Philippines, China, or somewhere in Africa. People are being killed right here in America. We’re just really, really good at getting people to look the other direction. We have honed our magic tricks. Smoke and mirrors.

Fucking magicians.

Let us talk about Florida and Alabama.

Alabama has around 20,000 people in its prisons and the highest prison homicide rate in the country. Florida officially says it has about 89,000 people locked up. I call bullshit, and they know it’s bullshit. An officer with rank told me it’s bullshit. Florida’s the master at this game. I’m sure there are other states that play the numbers game too, but here is how it was explained to me in Florida DOC: the reason Florida’s constantly transferring thousands of people every single day is because they don’t count in the official population while they are in transit.

So when inmates are being shipped all over the state, they aren’t on that main count. Florida seriously transfers thousands of inmates every day. And let us not hide from the fact, deaths recorded in prison every year are not really recorded honestly. More than half get labeled ‘pending investigation,’ and they sit like that for years. No real numbers. No real accountability.

Paperwork’s the biggest defiler in America. If the paperwork fits, whether it’s in prison, on the streets, in business, or in the military, then that’s the story getting told. We want to explain our actions and that’s where paperwork, the power of words, can take a nasty turn. Ask any lawyer who has watched a case twist itself around reports and affidavits. They build a story from paperwork and whichever story the jurors believe the most is the story that wins. The paperwork around legality and crime is the absolute power that’s used to justify actions in any arena. It’s scary to think it means so much, but it does. Our controllers are very intelligent. They know the written word holds power. How can something so beautiful be so downright terrifying?

Paperwork fucking sucks.

I wonder how many states use the same routine to disguise their body count. To lie without technically lying because, ‘they are under investigation, we cannot release that yet.’ Yeah, fucking right. Get real. But they won’t. It is too horrible to process. It’s like telling the American people there are aliens. The line’s always the same: people could not handle it.

Well, they may be fucking right it seems. Damn that truth fucking hurts. I believe we can handle it.

I have tried to pull statistics on Florida: overdoses, suicides, ‘natural’ deaths. Suicides happen all the damn time. Overdoses all the damn time. Murders all the damn time. And a lot of these deaths are not old age guys quietly dying in the corner. They are the younger generation.

There’s something else I need to say. Prisons are wildly understaffed and I know the job’s fucking hard. I’ve watched officers have to adapt in real time just to survive the dorm, the yard, the madness. We’re all people. Most of us, on every side of the fence, all just want a decent life.

There are many honorable people who work in prisons. I don’t want to take anything away from officers, or from any police, military, hospital worker, or anyone who shows up to a brutal, fucked up job because they want to live in peace and provide for their family. But the bad ones, you know who you are. Or maybe you don’t, and that’s what’s really, really fucking scary.

Florida DOC, as shown in the Hulu documentary The Grand Knighthawk about KKK officers putting hits on inmates, is fucking horrible. Hits are being placed everywhere, not just in prison, but knowing it’s happening inside a place that’s supposed to be about ‘correction’ is its own kind of terror. The Alabama prison system is fucking horrible. But what’s more horrible is that these issues stay quiet. I want to thank the brave, courageous individuals who are trying to tell the story we should all be reading. I want to thank the producers and the whole team behind The Alabama Solution, especially directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman and producers Alelur “Alex” Duran, Beth Shelburne, and Page Marsella, who helped carry this fucking tragedy to the screen. And I want to give the loud, angry howl of a wolf for Melvin Ray, Robert Earl Council, Raoul Poole, and everyone who has been snuffed and silenced.

Shit’s fucked up. Shit is real. Shit means something.

My memoir, COUNT TIME, tells this shit the way it really is and also reaches past the razor wire, because our minds are the real prisons. I’m thankful to be able to share my story, and after the lectures, talks, and pages I’ve put into the world, I know it helps people. If this hit you, stick around and read with me.

Let’s write, let’s read, let’s share stories, and let us all MAKE IT COUNT.

It’s COUNT TIME. ✨ ✨ ✨

And remember, I am no investigative journalist. I know that job is hard. To match the truth with what you can prove. To make the paperwork fit. Ahhh, there it is again. That damn paperwork. Because is that really where the truth lives?

Give me a break.

Have you ever heard of the Law of Attraction?

It’s the ability for our minds to attract into our lives whatever we’re focusing on; basically, all thoughts eventually materialize into reality.

I live in a world where faces are ripped apart by razors, stabbings happen almost every day, with occasional deaths, fights, drugs, gang members everywhere, and dangerous officers terrorizing the pound. This is the norm. My norm. What isn’t normal is me continuing my college courses after the police trashed my books and my grandparents sprang for new ones. Also not normal are my new friends pushing me to work on my essays and assignments.

At this time, Danny and Bosnia are my closest friends. Danny’s a Latin King who loves his K2 and his major hustle, gambling. He’s good at it but so are many lifers, who have nothing but time to improve their skills. Footlockers and bunks are jammed together, creating whole areas for the gambling event. Sometimes, these games last for hours, with inmates showing up from other dorms to try their luck.

Texas Hold ‘Em’s one of the most popular. Shouting and yelling are the norm. They gamble for pouches of tuna, chili, soups, candies, cookies, and honey buns. Some have their boyfriends sitting on their laps, encouraging the plays with kisses and hugs. Some dudes sit on the lined-up lockers at the sides, throwing their bets in the pot. Fights break out all the time over something as simple as a lost pack of crackers. The pot’s food and Danny’s thrilled to come to my bunk and, with his bags of winnings, cook up some goulash.

Once I get my new college books and assignments back on track, Danny says as he’s gambling. “Tatter, have you done that assignment yet, bro? You gotta’ get that done. Doesn’t it have to go out in the mail by Tuesday if you want it to get graded?”

Those moments are special.

I hold them dear because even though all of us are wild as hell at times, there are a few guys like Danny who really help me move in somewhat of a forward direction. Sometimes, this is necessary because I’ll lose my focus. Often, my English assignments for my college correspondent classes make me feel stupid. I forgot the basics of English grammar, blaming my drug use and party lifestyle on my lack of education. I’ll just fuck around and won’t feel like doing the college work, but Danny, Bosnia, or Firehouse will pull me back into it. Literally jumping me and wrestling me to the ground until I open up my locker, grab my books, jump on my rack, and get to work.

I want my identity to remain Emmett Tatter.

The question I find myself asking at night is, “Who’s Emmett Tatter?”

I follow that question with, “How did I ever get here?”

That question will have me ridiculously tired when three a.m. rolls around for my kitchen shift.

There’s a Haitian in the kitchen who, at first, I don’t like. Lil Zoe. He’s short and loud and has the mentality that nobody can ever disrespect him, no matter how minor the offense. It seems as though he doesn’t like me at first either, maybe because others he hangs with, do. I don’t know; I guess judging a book by its cover too soon can be wrong. We become close when we’re assigned juice detail together. I learn he’s smart and speaks English, Haitian Creole, and French. He’s traveled the world and for a time, lived in Morocco.

His stories amaze me.

During this time, I develop a deep desire to travel the world, maybe from Lil Zoe’s influence. I’ve been reading about Morocco and Spain and am even cutting out tropical scenes and beautiful spots from different magazines. I want adventure and Lil Zoe helps my imagination grow further.

Our kitchen duties are preparing juice and milk for the whole compound and making sure all the cups are brought to the line to be served with the trays. We hide in the confinement carts and drink protein shakes and bullshit about the universe. These huge carts get filled with trays and wheeled to confinement when all have been served.

Most people have their own problems. They’re telling bullshit stories, gang shit, or thinking up a scheme to hustle money. It’s rare to find an individual who likes to talk about our universe and all parts of our globe.

We call it, “Getting Deep.”

It’s talking about life outside of prison. When you’re in a place where most everyone has over five years, they don’t want to talk about what could hurt them. Generally, the inmate feels like such shit the last thing they want is to think about the problems of the world, or things they’re never going to be able to see or be a part of. Worrying about a guy you might have unintentionally disrespected coming back later and stabbing you takes top priority in your thoughts.

Lil Zoe and I talk about everything.

One morning, while we’re hiding from the officer in the confinement cart, we’re talking about things you do intentionally or unintentionally that cause certain things to be drawn into your world. At the time, we don’t know it has a name. We call it the Law of What Goes Around, Comes Around. We’re discussing how your thoughts and actions cause similar things to keep happening in your life.

“There’s this book I read, Tatter. It was so good, my favorite book. It said that what we think, we create.”

We go on and on about it.

He keeps referencing this book without a title. It’s a positive conversation. We’re cracking up with laughter and amazement at the way the universe operates.

“I’m telling you, Tatter. This book! You have to read it. It’s amazing.”

Then the officer catches us bullshitting and yells at us to get back to work.

Prior to this deep conversation, Lil Zoe was placed under investigation and sent to confinement. When he beat the charges, he went to the other side of Q-dorm. I was in Q-1 and he had been moved to Q-2.

After work, when we go to our respective sides of the Q-dorm, I’m stopped by the officer in the security station. The officer tells me I have been placed on a call-out to the property room. He writes me a pass to go up front where the viso room’s located. During the week, the viso room becomes the property room.

As I walk to the property room, I think, Why am I going up here? Mom just sent me books and would’ve told me if I had some more books coming.

The unanswered questions leave me feeling a little concerned. Why? There’s no reason for me to be worried, but whenever police want to see you, it’s usually not a good thing.

I take a seat on one of the empty chairs. There are about twenty other inmates in here. Finding this to be a positive sign that I’m not in trouble. I’m called to the desk, where officers are passing out property that has been mailed to inmates. I sign my name for the book they unwrap.

It’s the strangest book. The cover looks like a scroll with the seal of an S on it, like an old-time letter sealed with hot wax and then pressed with an S stamp. Walking out of the building and back to the dorm, I read the title: The Secret.

The Secret? What the hell is this?

I flip through a few pages. On the back, it says that Benjamin Franklin and many other big-name people knew “the secret.” I want to know what the secret is.

Back at the dorm, I’m still wondering who sent it. Usually, the paperwork tells you who sent what, but none of that’s there this time. I have no idea who has sent me The Secret. I guess that’s a secret, too.

I lie down on my rack and start to read.

Shortly into the book, I discover what this secret is. I’m speechless. Excited as hell, I jump out of my bunk with the book in hand, running toward the laundry room. I rush to the laundry area of the dorm, past the officers’ station, because there, you can do sign language and communicate with the other side of the dorm. I sign for an inmate to go and get Lil Zoe for me. I say to wake him up if he’s sleeping. I have to talk to him. Now!

Walking up to the window, groggy-eyed with sleep, Lil Zoe looks at me and raises his arms like, “What the fuck, Tatter?” I raise the book up and slam it on the window so he can read the title.

His eyes grow as large as saucers and he yells, “The book! The book! Tatter, it’s the fucking book.” I can hear his excited, high-pitched voice through both doors. He’s overjoyed.

The book’s about the Law of Attraction! Boom!

I can’t believe the book’s in my hands when, not an hour and a half before, we were unknowingly discussing the Law of Attraction. Did we attract this book? What the hell’s going on here? How’s this possible and who the hell sent it?

I don’t find out for a couple months that my twin brother sent it. By that time, however, I no longer have the book. Lil Zoe attracted some negative shit, it seemed.

I let him slide to my side of the dorm to read the book first, because I’m deep into another book. The smile on his face makes me want to share it with him immediately. I’ve only read about forty pages before he grabs it. Two days later, Lil Zoe is back in confinement. He stabbed somebody in the ear.

