Image by Ye Jinghan.
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 my 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 reporter’s 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 feeds 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 rougher and more 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 rumors. 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 describes 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, are 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 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 knows 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.
