I know crime statutes and dates can be boring and hard to read. Please bear with me for a minute. These laws are written a certain way for a reason. Staying in the dark about them is part of how this system keeps swallowing people, families, and whole communities, regardless of the harm it causes. This article isn’t just statutes and dates; it’s about what those choices do to real people.
Rehabilitation is supposed to be the goal of Florida’s justice system, of every justice system. But Florida’s own laws say something different. Florida’s sentencing statute, section 921.002, states that the primary purpose of sentencing is to punish the offender, and that rehabilitation is only a “desired goal” secondary to punishment.
Florida abolished parole for most offenses starting in the 1980s. For crimes committed after October 1, 1983, parole is basically gone, and by the mid‑1990s it was fully abolished for almost all new cases. People sentenced after that aren’t waiting on a parole board to see if they’ve changed. They’re serving fixed time. The law forces most of them to serve at least eighty-five percent of their sentence. Limited gain time is the only thing that can touch the rest, shaving down the years above that floor but never below it. Lawmakers have talked about lowering that floor and putting rehabilitation back into the language of sentencing, but bills to drop it to seventy two percent have died. People already sentenced under the old rules must still live under those rules. Punishment is still the baseline, and any talk of rehabilitation mostly affects the guidelines for new sentences. I’m glad people are finally pushing Florida to talk about rehabilitation and to think about changing the eighty five percent rule. That’s more than they used to do. But the men and women already trapped under the old statutes still must live inside them. The structure they built around punishment first and no real parole hasn’t gone away for us.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Florida pushed hard into tough on crime politics. Lawmakers killed most real parole, stacked on minimum mandatory sentences, and built a Criminal Punishment Code that centers punishment and incapacitation. Those minimum mandatories tie judges’ hands. In 2010, the judge in my case told me he didn’t want to sentence me to ten years, but his hands were tied. The sentence was already written into the statute. The system’s true goal is punishment, not rehabilitation, and that isn’t just how it feels inside. It’s written into the law.
Most states don’t do it this way. In other parts of the country, people still have a meaningful chance at parole. They can go in front of a board, show the work they’ve done, the programs they’ve completed, the ways they’ve changed, and sometimes come home early because someone believes rehabilitation is real. In Florida, for most of us, that door is welded shut. What other states call parole is not a real option in Florida DOC now. You can work, you can study, you can try to become a better man or woman, but the structure you’re stuck in was built to hold you, not to help you heal.
On paper, they call it the criminal justice system, like it’s just a set of laws and offices “operating” the way they’re supposed to. Inside, it doesn’t feel like a system that’s running well. It feels like a machine that keeps grinding on and on, no matter how much damage it does.
Florida also has a law that lets the state put a lien on any money tied to a literary or cinematic account of a crime: section 944.512, the state’s claim on proceeds from crime stories. Florida’s version of this law didn’t come out of nowhere. In the 1970s, states started passing “Son of Sam” laws after serial killers like David Berkowitz tried to sell their stories to publishers, and Florida followed in 1977 with section 944.512. Later, the state used this structure in high‑profile cases like the Gainesville murders tied to Danny Rolling, going after money from his artwork and a book and sending it to victims’ families and victim funds. That’s what they say this law is for: stopping people who turned their crimes into horror from cashing in. I’m not doing that. I’m not trying to sell murderabilia or glorify harm. I’m trying to tell the truth about what this system did to me and to the people around me, and what it’s still doing now.
When I walked into my probation office to ask for a travel permit so I could ride horses on the beach with my fiancée in the Outer Banks, it felt like a small, ordinary thing. I’d worked for years to build a life that meant something. I lectured on prison reform and criminology, taught trauma‑informed yoga, edited my memoir COUNT TIME, read excerpts at the St. Augustine library, and spoke with students at Flagler College, St. Mary’s College of Maryland and other schools. I was finally starting to feel like a writer, a teacher, a partner, a dog‑dad, not just a DOC number, V19743.
Instead of a simple permission slip (travel permit), the probation officer slid a new form across the desk and told me I had to sign it. At the top it said, “Acknowledgement of Understanding of Responsibilities for Notification of Involvement in Crime Accounts.” The language underneath said that all felons in Florida are prohibited from receiving any financial benefit from any literary or cinematic account of their crimes, and that I was required to notify the Department if I had, have or anticipate having such involvement. I stared at those words with COUNT TIME complete and now seeking representation. I’m querying agents and looking for the right one. I’ve already had two full manuscript requests, and my essays about prison and mental health are starting to find homes in places like CounterPunch. COUNT TIME began as a 250,000‑word monster, then 154,000, and after years of trimming it now sits at 79,799 words, ready for more queries and the right agent.
That feeling didn’t come out of nowhere. My first job in DOC was wrapping bodies and taking the dead to the morgue. I must’ve done that over a hundred times. You learn to slide the sheet, tape it tight, push the gurney, and try not to look at the face too long. You tell yourself it’s just work, that death is part of the routine. It’s easier than admitting what it really is: a system chewing people up.
It’s also a factory for profit. Sweat equity, mass incarceration, bodies turned into labor. A modern kind of slavery and human trafficking packaged as “corrections.” Underneath it all is a racist, discriminatory system that loves Jim Crow tactics and operates on a massive scale, swallowing lives and silencing and enslaving entire communities.
That isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. The horror goes so deep you’d have to read all my articles and do your own research to get even a glimmer of it. What you’d find is architecture, a deliberate design meant to keep the truth quiet, whether through paperwork, the legal system, or fear.