We’re in the kitchen doing our juice thing when this guy, who must have been having a bad day, disrespects Lil Zoe by saying some slick shit. The way Lil Zoe had grown up, he wouldn’t let it go. They end up fighting in the kitchen back in the cut, blocked from police view. When it’s over, Lil Zoe tells him if he comes near him again, he’s going to kill him. The guy must not have taken him seriously because before I even know what’s happening, the guy’s behind us. The knife has come out of nowhere, fast as lightning. Lil Zoe whips around and hits him right in the ear.

I stand there, my heart slamming in my chest, and watch as this guy seizes up like he’s being electrocuted. His body seems frozen, only his upper torso compulsively jerking. Lil’ Zoe has already moved away, handing the knife off to someone else to get rid of it. The guy crumbles and falls to the floor, still seizing. As suddenly as it started, it’s over.

He sits up quickly, seemingly recovered, but off balance. His eardrum had to have been destroyed. Blood runs down the side of his face and neck onto his blues, splattering the tile floor. On wobbly legs, he walks to the officer’s station and starts to bang on the security station door.

The book’s in Lil Zoe’s locker.

Lil Zoe’s placed under investigation. The man he stabbed is shipped to an outside hospital, and then to another prison. Lil Zoe only does thirty days before beating the investigation. The guy doesn’t tell and they never find the weapon. They think he might have stabbed him in the ear with a pencil.

My book’s a part of history.

Somehow, it’s lost and my only thought’s that maybe it’ll appear in someone else’s life after they get into a conversation about the Law of Attraction.

You never know. ✨ ✨ ✨

If this story hit harder than any feel-good quote on your feed, hit subscribe. And for the record, I’m not hating! I own a few self-help books and multiple quote books. They’ve helped me too. ✨ ✨ ✨ I love The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

That’s the power of truly good writing. It doesn’t just entertain you, hell no. It leaves a permanent imprint on your soul. In a place where I had no one to look up to, I let Diego Alatriste instruct me, The Captain. He taught me a man’s worth isn’t found in his circumstances, but in his conduct and his loyalties. I wasn’t just a number being counted in a Florida dorm anymore. I was a young man in 17th‑century Madrid, learning the weight of a secret and the value of a silent mouth.

Through Iñigo’s eyes, I learned how to watch, how to wait, and the impossible mission on how to survive without losing my dignity. The Captain didn’t offer easy answers or soft words. He offered a code. And in a world that felt fucked up and hollow, that code was the only real thing. That book changed my life because it gave me a mentor when the system only gave me a roof over my head. And that roofs not saying much.

I had a father, but he wasn’t around me in prison. He would have guided me, and the truth is, one of the reasons I went to prison is because I resisted his guidance. I didn’t fucking listen. I was a fool, thinking I was so grown. “I’m a man.” I think I said that at fifteen. I didn’t need or want them or anyone telling me what I could and couldn’t do. What a damn moronic thing to say. That was me. I did need them. But my pride and ego didn’t want to listen.

I must have watched Goodfellas and A Bronx Tale too much. I felt like those kids who wanted to be cool, and trust me, I learned the hard way just like them. But I also listened to my heart, something like the main character in A Bronx Tale did, which saved his life. My life was saved in prison, but my life was always there. I was lost. I was confused at first, but with each book my mom sent me, I found that heart, and it bled words. It bled a voice.

My heart connected with my voice. Started talking and having conversations with me as I turned those pages, as I strained my eyes reading sentences and paragraphs at night until I developed astigmatism in both eyes. But what’s that compared to the power of great literature? I escaped with Harry Potter. When I got lost in those books, I promise you I felt like a wizard. My friends would get upset with me reading, saying my books were coming between us. Sometimes they’d dogpile me and fucking rip them from my arms. They learned, though. Nothing could come between me and my books. Nothing. Fuck that. Books were my lifeline.

When my mom started sending me yoga books after I asked her to, my friends inside really got jealous. After I started designing my own classes for myself, that grew into creating specific yoga practices for guys with a bad hip, a crooked spine, a torn shoulder, or a fucked‑up neck. Eventually, those books gave me enough voice and enough strength to go head‑to‑head with the administration and create a real yoga class in the Florida Department of Corrections. Ending up changing the lives of hundreds of brothers. I don’t know if they still practice yoga now. Coming home is a whole different animal than prison. That’s when the prison of the mind takes over, as if it wasn’t already present. But I do know it meant something there. In that place. In those moments.

Books changed my life in the very best way. All books! Even dictionaries. Even books on how to learn Spanish. Don’t get me started on that shit. I’d study Spanish verbs all damn day, constantly whispering the words to myself. My friends knew I was lost to books at that point. After learning Spanish, I reread all the Harry Potter books in Spanish, twice, possibly three times. I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and the last one in that series.

But nothing impacted me like David Benioff’s City of Thieves I read that when I was still in the county jail, before I was sentenced to a decade. That was one of the first books my mom sent me. I was a mess facing so much time. Yeah, I acted like I wasn’t fazed, but inside I was dying. I was pleading to find some semblance of hope. And then there it was, motherfucking City of Thieves. I still smile thinking about it. I still read it every so often and fall in love with it all over again.

That book taught me to make a heaven from hell, and it opened my eyes to a truth that screamed, “Bitch, it can ALWAYS be worse. Emmett, what would you do in that situation?” It was the first time I really started questioning my existence. And just like City of Thieves, the second book that changed my life was Captain Alatriste. Yes sir, yes ma’am, that book spoke to my soul. Like I said earlier, that’s where I found my mentor. That was honestly the moment my life started to change, and I didn’t even know it.

I want to thank all the writers in this world. I want to thank all the writers here on Substack. Please keep writing, because you never know how your words might save a life. Humbly, I say thank you with all my heart. I could name a thousand great books, a thousand more that helped shape my mind and worldview. I fucking owe you all. I solemnly swear that I am up to no good, but... only in the best type of way.

Mischief managed.

Leaving the friends I’ve made in D-dorm sucks, but it’s something I decide to do. My new dorm is I-dorm. On the compound, they call it Iraq because it’s one of the more hardcore dorms; sometimes inmates like the more hardcore dorms. The dorms that have all the players on the pound who move dope and phones. The dorms where more fights happen than all other dorms. As far as I’m concerned, this is Lawtey and nothing’s that bad, or that good, depending on how you view it.

When I get inside the dorm, the day room’s really loud and everyone just wants to get high or smoke cigarettes. I don’t give a fuck. All I want is to be in a dorm where I can train and hit the rec yard more. With I-dorm, I get that. One thing I’m trying to make happen is to get a job as an inmate recreation orderly. The guy who cleans the gym and weights, picks up trash on the rec yard, and keeps the officer areas clean. More than anything, I want a private space. I already know the orderlies in the gym get to be inside the gymnasium when everyone else is on the yard. They can work out as much as they want, play basketball whenever they want, and have other perks that come with the job. They’re allowed to spend as much time as they want at work. There isn’t a regulated schedule, because the gym sergeant lets them do anything. Come when they want, leave when they want, plus, if another officer stops you when you’re out walking the pound, violating the movement protocols...

An officer barks, “Inmate, where the fuck are you going?”

“Ahh, Sarge said I could go back to the dorm and grab my MP3 player and grab Hector from A-dorm.” Just make up any excuse you can think up, on the fly. If the officer calls the gym sergeant, he’ll back it up, no questions asked. You can slide to different dorms and get another person out of a locked-down dorm and move them to another dorm on the compound, possibly to move contraband. It’s crazy.

Practicing yoga alone in the gym’s my main motivation. How sweet that would be. If I can maneuver into that job, I’ll be free to really focus on yoga, hitting some of the more advanced stretches.

I befriend some of the orderlies and a word’s put in the ear of the officer in charge. Supposedly, it’s a sure thing, which was the tipping point having me sign out of D-dorm.

It doesn’t happen though, and I’m placed right back into the kitchen for the morning shift.

Fuck.

It is what it is. I breathe through all that bullshit and think of my Granny and Mom saying, “This too shall pass.”

It takes a few months and one cage incident, where an inmate named Grumpy is fucking around playing games with a kitchen staff lady. He turns the lights out on her while she’s in the freezer room grabbing a box of green beans. When she storms out of the ice box, mad as hell, I’m close to the area, and so is Grumpy. She pushes her panic button on her hip and gets the two of us cuffed up by an officer that comes running to save her. And we’re sent to the cage.

But the job transfer happens. I finally become a rec orderly and even better, I’m teaching yoga to inmates during the meditation class. Shit really starts to get positive for a while. I’m helping Asa and Lang teach two times a week, Wednesdays and Sundays, both meditation classes. Guys really enjoy it, and it gives me the opportunity to test out my own skills. It’s a lot of fun and that is around the time when inmates really start to take notice of me teaching and practicing yoga. My days become filled with requests from older inmates with medical problems.

Say a guy has a bad back or knee. I design a program for him from my reading and studying and come up with a specific plan for that individual. Dudes are being healed and it makes me work even harder. These programs I create take hours. I explain shit and even draw little yoga stick figures for them. Some guys offer to pay, but I’m not doing it for that. I want to help them. I want to learn more and soak up everything I can. Learning to rely on myself and my own abilities makes my confidence grow and I begin to take on more difficult things I’ve never tried before. I want to use the time I have left on my sentence to become a better man.

Up until this point, I always thought that being tough made you a man. What I didn’t know is that there’s much more to it than just being strong or tough. Change takes hard work and patience, and—did I forget to mention?—lots of practice.

It is a happy time in my life, but there’s always some force, it seems, that just wants to challenge you or lock you up. The force this time is Sergeant Red.

He is such a bitch.

The officer that talks shit, humiliates you, will set you up with a knife or phone, slap, punch, and abuse cuffed inmates, and acts like he’ll fight you but won’t take his belt off to give you a one-on-one head up fade, or fair fight. He hates all inmates and looks down his nose at anyone in blue prison attire.

If you do yoga and don’t fuck with the police whatsoever, he hates you even more. If you’re trying to better yourself, he’s the type of person who will put you down at every turn. He’ll become the obstacle you won’t be able to pass or overcome. It’s his mission in life.

I fucking hate him.

While I’m in I-dorm, I become close with a few guys. My best bud in the dorm is Ray, a bald-headed, tattooed Puerto Rican. Brazil’s there, Cuba, and Lucho, a new guy who transferred in from Hamilton. Lucho is a bad motherfucker. He was MS13 and trust me, these dudes are some of the most serious you’ll ever run across in prison. They are dangerous and love the reputation.

When Lucho gets into the dorm, he instantly buys a cell phone and decides to throw a party for all the Latinos. He’s from Miami and just like everyone from Miami, it’s easy to tell. Since I chill a lot with the Latinos, I’m invited to the cookout.

This means that he’s buying everything for over twenty guys. Shit’s crazy, and I mean huge amounts of food, drinks, ramen soups, meats, chips, pickles, and shit from the chow hall. TC, a dude who makes the best food on the compound and is in our dorm, throws in his special sauces. Lucho makes sure everything you can possibly put into a prison goulash is in it. Then the cake. Honey Buns, Swiss Rolls, peanut butter, Pop Tarts—I mean the craziest, yummiest stuff you can buy.

The thing about me is I don’t really trust anyone until I have seen how he makes moves and what he’s about. I don’t impress easily. However, it seems Lucho and I are cool instantly.

That night though, after the dinner and the dessert’s made and devoured, one by one, everyone becomes deathly ill.

Ray looks over at me while we’re in the day room watching TV. He curls over, complaining about his stomach. I think he just ate too much and has gas, but he has to go and lie down. Next thing you know, I’m walking by bunks of guys I ate with and see them curled up in their bunks, sweating their asses off underneath their covers.

