Nobody warned you about the smell.

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 reaching back, grabbing both cheeks, spreading your ass wide, and holding 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, bleeding, 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 say: 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. 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.