Later, in confinement, I remember hearing guys kill themselves. I’d be trying to write letters home, telling my family I was okay, and I’d hear feet bouncing off the wall. Then the scramble of officers, the door, the body wheeled out. Another time, a man climbed up on the bathroom sink and wall, tied a rope of bedsheets to a pipe above, and jumped. I remember grabbing him, lifting him with everything I had, feeling the full weight of his body in my arms and knowing that if I let go, he was gone. Signing that paper in the probation office felt like that weight too. This time the life I was trying to save was my own.
Years earlier, at Lake Butler Reception and Medical Center, I watched officers spray a man with a chemical agent they jokingly called “Black Jesus.” They said that when they sprayed a Black inmate the gas made him holler for Jesus and they enjoyed it. After spraying him, they jumped on his swollen black head while he screamed. His “crime” was that his parents had called the prison to say they were worried about him after an officer threatened him.
The day before, around four hundred of us had said we wanted to do a peaceful sit‑down, refusing to lock down during count time because we were tired of the beatings, the terror, the random deaths. When it actually happened, only about twenty‑five of us stayed the course. Watching that man get sprayed and stomped in front of everyone was the lesson. This is what happens when attention comes your way inside Florida DOC.
Inside that world, brutality is routine, just another day. I learned not to tell my family what I saw. They were already worried and there was nothing they could do. I learned not to let myself think about it, because if I felt it too much, I might not make it through the day. Violence started to feel normal. Silence started to feel safe.
Years later, in confinement at Suwannee Correctional Institution, I watched another man get murdered after officers beat and sprayed him. I was there on a minor disturbance charge (first, they called it a riot), part of that twenty‑five‑man group that had stood up to the administration at Lake Butler. From the cell I could hear the chains, the shouts, the hiss of Black Jesus, bodies hitting the floor, and “stop resisting” shouted over and over. Then the quiet. That story haunted me before I could even begin to write it. Staying silent has become normal, but once you come home, silence turns into something else. It starts to chip away at your mind at the worst possible times.
On probation, I’d already gone through a confusing voter‑fraud case after Amendment 4. I was arrested despite acting in good faith. All the memories of my ten‑year sentence came flooding back. I’d built and remodeled the home where my fiancée, our dog Bear and I live. I was finally starting to breathe again. Being arrested and charged again made me feel like my life could be snatched away at any moment. So, when, after all that, I sat in that office and saw this new crime‑accounts form, the timing felt targeted. My old trauma lit up. It felt like DOC was placing a target on me again, just in a quieter way.
That’s the mindset I brought home from Florida’s prisons. Violence feels normal. Silence feels safe. So when I’m told to sign a paper that says I can never profit from any literary or cinematic account of my crimes, it feels like the same system that once relied on beatings, chemical agents and terror is now using paperwork to keep my voice in check. Seeing that paper took the air out of the room. It felt like breathing Black Jesus again, the gas we grew used to inside, the one that made men scream for God.
Everyone who enters Florida’s prison system is forced to sign a version of this crime‑accounts form at reception. When I first signed it, I didn’t have any designs to write a book; I thought it was just another way to keep me from sharing what was happening inside the prison walls, from writing home about the abuse I witnessed and what officers did. I had no idea it would follow me for the rest of my life. When I hesitated, when I tried to protect my right to tell my own story, I was threatened with spending my whole sentence in isolated confinement, with the very real possibility of being beaten. That’s the coercion that starts the moment you walk through the gate. By the time you get out, you’ve been taught that speaking honestly about what you’ve seen is dangerous, and then I’m handed a legal document that makes that threat feel real all over again, reminding me that the punishment for telling the truth might never really be over.
You don’t have to be behind bars to live in a prison. Many of us carry one in our own minds. Trauma, shame and fear become chains that hold you even when the physical gates open. Writing and speaking honestly about past harm is one way I’ve tried to break those chains. That’s what COUNT TIME is about. That’s why I lecture, why I teach yoga, why I publish essays about prison and mental health. I’m trying to live as a better man and help others do the same.
I’ll be honest. Part of me felt petty even sharing this. I don’t know everything that’s going on behind closed doors in Tallahassee or DOC headquarters. All I really know is what it feels like when that paper is slid across the desk after ten years inside and years of trying to live right on the outside. It felt terrible. I didn’t want this to sound like “woe is me.” But in the end, every word of this is true, and that’s what I can stand on. Truth‑telling is what I’m about. It’s what COUNT TIME is about. Naming what happened, how it felt and what it’s still doing to my mind is my way of taking count of my own life and of a system that prefers us to stay quiet.
I wasn’t even planning to write about this form. I wanted to move on, keep teaching, keep telling stories, keep living my life. Then something in me wouldn’t let it go. A voice inside kept saying I had to name it, that I had to put it down in words instead of letting it claw at me, suffering in silence. My brain was a flood of emotions staring at that damn paper: ten years inside, all the bodies I’d moved, the beatings, Black Jesus, my memoir COUNT TIME that I worked tirelessly on, my writing. And my family, the people who believe in me, my fiancée, our dog, our home. That form pulled every one of those memories of trauma and all my new hopes back into the room.
In 2010, I told the judge I’d be the rose that grows from concrete. I’m still trying my best to live up to those fucking words, even when the state tries to censor my voice or tell me I’m not allowed to profit from my own life. I’ve signed their form, and I’m choosing not to let it define me. I’m choosing to keep telling stories from my life, from inside Florida’s prisons and from the years of healing afterward, so people can see what this system does and what it takes to keep living anyway. My goal is to keep this space somewhere you can read the truth about what my time on this earth has been like and how I’m still learning to live with it.
Florida’s prison system has spent years teaching people like me that the safest thing to do is say nothing. I’m writing this because I refuse to go back to that silence, no matter if the chains are made of steel, iron, other metals, or paper.