Almost all of them, but I really don’t put two and two together. I feel fine. After dinner, Lucho and I bullshit all night. He has a lot of questions about yoga. We hang out and vibe. My Puerto Rican homeboys Roy and Santi come over, dap us up with fists, and go lie down.

After a while, I go to bed too. As I fall asleep, I decide I liked Lucho.

The next morning, I wake up sweating bullets with the worst pain in my stomach. I walk to the bathroom because I feel sick and throw up in the toilet. My head is spinning, and I stumble over to Ray’s bunk. He’s really sick too and can barely talk. I look over at Tony and another Puerto Rican dude, and their foreheads are sweaty, too. Chino, Grumps, all these guys are in bad shape. That’s when I realize anyone who ate the goulash last night’s sick.

Only us, nobody else.

The dorm turns into a Barf o’ Rama. It’s like that movie Stand by Me. The main character makes up a story about a chubby boy nicknamed Lard Ass by the mean townspeople. He gets his revenge by entering the blueberry pie-eating contest. Little do they know, he downed a whole bottle of castor oil and ate raw eggs minutes before the contest began. With a horrible rumble in his gut, he begins puking. He pukes his brains out onto one guy, who in turn pukes onto another person, and so on and so on it went.

A fucking Barf o’ Rama!

That’s what we have on our hands here and even worse, we’re sitting fucking ducks. Anyone could have fucked us up. I hate it.

Now this is where it gets a bit weird, as if the Barf o’ Rama isn’t enough.

If you’re in prison, you’ll see some things you can’t explain or understand. You’ll see offerings to deities inmates have created. You’ll run into guys who worship the devil and do curses, which some refer to as putting roots on individuals. I don’t care what anyone says. I have seen the craziest shit that can’t be explained. At this time, I don’t hesitate to start thinking that this new dude wanted to put roots on us all and gain our power. That may sound all types of fucked up, but yo, it is what it is. I mean everyone who ate Lucho’s goulash is fucked up.

The last thing I need is to be cursed. You can say you don’t believe in it, that it isn’t real, but when you have seen the shit that I have, you might feel differently about all that. I’ve witnessed things that can haunt a person. Mass amounts of death and violence, bodies lying still after gang fights. I’ve prevented suicides by grabbing the legs of desperate inmates, moments after they jump, noose around their necks, the weight of their lives literally in my hands. I’ve cleaned up the aftermath of those I couldn’t save, scrubbing blood off cell walls, wiping away the last, desperate acts of inmates slitting their wrists or necks. Watched helplessly as inmates are stabbed repeatedly in the yard. I’ve seen officers beat inmates to within an inch of their lives, then cover it up. I’ve heard cries of inmates being sexually assaulted, their screams echoing. Inmates worshiping the devil. Practicing witchcraft, voodoo, and Santeria, having seances to communicate with the dead, making offerings to different deities or orishas. So, witnessing things like that, the idea of a curse doesn’t seem so fucking farfetched. The darkness I’ve seen makes me believe evil is real, in all its forms. It’s very real.

Around this time, I don’t go to church unless it’s to get a scan. All I can do is address the situation. Everyone tells me I’m tripping, but if they’re honest, a lot of guys think it’s highly possible that we’ve been cursed. And I think they’re more than a little scared. I don’t know if we’re all delusional. But we all begin to believe it.

I envision Lucho smiling as large as Lard Ass does when he sits back and watches what he created.

Nobody wants me to say anything, though, because what if we’re wrong. I mean, this dude has a huge reputation in prison and will stab you the fuck up over shit way smaller than that. Revenge served up by him would be way worse than ruining the town’s pie-eating contest and grossing everyone out. This guy would fucking kill you.

“El hombre es muy loco,” I keep hearing.

I sit on my bunk, convinced that the root thing is what happened, like it was a sacrifice to the devil or some shit.

Lucho sleeps in the bunk across from me and as I sit there sweating my ass off, feeling like shit, I say fuck it and come up on the side of him while he sleeps. His head is covered by his blanket. After knocking on his bunk a few times with my fist, trying not to puke, he uncovers his head. Then he looks at me with these crazy fucking eyes. They are on fire, red and big. He doesn’t look scared or anything. He looks mad as hell I just woke him up.

“Lucho, did you put roots on that food, bro?”

He looks at me wildly.

I say it again and he lies there, staring at me angrily. I picture a knife in his hand underneath the covers, ready to jam into my neck, but I wait.

He says, “Tatter, what the fuck are you talking about?”

I answer him, “Man, every fucking guy that ate that goulash and cake last night is sick as fuck, sweating bullets and throwing up everywhere!”

He stares at me, incredulous, and finally says, “Tatter, I’m fucking sick too, loco!

He starts to laugh and that’s when I notice his forehead is as sweaty as mine and that crazy look in his eyes is from being sick.

“Tatter, you are one loco motherfucker, ese,” he says, coughing and laughing.

I tell him that I’m just checkin’ and don’t mean any disrespect and all, but if he did do the root thing, spell or whatever, I just want it off of me.

He’s laughing and keeps calling me loco. From that day on, Lucho and I are really tight.

Real photo from prison, taken on an illegal cell phone. Don’t judge the Pigeon Asana! Was still learning it.

One night, Officer M’s working I-dorm. She’s generally all right but extremely cautious about her job security. It’s clear she doesn’t want to lose her job. In prison, we call it being job-scared. She’s a big woman, with a pretty face, and she runs hot and cold. She’s cool one second but she’ll flip on some really minor shit. She’s fairly new and still learning, but it’s hard to know what to expect from her.

That proves true this night.

The night before, in a random dorm search, she caught Will with contraband, a pack of cigarettes. Will’s African American and Native American, strong and tatted, the kind of guy you notice when he walks in a room. He could have gotten thirty to sixty days in the box and loss of gain time. “Gain time” refers to a reduction in an inmate’s sentence for good behavior or participation in rehabilitation programs. Loss of gain time would push back Will’s release date, as inmates typically earn a certain number of days off their sentence each month, provided they don’t have a mandatory sentence. For whatever reason, that time, she decided not to lock Will up.

Tonight, during our Spanish skits, Will tells me he feels he needs to thank her. I warn him against it. Officer M’s too unpredictable. Against my advice, he goes to the security booth to talk to her, but comes back scared as shit, thinking he made it worse.

I ask, “What the fuck did you say, dude?”

“Nothing,” he answers vaguely. “She just started trippin’. She gonna lock me up, bro!”

Feeling like I need to do damage control for my dawg, I approach the officer station. We’re on pretty friendly terms and I’ve known her longer than he has.

“Mrs. M, he didn’t mean anything by that. He wanted to say thanks for the other night. I know he shouldn’t have said anything, but he’s a good dude and didn’t mean anything by it. You see us,” I continue, “all we do is study Spanish.”

She says it’s all good, but what I don’t know is that she has already hit the panic button on him.

It’s count time, and the next thing I know, officers are rushing into the dorm, directly to where Will and I bunk.

Shit.

Here we go.

We’re informed we’re being locked up for trying to establish a staff relationship. We’re told we were trying to run game on a rookie officer. The Sergeant’s pissed, saying we’ve been trying to run some bullshit good cop/bad cop game on her. Establishing a staff relationship’s automatic grounds to be shipped to another prison or go back to your old one. I was only trying to help a friend and get back to our Spanish skits.

I probably shouldn’t have gotten involved at all. The thought of leaving Fidel, all my friends, and getting sent far from home again makes me feel like I’m going to explode. I’m pissed at Will for not listening to me, but more pissed at the situation. We’re being locked up on bullshit, but that’s how it is in prison.

Walking up to the cage, I look up at the stars. It’s always when you think you’re doing your best that shit hits the fan.

You’re always going to be tested.

They separate us.

Will’s in the front building’s cage and I’m placed in the standing cage, outside the building. This cage is so small you can only stand up. I’m in there for so long that my guts are doing somersaults. Is it because I was told I’m being sent to Colombia CI? That place has a reputation as one of the hardest prisons within the system. Is it because of the haunting thoughts I’m having? Will I have to stab a motherfucker as soon as I get there? How will my family take the news that I’ve been shipped again?

These are the self-defeating, shitty thoughts I’m susceptible to during hard times.

Standing up in this shitty cage, I gaze outward at the dark landscape through the bars to the chain link fence beyond. In my mind’s eye, I can envision the van pulling up to take me to Columbia, and myself shuffling out to it, in chains, needing to be helped up the steps due to my ankle shackles. I see myself arrive at the next prison nightmare, worse even than the present one, and having to fight someone upon my arrival to protect my new shoes or whatever. Maybe even an attack by the police, considering the DR. Officers hate those kinds of staff relationship charges. I’m amping myself up for the horrors ahead. I’m ready to take anyone on, whoever fucks with me. Whoever’s going to try me the minute I get on the new compound.

Fuck these motherfuckers. I need to be ready to go at it.

Wait, Emmett.

This isn’t yoga!

I need to calm the fuck down and change the ending here. What happened to all the yoga I’ve learned? I need to shift my perspective. I have the power to choose how I think and feel, at this very moment, instead of projecting. I’m not there yet, Emmett. I’m not on the transfer van.

Yoga’s taught me so much. How can it help me now? That’s when I choose to focus my thoughts. I whisper to myself, “Emmett, you’re still here. Think. Breathe. Meditate. Emmett, do your yoga. Don’t think; just do.”

I notice now how quiet it is outside. It’s actually kind of a pretty night. If these orange security lights weren’t on, I might even see some stars.

My breathing slows. I’ve been in the cell now for a couple of hours, having to shit the whole time and being ignored by the officers passing talking shit, but fuck it.

I don’t have the power to do anything about this. I can’t even use a restroom when I desperately need one. Right then and there, having to shit and all, I start to do a sun salutation.

I envision the stars through the glare of the security lights.

The orange glow of those lights makes me think of Halloween and creepy shit. I need it to be Christmas; I need that joy and hope. I need the light of those stars. I will them to lift me out of this cage and this moment. I need the stars to heal me now. I need their energy and their light. I want to be positive. With all my might, I push all negative thoughts away, replacing them with thoughts like, Emmett, you’re still here. The transport van isn’t here yet. Take control of what you’re able to control, like your thoughts and actions.

I don’t cuss out the officers who fuck with me about doing yoga. I do a whole flow in that cramped space, banging my wrists and ankles against the steel wire frame of the cage.

I’m sweating my ass off underneath the cool night sky. All the negativity I’ve been feeling dissipates and a cool acceptance sweeps over me. No matter what happens, I know my mom and family will trust I’m okay. It’s a very emotional time, and it still blows me away to think about what happened next.

Positive thought is truly able to create and manifest a positive reality.

Suddenly, an officer interrupts my yoga practice in the tiny cage. As he’s placing the cuffs back on my wrists, I realize I don’t even have to shit anymore. He takes me out of the cage and leads me inside the building, past Will in his own cell, to the captain’s office.

This is how crazy life is.

It just so happens that tonight, the captain on shift is there covering for the regular night shift’s top-ranking officer. He’s now a captain. He’s one of the officers I encountered so long ago when I first got to Lawtey CI and pushed that dude about the phone. He’s seen me and dealt with me in other confrontations as well.

He notices my surprise at seeing him and says, “Yeah, they sent me to Lowell CI the female prison for a little over a year and I made captain. Emmett, what are you doing in the cage? I’ve kept tabs on you and heard you were doing really well. I know it’s true you picked up yoga since I saw you doing it in the cage. You were a real hot head, but trying to establish a staff relationship, with her? No, I want to hear from you what happened.”

I give him the rundown from beginning to end. I explain that all Will and I do is study Spanish together and that Will wasn’t trying shit with her.

He says, “Look, Mr. Tatter, I’m going to call down to the dorm and if she’s cool with not having y’all go to jail, then I won’t lock y’all up.” He keeps it real and after the call, he tells me to keep my head up. It feels like that Tupac song, “Gotta keep your head up.”

Yoga did this.

Walking back to the dorm with Will on the tree-lined path, I can now see those stars I envisioned through the cage bars. I’d felt so hopeless only four hours earlier. I see my homeboy Fidel’s shocked face looking through the window. Fidel is a Cuban gangster from Miami, wet with tattoos, and he loves my mom too. That’s the best feeling. I can’t explain how strong the bonds between friends of shared experiences are in prison.

When I get back inside, I can’t lie. I’m happy. Fidel’s happy. Will’s happy. We all are.

I’m the happiest of all. I go to the bathroom and shit.

As I come out of the bathroom, Mrs. M stops me and apologizes. I tell her no sweat. To not even stress it.

How the fuck could this not be the power of yoga? Convinced that if I’d kept my negative attitude, I would’ve been shipped, just another piece of cargo for the system, at another institution.

✨✨ ✨

—Japanese proverb

Bluebird

Chapter 1

November 15^th, 2010

2,836 days until my release on a ten-year sentence, after ten months in county jail.

The police have come to awaken me. It’s 3:30 in the morning and of course, I didn’t

sleep. How on earth could I? Adrenaline has been racing through my body for hours now. I’ve been dreading this moment. Now it’s here.

I have no choice. It’s time to cuff up. I turn around in my cell, putting my hands together behind my back, sticking my hands up to the hole in the cell, which allows the officers access to safely put handcuffs on my wrists.

With the touch of the cold steel on my skin, I’m immediately zapped awake as if by an electric charge. This is fucking real. This is happening, and it’s happening right now. I’m going to prison.

Fuck it, let’s ride.

This “fuck it” attitude is what’s gotten me into this mess, but it’s something I still hold onto as a tool to help me accept what I don’t want to accept. After months of waiting in different county jails, different cells, transfers, and confinements, the moment has come, and yes, like all those other times, here I’m mouthing “fuck it” to myself.

So, fuck it, the cell opens and I’m taken to the front of the jail to await the loading van that’ll shuttle me to the prison. I’m going to Orlando, Florida’s reception center. It’s a giant facility used to house transferred inmates throughout the state, to process new inmates, and to house permanent inmates who help the facility operate. The lifeblood, the slaves.

When the van’s doors open, my feet and wrists have been shackled in the front, with a chain that drops down to my feet that meets ankle shackles. It’s tough to take a large step forward, or to step up. An officer helps load me into the back of a van with three other inmates. I notice that the hard faces have that inner lining of nervousness, or what I see as fear. They don’t scare me but not knowing what’s going to happen does.

When the doors close and I’m seated facing another shackled man, I sit there, blank-faced. The drive will take a couple hours. I am too busy mentally preparing myself for what lies ahead to give a damn about anything else.

There it is again! That damn fear. I can’t shake it.

Why the hell is my leg bouncing? I remember a girlfriend who would always stop my shaking leg during a movie with her hand or a stare.

“You’re doing it again,” she’d say.

I allow a small smile and that river of fear stops for just a moment.

That river is replaced by another, a familiar pressure telling me of my need to use a restroom soon. Yeah, that river. That’s the one I’m feeling as we pull up to this huge facility that I’m totally not prepared to see. The one with these ominous orange lights that cast an eerie Halloween feel to everything. Those huge fences with razor wire that let you know you’re fucked. Nobody’s getting out of here.

Anyone who tells you that they’re not scared when they first come to prison is lying.

As the van pulls up, I’m nervous, and thinking entirely too much, with a million questions flashing through my mind.

What’s this going to be like?

Is somebody going to try to rape me?

Will I survive?

What all the county jail experts (my fellow inmates) failed to mention was that when you arrive at the prison, there are also vans from all over the surrounding counties waiting to drop their cargo off as well. This line of vans takes hours to drop everyone off and my van’s far down the line.

When the hell am I gonna get to use the bathroom?

Sweat begins to form around my hairline, which should be impossible because it’s fucking freezing outside and inside this sardine can.

My bladder has filled to the point where nothing else matters. I need to use the bathroom bad. The situation is becoming dire. With each jolt of the van moving forward, with every push of the brake pedal, it feels like some ancient torture method.

My bladder is going to burst.

When the van’s doors open again, I’m sweating my ass off. I’m hit with a cold blast of air. The year 2010 is by far one of the coldest in recent memory. I am basically a human popsicle right now. My body’s wracked with the shivers.

Now, a group of us are being directed by yells and shoves toward a fenced-in area where other shivering inmates are huddled together. As I shuffle into the area, every step’s a moment I want to die. There’s no way on this earth that I’m going to start my first day pissing my pants. Fuck no. Not me. I refuse to be that guy.

An officer with a voice as loud as a bullhorn screams, “Get naked! Everyone strip the fuck down! Now!”

Mind you, it’s freezing, and the shackles have been taken off as we’re ushered into this cage, one by one. This simple task that should be easy, isn’t. I have to piss so bad, each movement sends electric shocks through my entire body.

Does the torture stop?

It does not.

The corrections officer yells again, a booming, “You dumb motherfuckers will not be staying here. We’ll not be able to accommodate you. You are going to be put on a bus.”

What the fuck? I realize I’m not going to be able to enter the prison and use the bathroom. This is the moment when I just know in my heart I’m not going to be able to make it.

I barely hear the Corrections Officer (CO) yell, “Y’all are being shipped to Lake Butler Reception Center, so put your clothes on and hurry the fuck up!”

One of the permanent inmates is dropping a pair of blue trousers and shirt at each of our feet, along with a pair of white boxers. The cold hasn’t gotten any better and neither has my dread that I’ll not be using the bathroom.

When the gates open, officers usher the shaking, scared herd toward the buses. Once our ankles are re-shackled, the invasive, screaming thought, I need to pee, NOW, has completely taken over.

I’m the first to enter the next bus in line. At the front of the bus, there is a huge, gridded cage of steel that prevents me from going forward to where the guards sit with their shotguns alongside the driver. Walking forward, I’m cringing with every step. Each one feels more impossible than the last.

I allow another inmate behind me to squeeze into the seat by the window. I want the outside. But I’m also in the front row. That means my legs are scrunched up, putting an enormous amount of pressure against my screaming bladder.

I won’t survive this. Fuck it, I think for the hundredth time.

The bus fills up quickly and the door in the back shuts. I don’t care about anything at this point. Not about being raped, what prison will be like, the officers, life, or death. I have accepted my death.

A young black kid next to me leans over and says, “Yo, bruh, will you move over and step up? I need to use the bathroom.”

I stand and he disappears into this mass of people resembling an angry beehive.

A minute goes by; I can’t stop shivering. Then I see him. I can tell by that face, he’s peed.

When he sits, I ask him, “Dude, where’d you piss?”

He looks at me, amused. “Oh shit,” he laughs. “You’s a green motherfucker.” He points. “Back there when you first stepped onto the bus, to the left. You must not have noticed one of those steel sinks you see in cells. It’s posted right there in the back. You didn’t notice that fucked up smell either, huh?”

I stare at him in stunned silence.

He chuckles again, but I’ve already turned and begun to maneuver my way through this pack of hyenas.

“Excuse me,” I keep repeating, and then there it is. The nastiest, smelliest, most beautiful sight I have ever set eyes on. The holy grail. My toilet.

A wannabe NASCAR racer is driving the bus. It’s jumping up and down, making me fearful of pulling my dick out in front of everyone and causing me to pee on the men directly in front of the sink. I just know the piss will splash them some.

With a Clint Eastwood draw, I pull my dick out, but I’m a shy pisser. I loathe pissing in front of anyone and I hate people behind me. Here, they’re surrounding me.

I take deep breaths. My mind’s telling me that I’m going to be stabbed on this bus for pissing on the man in front of me, while my bladder continues to plead for release.

FUCK IT!!!

I inwardly scream, and my piss-shy dick begins to dribble, and then outright gushes an Old Faithful geyser. I’m actually pissing! Thank you, God! Yes! I’m elated, weak with joy and relief.

The fear, the questions, the anxiety and nerves, have now been replaced with a sense of calm. Here I am going to prison and I find myself mouthing for the millionth time, “Who gives a fuck?”

PRAISE FOR COUNT TIME

“No more proof is needed that behind prison walls lies abundant untapped talent than this riveting account of prison life by Emmett Tatter. Far from portraying himself as a saint, Tatter provides us with a truthful description of his time inside, revealing questionable morality at times, also known as human behavior. All told in the most colorful and graphic manner.”

—Pamela L. North, former criminal defense attorney and retired Chief Circuit Court Judge

“Emmett Tatter’s COUNT TIME is a searing, unforgettable and true account of one young man’s journey through our terribly flawed prison system, but it is also an inspiring testament to the power of human will and resilience. You go, Tatter!”

—Les Standiford, New York Times bestselling author of Last Train To Paradise and the John Deal mystery series

“Tatter is a beautiful, lyrical writer with a real story to tell. The world needs to hear his voice and heed his warnings—now more than ever.”

—Dr. Baz Dreisinger

Author, Incarceration Nations

Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Founder and Executive Director, Incarceration Nations Network

“Emmett Tatter is a gifted writer who has been through hell—much of it self-inflicted. COUNT TIME is a raw, wrenching, and vulnerable look at the years he spent behind bars. His story is a compelling argument for prison reform—and self-reform.”

—John DeDakis, novelist, writing coach, and former editor on CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.

“The corrupt Florida prison system nearly swallowed young inmate Emmett Tatter whole, but by will and wit, he survived and made his time count. He found comfort and wisdom in unlikely friendships, yoga, and books, from Harry Potter to The Count of Monte Cristo. Count Time is a page-turner and a thriller, a handbook in navigating violent gang life behind bars, but it is also a call to action for prison reform in this country.”

—Kim Bradley, author of Spillway, Florida Book Awards Silver Medalist; Associate Professor, Flagler College

“Need a good news story, one that will give you hope in the uniquely human capacity for change? Yes? Then forget Netflix, put down those phones, and tune into Emmett Tatter’s tale of redemption, of how a young man turned from the dark side to the light through sheer force of will. And yoga. Who knew that the ancient Indian art aimed at uniting body, mind, and breath could save a young man once so far on the wrong side of the tracks he thought he’d never find his way home? Yet, he did just that. Many minds believe ‘convicted’ to be synonymous with unsalvageable, of no further use to society. Emmett Tatter will not only tell you, but show you, how he not only survived a brutal prison system, but used his experiences inside to help hundreds of other inmates along the way. Emmett’s story will shock you, then amaze you, then make you want to learn how to harness the power of your mind and spirit to make your life the best it can be. Buckle up for one wild ride from damnation to redemption, which you won’t soon forget. I never will.”

—Mandy Miller, JD, PhD, Former Public Defender, Criminal Attorney, and author of the Grace Locke crime series.

Emmett Tatter’s COUNT TIME is a brutally honest and transcendent exposé of himself and the horrendous realities of a state’s penitentiary system. The book is also an inspirational homage to the human spirit and its ability for reinvention and transformation.
—Allan J. Marcil, producer of White Mile and Rated X

“I feel like I am reading one of those Dickens novels that came out serially first; unfortunately, this is nonfiction. Keep the episodes coming if you can, and I still hope there is a copy to buy someday to pass on to someone.”

—Thurlow Cunliffe, A Father

—Jared McCann blurb coming soon. International yoga teacher. I can’t wait until it’s in! Yay. 🙏 ✨

Some other’s are on there way and I can’t wait to announce when they arrive.

I kept butchering the damn name at first, “PechKucha, Pech-whatever,” until I finally got it right: PechaKucha. It’s a concise, fast paced presentation format that started in Tokyo in 2003, built around a simple rule: 20 slides, 20 seconds each, for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds. The slides auto advance whether you are ready or not, which forces you to focus on storytelling, brevity, and strong images instead of text heavy lectures. I got that from Google. I was having a real hard time explaining it.

Perfect, I thought. My life is nothing if not a series of sharp, fast cuts. Uhhhh, right.

What the 150 people in that room didn’t know, didn’t have any fucking idea, was that while those shocking images (and I chose for the prison section bit, bloody images) of prison life flashed behind me, I was in extreme pain. I wasn’t just nervous. I wasn’t just vulnerable, standing there talking about bodies, brutality, and the long road home, hitting every rock along the way.

I had kidney stones.

The kind of damn kidney stones that made me feel like my bladder was going to explode. Literally, explode. The kind where I felt like I was going to piss every minute, but was lucky if I squeezed out five drops. I had been dealing with them for days. It was fucking unbelievable to think about walking on stage, in front of 150 people, with those slides and that story, and this body.

I kept thinking, You cannot leave this damn stage to run to the bathroom. Fuck no. You can’t tap, bitch. You can’t fucking quit, Emmett.

Then my mind did what it always does. It went back to prison.

Sonofabitch.

It jumped straight to confinement at Taylor CI’s Main Unit. The summer heat was oppressive, pressing down on that sweat box, my body drenched while it refused to let go of a single drop of pee. I knew nothing about kidney stone pain. Never in my entire life had I experienced them. I saw others, of course, while working as a hospital orderly at Lake Butler, getting stones zapped from their bodies, but I didn’t feel their pain, their suffering. All I knew... I was dying. My poor bunkie watched me pace and curl up and sweat through my shitty, lumpy, uncomfortable mattress, absolutely helpless. He tried, again and again, to get the officers attention on their half hour rounds, pleading for ibuprofen, telling them he thought his bunkie was dying. No one took him seriously. No one took me seriously.

That time in confinement was worse than this PechaKucha night. So I’m lucky.

But as I stood there under the lights, with my slides auto advancing and my bladder on fire, I realized something.

This time was different.

My mom and dad were in the audience. My dad, a sound engineer, usually misses my talks because he’s working other people’s shows. That night, he was there. In crowds, he’s old school stoic, not big on talking, not big on making a scene. But afterward, when he told me he was proud of me, I saw it. His eyes. They were tearing. He tried to play it off, but I saw it.

My mom was there with her group of supporters, her face lit the fuck up with a big, unmistakable smile. She looked young and beautiful that night. I thought back to all the times I’d let her down and told myself, Not today, Emmett. Not today, motherfucker.

Her joy said it all.

And then there was my girlfriend, who’s now my fiancée. For the past 48 hours she’d been my doctor, my nurse, my angel. She ran baths with Epsom salt, made sure I took my meds, checked on me constantly. Listened to me moan. She sat there in the audience looking gorgeous, and I knew: this night was not like Taylor CI. This night was not like any other night.

This was my time. And I would be damned if some kidney stones were going to fuck it up.

Standing on stage, the slides started rolling, and I launched into my talk. Nobody knew what was happening inside my body. Nobody knew about the pain. All they saw was the story.

This is the talk I gave at that PechaKucha event.:

Events theme was “Double Edged Sword.”

Prison.

I may have been 21, but I grew up in prison.

I remember thinking this 10 year sentence is going to suck!

And it did, but it didn’t. My first job assignment was wrapping bodies. I wrapped a lot of them. I cleaned up a lot of blood. I witnessed a lot of brutality from inmates and officers alike. I remember clearly what it feels like to be on edge for 3,102 days.

But who cares? You can make a heaven from hell, right?

I wanted to be the master of my own destiny. I wanted better. I became so strong in prison. Patient. I learned many of life’s lessons. I read every book I could get my hands on. My friends used to wrestle them out of my hands, saying my books were coming in between all of them. I laughed and I sometimes cried, but I grew. I took full advantage of my time. I studied yoga and started a yoga program and taught hundreds of inmates. I taught myself Spanish and more than anything I finally had a purpose.

Freedom.

I remember thinking this is going to rock.

It did, but it didn’t. I was with my family again. Traveling. Living my dream. Becoming a certified yoga teacher and fitness trainer. Teaching classes to free people. It was amazing, and my family was so proud of me. And I was too. I didn’t want to become another statistic. No way. My determination to succeed wouldn’t allow that.

So... why wasn’t I adapting to life outside? Being free became a real double-edge sword. I wasn’t given an instruction manual for life after prison. All I knew was to not stop, to not quit, to never give up. I’d say “Emmett, you got this”. But did I?

I thought prison was hard. It wasn’t. I mastered prison. Being a real adult, however, with real responsibilities, that almost made me tap out. In prison I never doubted myself. I knew exactly who I was and was in love with that version of Emmett.

This new free version; the version that can’t sleep at night, who worries about everything, who can’t even explain to his family and friends what was happening within himself?

I needed to find the version of Emmett that I loved and respected. I wanted to talk with him. I needed answers on why I was struggling, I just didn’t know how.

Then, I had an idea. I’d write a book. Bingo! Thinking writing a memoir would help solve all of my problems, looking back, was very naive. In the beginning it did help me, but it was a real double-edged sword. It was like ripping open an old healing wound. It bled a lot, all over me. I did find the version of Emmett I searched so desperately for, and I saw once again his many sacrifices, all his pain, his resilience, his determination, his values and morals all over again. I saw his dreams! I loved him. I wanted to be him again. I wanted that Emmett back.

It was amazing, but it ruined me.

I couldn’t relate to that individual. I was no longer him. I was scared that I might never be him again. By that time I had hurt so many of my loved ones, without intending to, but who I hurt most was myself.

Enough was enough! This had to stop. No longer could I rely on myself. I needed help. I needed to forgive my past mistakes and start a new chapter. I worked hard. I was going to hold myself accountable for every one of my actions. I wasn’t going to throw in the towel to get out of this fight, with real life, not this time. I’d never give up again. I reminded myself of what’s really important, what really matters. My inner peace and my loving family.

Therapy, was definitely in my future. I knew I needed it. Let’s face it, I was kinda crazy. But, I won’t address that here, this is more than enough. So, I went to an amazing counselor every week for two years. Started doing yoga again. I’d sit with my dog for hours out by the stars and have deep conversations. With myself and my dog. Talk about crazy, right? I’d signed power of attorney of all my finances to my parents and moved in with them. Which, I am beyond thankful for; that they were willing to help me. I sold my car, got rid of my bike, and basically locked myself down and set a lot of boundaries. Not only for myself, but with others too. Then I finished my book.

During this time I was, so to speak, self-editing, I began to listen to others about publishing my story , and began to edit my book, as well. I probably wouldn’t have agreed had I known how tough that was going to be, but something I am so grateful for happened as well.

I found love.

Talk about a double edged sword, right? Just kidding.

I took a meditation course with yoga instructor Jared McCann to open my heart chakra, and wouldn’t you know it, a couple of weeks later I discovered love and wasn’t even looking for it.

Life is a double-edge sword.

It’s hard when you think it’s going to be easy. It’s easy when you think it’s going to be hard.

I said that I grew up in prison. I did. But, I didn’t.

So, maybe I will never be an expert at wielding life’s double-edge sword. But, I’ll never give up, I’ll never stop, and I’ll never quit.

When the last slide clicked off and the applause started, I walked back to my family and to my amazingly beautiful woman. No one in that room knew about the war going on in my kidneys. They just knew the story I had chosen to tell.

In a way, that is the heart of PechaKucha and the heart of my life. You get 400 seconds onstage, or 10 years inside, or one long summer in confinement, and decide what to do with them.

That night, I chose not to give up. I chose not to stop. And I did not fucking quit.

There at Lake Butler, I watched friends get stomped by officers, watched skulls get crushed underneath stormtrooper boots, and lived with the intoxicating smell of Black Jesus, the horrible torturous chemical spray. Inside, I knew exactly what fear feels like, intimately . Fear and a mixture of high-intense anxiety feels like electric currents coursing through your body. Or the space of an entire dorm being pulled from a room packed with 80 others into a black hole. The black hole? Deadly sergeants whose mission is to instill terror.

I remember the feelings I felt when this one particular terror would march by doing the midnight count. Even if my eyes were closed, you could feel her presence. I didn’t have to hear her with the fans in the dorms making a constant noise, but I sure fucking felt her. I was around killers. Writing about it now, I still get the chills. I remember my friends getting sent to confinement for nothing. A whim, a cruel joke between officers. What I saw in their faces as they beat and destroyed lives made me want to throw up. Made me angry. Made me sad, made me want to get lost in stories that could help me escape the nightmare of my daily existence.

There’s something about terror? Was I fearful, yes, but I lived with fear all the time. It wasn’t that I couldn’t continue onward, no, it was more the helplessness I felt as my friends were being beaten or killed, and the knowledge there was nothing I could do to help them. There was nothing they could do to help me. These feelings rooted survival in my DNA and it makes it really hard to stick your neck out to help someone knowing I might potentially be killed too, knowing that the paperwork will be written up in a way that makes you the aggressor. There is no recourse, no fucking nothing.

But that isn’t to say that all officers were fucked in the head. Not at all. I remember there were some who, after seeing me reading, working hard, and studying college courses at Ohio University correspondence classes my granny had purchased for me, seeing me work so fucking hard and wanting a better life, watching me crumple up a million English papers into little balls not wanting one error on the page, balls of paper surrounding my bunk or me getting frustrated and launching my books across the dorm telling myself I was stupid, and then them encouraging me to continue. I remember there was Sergeant J, Sergeant G who I honestly hated but grew to love because honestly they felt similar to parents. They would fuck with me hard and punish me sometimes but I sensed they actually cared. Then officer W and officer Kol would talk to me like a real person and not simply a number, inmate V19743, was another instance of humanity. I remember an officer Miss Marsha hated me when I first got there. But her seeing me grow within hell she started to respect me and guide me to keep going with the college courses, don’t let it get you down or let the officers who would crumple and rip up my pages ridiculing me for being a college boy who would never turn out to be shit but a piece of shit felon, not to let any of that phase me. And for her I’m still thankful for.

Once I was transferred to Suwannee CI for standing up for a really great friend who was African American after watching officers jump in the air and land on his bleeding, swollen, broken face and head covered in the orange “Black Jesus” pepper spray, my swollen sausage fingers from zip ties being on my wrists too long sending shocks of electricity through your entire being, and after 25 of us stood up against these brutal/deadly conditions when 400 other inmates were supposed to, and after being sprayed by the infamous Black Jesus, and watching my college books get destroyed and thrown away yet again, and watching and feeling the pain of others who were being beaten, terrorized and shipped to a new facility with stormtroopers in riot gear waiting for us, clubs and black gloves the more sinister threats materialized, I’ve seen an officer slap an inmate so hard with those fucking black gloves he dies. So I knew this was serious.

I knew this screamed danger. I knew I was probably going to die but fuck it. I did what I did. I stood up when others played down and standing up means sometimes you suffer further, especially after I saw inmates killing themselves in confinement to make the torture stop, after I saw these confinement officers beat mercilessly inmates (i.e., friends black and blue), after I witnessed staged murder, and being tortured and frozen like a block of ice, stripped naked, put on property strip for whatever reason they enjoyed using, doing thousands of jumping jacks to stay warm in confinement only to sleep for only a moment on a cold steel toilet and after the dorm sergeant who looked like an evil kid enjoying the torment he caused blowing whistles at the window flap over and over to eat your tray and throw the one bite of the full tray back out to him every time he worked, and after the air trays with no food, and inhaling the constant fucking chemical spray over and over and watching them play games at night to bust a talker and spray them with spray to an inch off their life, and taking away all reading material, yes the sentimental feelings I felt toward the good officers were being stripped away. Slowly then rapidly.

Telling you what it feels like to almost die all the time, every day, and that there isn’t anything you can do about it is a kind of sick joke. Time stands still in confinement. Blood and chemicals are constant. Mail not so much. They threw that and ripped it up. Some officers would allow this one sick twisted inmate to jack off to the other inmates when they were led to the confinement showers. They never allowed us time to actually wash if they provided soap or an old, unwashed prison uniform to dry with, no. But they would allow this motherfucker to jack off to all of us and supply him with toilet paper but keep toilet paper from us. Fucking crazy. I remember it had been 26 days until I was given a toothbrush. One of my friends, he didn’t get one for 96 days, so I guess I’ll count myself lucky, but that 26-day toothbrush didn’t just magically appear. I risked my life to get it. I was sick of using the inside elastic from my underwear to floss my teeth, sick of scrubbing my shirt over my teeth back and forth to clean them.

Inside, I remained who I was. I was the man that would stand up for a friend regardless of their race. I was the man who wanted better, who never wanted to be back in prison. I was the son who loved his mom and dad, his brothers. I was someone that they were not going to break. I read other stories of men who survived impossible odds. I used their stories to strengthen my resolve, my heart. I knew people had it worse than me throughout other times in history, and I knew asking for a fucking toothbrush even if it meant my death meant something on a level that others might not understand.

So, this officer would do the rounds at count. We weren’t allowed to talk. We weren’t even allowed to look out the window or door unless we wanted them to wrap chains around the doors that only allow your door to be opened but a foot for them to spray a can of Black Jesus into the room, or them to do a fucking cell extraction and rush in and pull you bloody from it. So he is walking by and with reckless abandon I start to watch his movements walking closer and closer toward my door through a little crack of space at the side of my door. My eye watched him move closer. He was walking fast. I don’t think he was really counting, just going through the motions. But “fuck it, I’m all in.”

I have seen this very guy torture others without mercy. I knew what he was capable of. At this point, any sentiments I had toward officers in a good way have been erased from the page. Right when he was about to pass, I took my chance. I called out to him. “Sarge!” I wanted to brush my fucking teeth bad. I felt terrible not being able to brush them. This had to fucking end one way or another. He stops as if someone shot him. Menacingly he turns and faces the crack I shouted from. The crack is small, and when I put my eye back to that fucking crack, it took a minute to register what I was seeing, but it was another person’s eyeball.

Once my eye focused on that eye, I asked him, “Sir, please sir, I only want to brush my teeth sir.” (I knew if you didn’t say sir with them it brought punishment and pain.) I continued, “Sir, it has been 26 days sir since I last brushed my teeth sir and all I’m asking sir for sir is a toothbrush sir. Sir, I don’t even care sir about the toothpaste sir. Please sir. That’s all I need sir. Please sir.” I hated saying please this much. It killed me inside. The fucking thought of it, the humiliation. But it is what it is. If this is their game, I’ll fucking play it, especially to brush my teeth.

In that moment of our eyes meeting, I saw deep into his. I saw an endless sea of misery. I saw hate. I saw things that would make killers shudder. I was staring into the eyes of one. I knew that. I knew this was fucking daring, but through the door I let one more please come from my mouth. “Please sir, a toothbrush.” That moment changed me. In his eyes I saw a shift. I saw kids he might have on the street. I saw something from my approach, approach the door to his heart and beat on it, beat, beat, beat. This motherfucker might actually do it. It was a moment. A moment of understanding that had left this place I was in. “I’ll see what I can do,” and then he quickly turned and moved on.

Fuck. That was real.

After a time, a run-around (inmate worker who works confinement as his job) slides two toothbrushes and a tube of state toothpaste under my door. It was a fucking real deal miracle in real time. And that memory changed my belief about evil, about mercy. Mercy is possible even within callous hearts. This officer and I connected. We really did. I hated officers at that point. I did. I’m guilty of that. But it showed me something about myself and the power I had within. It showed me that I didn’t need to hate. What does hate really accomplish? I love righteous anger and understand that, but hate defeats a spirit in the end and I never want to be defeated in spirit or mind. I was thankful to that officer even though I knew what he had done. We are all people capable of horrors and of kindness, of empathy, sympathy, and a million other fucking things, but my belief about officers changed in that moment and I accepted then and there that life is full of mystery, sometimes it’s wonderful and other times not so much, but I knew who I was and was proud of who I am and who I wanted to become. I once again believed I was going to make it back home even if it killed me doing it. That’s paradoxical, but it’s so magically true.

When you first get locked up, that’s what everyone tells you to worry about. You hear you’ll have to punch someone in the face to prove you’re not soft, so nobody will try to rape you or take your shit. I went in young, naive, with a “fuck it” attitude. Before prison I thought I was grown, but at twenty‑two that was just my ego talking. The truth’s, I was young and way out of my depth in this new crazy ass environment, no matter how many times I told myself I could survive anything, no matter how many times I “whispered this too shall pass,” my granny’s mantra passed down to me.

In my mind, survival and beauty didn’t mesh well. I mean, I’m in fucking prison, right? Survival plus beauty meant: get real. They didn’t compute. But as time crawled by, I learned. I expanded my mind. I read everything I could get my hands on. You know what’s fucked? There was a time in my bid when I was pissed the day was over. Like what? You’re in prison dummy, you want the days to pass. There was just so many things I wanted to accomplish that day.

Anyways, I never thought about beauty. Making it through the next hour felt like a full‑time job with the many different personalities I encountered every day. You had other inmates. You had murderers, rapists, violent offenders. And that’s not even mentioning the psychopathic officers who had the power to make you disappear, the same men who could flip your world upside down and then write the paperwork to match whatever story they wanted. Not getting killed was the priority. If an officer said you hung yourself, then that’s what your family and loved ones would believe. If they said you overdosed, then your family would forever think you were a junkie in prison who still couldn’t get his shit together.

That aside, my first real experience of beauty came from my mom. Her belief in me was ab-so-fucking-lute. She not once budged on who she knew I was: Emmett Tatter, a good person, who wouldn’t become worse because of his circumstances, his environment, or the deadly, continuous chess match he played every day to choose the right thing. She knew my heart was solid, strong, smart. I don’t think there was ever a question about who I was, and she always made sure I knew it. Seeing that kind of raw belief was the first truly beautiful thing I’d ever known. Like... I felt it in my core. My whole being. Isn’t that beauty? Isn’t that what it looks like?

She was the one who opened my eyes to different worlds. Books have real-fucking-power, and that was the next kind of beauty I experienced. They transported me straight to other realms, to other places, and opened my eyes to how much I didn’t fucking know.

There’s something beautiful about realizing you don’t know shit. That you never will. You can study and study your ass off, but there’s always more to learn. For all the many galaxies in the universe, an infinite number, there are always more. When it came to books, I wanted to become a star‑charter, seeking out new solar systems. And I did. They opened my eyes, and it was fucking marvelous. It felt so fantastic to feel my mind stretching, to be reaching outward from the confines of my position in life, just as our universe keeps expanding into the unknown. I was my limiting factor, and realizing I didn’t have to keep being that created a kind of beauty I’d never known.

I remember I was sent to confinement for supposedly inciting a riot inside prison. In confinement I was tortured. This isn’t that story, so I’ll leave it at that, but I was tortured, and after being transferred again to another prison they released us out onto the rec yard. They let all the dorms out, hundreds upon hundreds of inmates, and it was my first day on the pound, so I was on my own. I didn’t know anybody yet, and for me it takes a while before I meet someone and call them a “friend or homie.”

I also remember thinking, oh my God, there are a lot of prisoners. How is this fucking possible? Are all of us really bad, bad people? What the fuck is wrong with us? Then my mind went to all the other prisons in Florida, and then to other states prisons, and honestly it almost made me sick. There are millions. Then you add other countries and I thought, fuck, this is getting heavy in my spirit. And then I crashed inside myself like a star collapsing into a black hole. It’s fucking wild to crash like that and still try to act normal so you don’t become a target. My steps got heavy. I felt myself sinking into a deep depression.

So there I was, walking the track and thinking of home, of calling my family out on the street, peeping my damn environment, and it looked like a fucking wasteland. I was at Taylor CI Annex. The track was sand and sandspurs. I felt like I was on planet Pluto, like where I was wasn’t even part of the real world. The free world felt like an illusion, a dream, a place far, far away from my grasp no matter how desperately I reached. Like the sand on the track: if I scooped some up, no matter how tightly I held it, it slipped through my damn fingers.

I felt completely isolated and alone. Cut off from the real world, from the people who cared about me. If I didn’t have a reputation to keep up and an ego, I could’ve cried right then and there. But for whatever reason, I looked up, and when I did, wow. I was in awe. It was getting late, they were about to call third rec, the last rec of the day. The sky was beautiful. Reds, oranges, a myriad of colors. That sky looked like Michelangelo himself had painted it. I was awestruck by the pure beauty of it. Gone were the countless inmates. Gone was the isolation and depression. They freaking vanished. Emmett, you can forget about being on Pluto and just keep looking the fuck up. I’d started to spiral, and that sky brought me back, and it was beautiful. That’s beauty.

I stood there a few more moments, watching the colors, watching the small rippled clouds catch the reds and oranges of the sunset, long rows of them looking like scales on a fish. A feeling of peace came over me, and before the damn fool standing in the middle of the track got run over by the next swarm of inmates, I moved on, walking with my head a little higher, a little lighter, with a sense of much needed peace.

I remember getting back into the dorm and telling my mom on the phone that night that I was good. That she had nothing to worry about. Later, lying on my bunk, I reached for a good book, excited to visit another world. Excited for the next day. I told myself I’d be all-fucking-right. That I’d make it home.

I could write an entire book on the beauty I found in prison. COUNT TIME has been edited multiple times, but a book only about beauty? How the hell do you trim any of that?

If I wrote about teaching all those men yoga inside and how beautiful it was to watch them grow, or let go of trauma, or heal right in front of me, you’d see it’s not a crazy idea that someone could find beauty in prison. I guess it depends on who you are. I don’t know if everyone found it, but I pray they did, even if it was just for a moment.

Maybe beauty in prison starts from within and then reaches outward, affecting everyone around you. Does that make sense? I’m not saying that to correct the person who asked the question. I’m grateful they asked. Their question helped me remember just how much beauty I actually did see.

Beauty is all around us, whether you’re inside prison or on the outside. You only have to look up to see it, look within to feel it, or open a book to find it. Maybe even strike a yoga pose, I don’t fucking know.

Before you saw anything, before you understood where you were or what that place was going to do to you, it hit you: industrial bleach, sweat, and something underneath, something coppery, like a penny pressed flat against your tongue. You couldn’t name it, but you would never forget it.

That was Lake Butler Reception and Medical Center. That was Florida DOC. That was day one.

That was the first thing that happened when you stepped off the bus.

The Monster was waiting for you.

“I swear to God, that man was a giant, he had to be. Larger than Andre the Giant from The Princess Bride. I later learned that he was famous within the system. He was a huge, corn-fed cracker. Hands that could smack you dead. His beady eyes were small, like a pig’s, and they checked out the shivering crowd that stood at attention before him and his penetrating gaze. That six-foot-five, 300-pound giant would fucking kill me if I blinked wrong, and if he couldn’t, somebody else would carry out the hit. He had a presence about him that screamed: Bitch, play with me, I dare you.”

–Excerpt from COUNT TIME by Emmett Tatter

That was who was waiting when you stepped off the bus.

All thirty of us stood shoulder to shoulder, dick to ass, bunched together so tight you could feel the chilled breath of the man behind you while officers worked the room with their mouths, using names and words designed not just to control your body but to defile your very soul. They called us pieces of shit. Sissies. Lowlifes. Words meant to strip whatever was left of you after the handcuffs, the bus ride, and the clothes they took. Then the long hard bench that lined the wall. You kneeled on it, nose pressed flat against cold concrete. Don’t move. Arms reach back, grabbing both cheeks, spread your ass wide, and held it while an officer walked the line and looked inside every man’s asshole. When it was over, you were ordered into a pushup position. Naked. Twenty pushups. Then another twenty. Then another. Then another. And if you had gold teeth, you felt their eyes stop on your mouth. The officers said they had a jar. A jar of gold teeth beaten from the mouths of inmates who came before you. They told you about it. Casually. Like it was funny.

That was your welcome to Florida DOC.

Then you walked through the metal detector one by one, and the officers who lined the way kept making sure you knew exactly what they thought of you. Slick comments delivered slow and steady, with malice, just loud enough. The kind that weren’t for your benefit. The kind that were for theirs.

Fuckers.

Then they walked you inside.

The first thing you saw was other inmates. Some were on their hands and knees, toothbrushes working back and forth between the grout of the tile floor. Punishment for talking. For looking wrong. For nothing at all. Others were in cages. Not cells. Cages. The kind that looked like they belonged in a history book about medieval torture, not a state-run facility in the twenty-first century. You stayed silent. Inmates who whispered were on the floor, waiting on another inmate to come clean up the pooling blood. You didn’t ask what they did to get there. You just kept walking, kept your eyes forward, and tried to look like none of it surprised you.

It surprised you. It shocked you. Made you want to hide, but there was nowhere to run.

That’s when you heard him.

A man was screaming somewhere down the hallway: not yelling, screaming, the kind that sends chills down your spine. He looked wet. Soaking. Orange splashes trailed his movements, dripping, the chemical agent still alive on his skin and clothes like he had just walked through fire. A White Shirt, a lieutenant, the kind you didn’t want to notice you, had a camera trained on him. The inmate was being transferred. Whatever happened to him had already happened. That was the aftermath.

You didn’t understand what you were seeing yet. You found out later.

The chemical agent. The pepper spray. And the name they gave it in there.

“White Shirt has a camera focused on the screaming inmate, who looks wet. I learn later this is because he’d been sprayed with pepper spray, a chemical agent. In here, they call it Black Jesus. Why? Because the officers say after they spray a black inmate, he screams for Jesus.”

–Excerpt from COUNT TIME by Emmett Tatter

Read that again.

They named it. Not in whispers. Not in shame. Casually. Like it was a brand, a product, a tool on a belt. Said it the way you’d say paperwork or count time or any other part of the daily routine. Enough officers used it enough times that it stuck. That it traveled. That it became the accepted name inside Florida DOC for what happened when you chemically burned a man until he called out to God. And that’s how deep it went. That’s how far the poison spread. Even we, the inmates, had started calling it Black Jesus. That’s psychologically terrifying. That’s what happens when a culture is toxic enough for long enough. The people being destroyed by it start using the language of their destroyers. It’s fucking bullshit.

Black Jesus.

What the fuck.

And let me be clear: they sprayed all of us. White, Latino, Black. It didn’t matter. Inside Florida DOC, you weren’t a person. You were a number. Mine was V19743. You were scum. You were worthless. You were a slave in a state-run facility in the twenty-first century. Race didn’t protect you from the spray. Nothing protected you from the spray.

But I can’t pretend I understood it the same way for everyone in that room. I can speak to what it felt like to get sprayed. I cannot speak to what it felt like to be a Black man and hear that name. To know that the people with the power to kill you had looked at your suffering, at the sound of you crying out to God, and turned it into a joke they passed around like a punchline. That’s not just dehumanization. That’s a weapon designed to cause fear, to ssay: we own you, we mock you, we will terrify you, and we will kill you. Not a threat. A promise.

And they kept it. I watched them keep it. We were all targets. Every last one of us, white, Latino, Black, a number, a body, something to be managed or disposed of. They didn’t always differentiate when it came to the killing. But in a system built on racism, run in some cases by men who wore hoods on their off days, I have no doubt that some lives were considered even more disposable than others. The name tells you that. The name is the proof. I was a number. They were a number and a target. There is a difference, and I will not pretend otherwise.

But they named it after Black men screaming for Jesus.

Think about what that tells you about who was giving the orders. And if you think this is ancient history, think again. If you don’t believe that the Ku Klux Klan has a presence inside Florida DOC right now, watch the Hulu documentary The Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK, which includes Florida correctional officers who were Klan members. Officers with badges and hoods. A culture so poisoned that they could take a chemical agent used to torture human beings, give it a name, and pass it down like tradition. A name said out loud in front of everyone like it was nothing.

Then watch the new HBO/Max documentary The Alabama Solution, which follows Alabama’s prison system through footage shot on contraband cell phones by incarcerated men and exposes systemic brutality and cover-ups.. It is one of the most powerful pieces of journalism about the American carceral system ever made. Those inmates are very brave souls who risked their lives to get that footage out, and right now, at this very moment, they are experiencing consequences for that bravery. That is what courage looks like behind a fence. That is what it costs.

But I’ll be honest with you: Florida never lets it get that far. Alabama’s atrocities made it to a screen. Florida’s atrocities disappear before anyone gets the chance. If an inmate inside Florida DOC is making videos of officers or filming what the system does to people, that inmate is probably dead. Florida has far more prisons than Alabama, far more inmates, and a DOC that has quietly mastered the art of controlling what the public is allowed to know. Death after death gets listed as pending investigation and sits on the books for years. By the time anyone gets a real count, the story has moved on and the bodies have been buried. There is no way of truly knowing how many people died inside Florida DOC because the people who control that information are the same people responsible for those deaths. The facts get muddied in the bloody water. They always have.

Alabama asked the question out loud. Florida never had to. And that might make Florida the most dangerous system in the country. Not the most documented. The most dangerous.

This is the American prison system. Not the exception. The rule.

And there’s something else, because this story isn’t black and white. Nothing inside those walls ever was.

Not every officer was the Monster. Not every officer was the kind of man who named a chemical agent after Black men screaming for God. Some of them were decent. Some of them were fair. Some of them looked at you like you were still a human being, and that mattered more than I can explain. To those officers, I am grateful. Genuinely. You know who you are.

But here is what I also know. There is a reason the Stanford Prison Experiment was shut down after only six days, even though it was supposed to last two weeks. College students. A fake prison. It was only supposed to last two weeks. Not long. They didn’t even make it to day seven. Shut down after six days because ordinary people were already doing extraordinary harm to one another. Six days. Now imagine that isn’t an experiment. Imagine that is every single day for years. Imagine the culture, the pressure, the desensitization, the slow erosion of everything you were taught was right. Everyone has a breaking point. Everyone is capable of harm when the system around them normalizes it. Character and values don’t disappear overnight. They get diluted. They get muddied. And for some people, given enough time and enough permission, they disappear entirely.

Some officers made cruelty a mission. Others fought against it quietly, tried to hold on to who they were, tried to be better than the system they served. That’s the gray area nobody talks about when they talk about prison. It isn’t a story of monsters and saints. It’s a story of human beings under impossible conditions making choices, every single day, about who they actually want to be.

Prison is the land of the gray area. It always was.

That was your first hour inside. That’s the part that never left me: not the screaming, not the naked pushups, not the orange dripping off a man’s skin, not the jar of gold teeth. The part that never left me was the casualness of the name. That’s what COUNT TIME is about. Not just what they did to us. But who I was before those walls, who those walls tried to make me, and who I chose to become anyway. The books. The yoga. The men I met who showed me that dignity can survive in the most undignified places. The things that became normal that should never be normal. And the long road back to knowing the difference.

They call it Black Jesus.

And people know. They suspect. They’ve heard enough. But most people turn away because they’ve already decided that whoever is inside deserves whatever they get. Here’s what they don’t understand: most people come home after prison. Most people in there are not the worst of the worst. Most people just fucked up. They made a mistake, or a series of mistakes, or they were born into circumstances that made those mistakes inevitable. And they are still human beings. And what is being done to them is being done in your name, in your state, with your tax dollars, behind walls designed to make sure you never have to see it.

They call it Black Jesus.

And you already know. You just don’t want to.

COUNT TIME is currently seeking a publisher. Subscribe to follow the journey, and share this if it moves you.

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It was brutal deciding what stayed and what didn’t. Every chapter felt necessary. Every story deserved to be told. But the book couldn’t hold everything.

So this is one of the chapters that got left behind. And honestly? It’s been eating at me ever since.

Here it is. You decide if it should’ve stayed.

Blown Away by Emmett Tatter

There’s a showdown fast approaching between me and Officer Ono. Every day, he sees me on the pound and comments he’ll be the one to finally catch me hustling. At some point, there has to be an understanding.

It’s ridiculous.

I’m dedicated to teaching yoga on the pound. I can’t understand this dude. You know when you think someone’s trying to play around with you? Then you realize that this isn’t a game. He wants your head.

He dreams I’ll be shipped to another main Hell Camp. It seems he doesn’t want me to be around my support system, the loyal pack of wolves who love me unconditionally and want nothing more than to see me succeed.

Fuck this guy.

I’ve been through way too much in my life for me to start trippin’ about what Ono really wants for me. As long as I can remember, I’ve never worried about what a spiteful, petty cop thinks about me, or let that shit faze me. I know I’m not selling dope and not affiliated with gangs. He just wants me to be doing all that.

When my sentence first began, I didn’t have a lot of options. I set my mind to accept my time in prison and deal with it. That’s exactly what I’ve done. Fuck whatever anyone else has to say about any of it.

I constantly work to improve myself by helping other inmates heal themselves using the practice of yoga. Learning and practicing the different asanas helps people to recover from the PTSD, trauma, and anxiety created by just living in this world. It’s hard reaching these dudes I’m locked up with in here. I can see they all want better but don’t really have any idea where to begin. Reaching feelings deep inside makes them fearful.

Shit is scary.

It was for me, too.

There is a big fucking line you have to be able to maneuver around to get past insecurities and fear. Crossing that line can take a lot of time and hard work. It drives Ono crazy I’m doing yoga and studying Spanish to get across that line. He thinks it’s all smoke and mirrors, that I’m running game.

Why does he have to fuck with me every single time he sees me on the pound?

Ono, can’t you see I am trying and have a purpose here? All the things I’ve done to keep my crazy mind at ease? Ono, haven’t you seen me up top leading a yoga class? Haven’t you seen me study Spanish every day? Haven’t you personally been next to me walking into the chow hall while I whisper Spanish words to myself? I know you’ve heard inmates in the chow hall call out my name and say shit like, “Tatter, I tried to do a handstand for a minute. Don’t worry about the split on my head. Thanks, bro.” You’ve seen this with your own eyes, haven’t you? I get it, though; you want to see me fail. You want to be one of those assholes at Lake Butler, whispering in my ear, telling me to drop my college books, don’t you? You want to be the one who tells me I’m a nobody. You want to be the one who proves all that yoga shit was a front, don’t you? You want to be a prosecutor trying to make a name for himself, being hard on crime. Taking my future away without all the facts or caring to listen to them at all, don’t you? That’s who you want to be, right?

Please don’t be that guy. Please, Ono! Don’t be like them. Fucking please, man. The naysayers. The counselors telling me I’m a master manipulator when I’m only a young man just wanting to smoke weed. Don’t do that to me. I’m trying now more than ever before. Never in my life has something meant so much to me. Don’t be the little bitch with the whistle at Suwannee CI. Don’t snatch my dreams. You have no reason, but you don’t need one, do you? I can’t take it anymore.

That’s where I am with Officer Ono.

My thoughts are betraying my peace of mind.

It’s going to be a long night with him working the dorm, always trying anyone for anything. Doing locker searches. It’s also the same day I call home to Mom and am thrown off guard by a combustible situation at home. All it needs is a flame to ignite it.

Guess who that flame would be?

Around this time, my brother Zach’s going through his own personal shit. He isn’t doing too well out on the street. He has gotten into the whole heroin thing. He has overcome this now but at this time, he was knee deep in it. He had my parents arguing like crazy. When I call home that night, my mom’s crying, yet again. This time about Zach, though. Nothing hurts me like when she cries. She’s asking me to call Zach, hysterical because Dad and Z are at each other’s throats.

My dad had called him a junkie and bro was talking about hurting him. I knew he wouldn’t really try to kill him. I also know that Dad isn’t the type of person to take back what he said.

It’s bad. And it’s killing me Zach’s doing heroin. My heart’s breaking as I talk on the phone with Mom. This is so bad. I really don’t know what I can do about it.

My friends can tell something’s up with me. They see I need to use the phone so they let me run it up.

The only one that doesn’t give a shit at the time is Officer Ono.

Everyone knows I’m not the one to pick a fight or go into confinement unnecessarily, but this motherfucker...

Flip-flopping between calls to Zach and Mom, I’m losing it.

Zach doesn’t want me to know he’s on heroin and he’s saying that Mom and Dad are trippin’. What can I do? It’s such a helpless feeling not being able to do anything to help from this prison phone. I try my best anyway.

Most officers let you kneel down and get comfortable while you’re using the phone, but not Officer Ono. He doesn’t let me down, sticking to regulations. Let’s just say I’m not surprised in the least when he starts going off about it.

“Hey boy, stand up while you’re on the phone, boy, if you want to keep talking, boy.”

I stand up quickly. I don’t want to irritate him further. Don’t want to get into it with him at all. My adrenaline, though, is spiking fast. My leg is twitching. Anyone who’s paying attention could tell you that Tatter has a really big issue playing itself out right now.

“Watch out, Tat’s goin’ through it right now, bro.” Everyone’s seeing it.

When I slip up and sit back down on my knee, Officer Ono’s on my ass fast. No hesitation. “Tell him bye, boy.”

At this point, my mind’s on fuck everything. Nothing makes sense to me right now.

Here we go.

I do listen to him, but before I hang up the phone, I say very loudly to my brother, “Zach, I gotta go, Dawg. I got this fuck-ass officer fuckin’ with me. I’ll hit you back later if I’m able to. Love you.”

Ono says, “Inmate. Did you just call me a fuck-ass officer?”

As I’m walking away from the phone, my mind just flips. Everything I’m trying to handle with these phone calls already hurts so bad. With Ono here, fucking with me, something inside me fractures; it’s the sudden break you see on those murder shows.

Fuck this fucking motherfucker.

He’s standing above me, about three steps up from the officers’ station, with the door right behind him.

Not using my brain anymore, I turn and face him.

“Yeah, I just called you a fuck-ass officer. How about I just go right up in your shit right now, homeboy?”

He moves like he’s going for his radio and I turn it up a notch.

“You goin’ for that radio, bitch? You ever had anyone at this camp hogtie a motherfucker up to confinement? You even know what hog tying is at this pussy-ass camp? Call ‘em, bitch. Run it, bitch! Boy, run it! I’ma run up in your shit, boy, right now boy! How you feel about that, boy? What the fuck is good, boy? Call them other boys to save your ass, boy, see if I don’t take a few of them officers with me. We all gonna get lit up in this bitch.”

In a flash, he’s behind the Officer’s Station door.

That’s when I completely lose it. I want him so bad. I’m banging on the glass window calling him every type of name I can think of.

“Fight me, bitch. Fuck you, boy. Tell all them fuck boys on the compound to run it. I want this shit, bitch. Call ‘em, motherfucker! Let’s get it, bitch!”

I hear inmates yelling for my friends to come get Tat, that he’s losing it on Officer Ono.

Vaguely I hear, “Quick! Hurry! Get him. They gonna kill his ass.”

I see them all coming: Fidel, Santi, Roy, Five, RD, and a few others rushing me.

I’m pacing in front of the officers’ station, screaming for Ono to come outside. Warning everyone today is the day I’m makin’ them run it.

Ono looks as if he has no idea why I’m acting the way I am.

“You gonna figure it out now MOTHERFUCKER!” I keep slamming on the security station glass, screaming my head off.

This is what going all in looks like. This is another level.

Next thing I know, all my friends are grabbing at me as I wildly fight to keep them off. I have lost all sense of time. I don’t even know what doing time means anymore. Fidel, with help from the others, has managed to slam me up against the dorm wall near the front door. They immediately do the only thing that might make me chill.

“Think about your Moms, bro.”

I scream, “I don’t want to think about her, motherfuckers. I gotta have this dude, bro. Fuck this asshole.” They won’t allow me to hurt myself any further. At this point, I’m almost crying. All of them screaming at me, “Think of Moms.”

Stop! Please! Don’t tell me to think of her! Fuckkkkkkk!

It’s all in me. Hate...misery…despair. Something inside me breaks down. It’s their incessant mentioning of Mom that makes me come to that night.

They drag me into the day room, still going ballistic. Slam me up against a different cinder block wall, but it finally leaves me. The fear, the anger, the hate, and the confusion inside of me.

Pain and everything else.

I feel the tension leave my body as my breathing begins to calm. I finally start to recognize all of my homeboys around me, and then I nearly break down, again. My arms are wet from using them as if they are Kleenex. I’m thankful for all my friends around me. Especially Fidel, because I know that he’s the only reason I didn’t get hog tied, sprayed, or end up serving more time.

The weird thing is that Ono never does push that panic button.

He never calls the police to rush the dorm or any of that bullshit. He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t fuck with anyone else or do locker searches that night. All he does is sit in the officer security station booth and stare at his own reflection. Honestly, I should be shipped to another institution and I wouldn’t be surprised to have another hit put on my head. This motherfucker though, he doesn’t do any of that.

The thing about it is I see him around the compound for months after the incident. I catch myself still getting mad. I still want to react in a bad way. To his credit though, I can’t recall him fucking with anyone. Not even one person. Every time I see him, it is let bygones be bygones.

About three months later, I’m taking a theology class and trying to get a scan. I ask the facilitator if I can use the restroom.

The bathroom’s situated in a different building. I walk through a small courtyard and that’s when I see Ono. He’s sitting on a bench with his head resting in his hands. He’s slipping, completely oblivious, unaware I’m passing before him with rage still in my heart. The two buildings are fenced in, with nowhere for Ono to run. Off to the right are swinging doors that lead to the bathroom. I walk through and start to daydream and fantasize about all the things I want to do to him. It would take forever for anyone to rescue him if I attack him now.

It feels like some sort of gift.

From the devil, maybe?

While I’m using the urinal, the grin on my face would make you sick. As I’m thinking about how I want to demolish him, my mind spins off in a different direction. I start questioning myself. Why the hell am I thinking like this? This shit has been over. I say to myself, You know, Tat, this dude doesn’t want problems. You know in your heart you are fucking trippin’.

I’m wrong here. I need to let this go. I say to myself, Emmett, do what you know is right. Apologize.

My heart’s tearing apart.

It’s very confusing.

Why, when I walk back outside, does my mind switch back to fuck this motherfucker? The thought persists. I struggle to silence my mind from these horrendous thoughts. I force myself to turn to the right to stand next to him. Silencing the demon trying its best to take over my thoughts, I speak.

“Officer Ono, can I have a word with you?”

He’s shocked I got the slip on him. I can tell right away.

“Sir, I know that we had some words. I know that by all rights, you should have at least taken me to confinement. I just want you to know, sir, that it never should have gotten to that level. I just want you to know that I am sorry.”

He looks at me in amazement and says, “Tatter, sit down with me.”

He slides over, tapping the bench beside him. My first thought is that I don’t want anyone to witness me sitting next to him. Kinda looks funny. I sit anyway, right next to my nemesis.

That’s when he really surprises me.

Looking directly at me, he says, “Tatter, if anyone owes an apology, it would be me. I know you know that I was joogin’ at you. As a matter of fact, I can remember exactly what day that happened. It was September 11. I don’t know if you noticed, but I haven’t been joogin’ at anyone since that day. Not one person.”

I just watch him as he shakes his head.

“Ever since that day, I’ve been trying to be a better man. I went home that night and sat for hours looking at my life. I thought about how I had been treating people badly around the compound for no reason. I swear that ever since that day, I’ve been trying to be a better man. That’s the honest truth.”

Hearing his words, I’m speechless.

Yeah, it’s like that sometimes.

The person you think you have figured out the most will surprise the shit out of you.

He surprised me.

I reply that regardless, I’m still sorry and that it never should have gotten to that level. I get up and leave him there with his own thoughts.

The next day, I go to a Bible Spanish class and tell them the story of my encounter with Officer Ono and its amazing resolution.

The class begins shouting out words of praise, “Bendigate, hermano! Gloria a Dios!”

I swear we all praise God that day.

Thinking about it now, I still smile.

It takes a real man to admit that he was wrong. Shout out to you, Ono. I hope that you have it all figured out. I hope you’re a better man to this very day. I send you lots of respect and the truth is, it changed my life too.

Thank you.

(This is what got cut. What do you think? Should it have stayed in? Let me know in the comments.)

But what happened between those counts? That’s where the real story lives.

The system was fucked up. Horrible. I wrapped blistered corpses at Lake Butler RMC. I survived officer-ordered hits. Officers sprayed entire cans of chemical agents (souped-up pepper spray) they call “Black Jesus.” I taught myself yoga in 100-degree heat to hundreds of men the world had written off. Then I wrote COUNT TIME to make sense of it all.

My memoir chronicles that decade, but there’s so much more I need to say.

What You’ll Find Here

This Substack is where I’ll share the publishing journey: the rejections, the breakthroughs, the fight to get this story into the world. I’ll share prison stories that didn’t make the book, the details too raw, too specific, too necessary to leave out. I’ll talk about criminal justice truths, what really happens inside Florida DOC, and show you exactly how the system is rigged. I’ll address what happens after you come home: the real shit, no filter. Reality. Reentry. Rebuilding. The battles nobody prepares you for. I’ll write about yoga and survival, how breathwork and practice became my lifeline. I was in disbelief too. But yoga saved my life. I’ll talk about books, loads of books, the ones that got me through. And I’ll tackle mental health, addiction, PTSD, and anxiety. The battles I’m still fighting. The lessons I’ve learned, inside and outside prison razor-wire fences. But also my triumphs.

Who This Is For

This space is for anyone who’s ever felt counted out. For people who understand that the deadliest confinement isn’t steel bars and concrete. It’s the prison of your own mind. For readers who want the unfiltered version, the stories behind the stories, the truth about what survival really costs and what freedom really means.

This is for people who love to read. Who love stories. Who believe literature can save lives because it saved mine.

If you’ve been locked up, locked out, or locked inside your own head, this is for you.

If you believe in second chances, prison reform, stories that tell the truth, and redemption that’s earned, this is for you.

If you want to know what it’s really like inside, without the sanitized cuts, this is for you.

If you believe in doing right, even when the world makes it hard, this is for you.

If you need to be inspired, to know you aren’t alone and that the comeback is greater than the fall, this is for you.

And, if you love yoga… well then, you will fit right in.