Prisoners beaten to death by guards.
A prisoner boiled alive until he died. A murder contract taken out against a
released inmate by racist Ku Klux Klan
(KKK) prison guards. Systemic brutality, widespread contraband
smuggling, false statements, coverups, and fabricated disciplinary reports.
Hundreds of prisoners dying due to inadequate medical care.
Anomalies ? Isolated incidents?
Freak occurrences? The answer is none of the above. For those of us inside the Florida prison system
for decades, it is called business as usual.
Thanks to whistleblowers stirring up
a maelstrom of media attention over those incidents listed above, and many
more, Florida politicians and the public are demanding that changes be made to
a corrupt prison system that has bumbled along on its own for decades, the
massive prison bus carrying 100,000 prisoners and 20,000 employees driven by a
succession of “Good Old Boys” who have grown fat on prison largesse.
Can the prison system be fixed? Can
a new leader come in, wave a magic wand, and erase generations of abuse? Is it
possible that a new Florida Department of Corruptions — er — Corrections, can
emerge on the other side of a cleansing process, a process that will end the
frequent beatings, gassings, civil rights violations, and worse that have been
occurring all along?
The answer is yes and no. Yes, if
good faith efforts by Governor Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature to clean
up the mess that has built up and accrued for over a century were followed
through with new, enlightened leadership that was given carte blanche to sweep the prison system clean.
No, if token efforts by the same
good old boys result in just another dog and pony show for the camera and
politicians, with a coat of fresh paint on the buildings, the green lawn neatly
trimmed, and pacified prisoners sitting quietly on their bunks until the group
goes out to the administration building for the requisite luncheon, nothing
will have changed.
After reading newspaper accounts of
the most recent scandal involving KKK prison guards and the thwarted murder
plot, an African-American prisoner who has also served decades in prison
commented on the outrage. “Them
peckerwoods been doing the same thing since they lost the war.” (The Civil
War).
I
must agree.
Why
has “the system” withstood every effort to purge the “bad apples” and replace
them with decent, honest people who will obey the law, enforce the rules
fairly, and allow prisoners to “do their time” in an atmosphere conducive to
personal growth and rehabilitation? To answer that question, one must examine
the roots of the prison kudzu vine that has grown so large and ungoverned that
it chokes out and suffocates every effort to reform it.
The
“Main Housing Unit” of Union Correctional Institution, near Raiford,
Florida, was Florida’s first “modern” penitentiary, a
three-story concrete house of horrors that imprisoned thousands of men from its
opening in 1913 until its closing over seventy years later. Uncountable blood
sacrifices anointed “The Rock’s”
walls and floors over the decades. Home of Florida’s Death Row and “Old
Sparky,” the electric chair, until Florida State Prison (FSP) opened across the
river in 1961, U.C.I.’s old-timer guards who were still around in the 1980’s,
when I served my time there, delighted in sharing their joy at dragging
condemned men from their cells, kicking and screaming, to be strapped down in
Old Sparky and electrocuted. Their identities supposedly secret, every guard
knew who the electrocutioners were, and vied for the honor of being chosen to
pull the switch.
Children
grew up eating state pork chops from pigs raised at the prison hog farm,
listening to stories at the knees of fathers and grandfathers who regaled them
with their rites of passage at the prison. Those children who went to college
rose through the ranks quickly, became colonels and wardens, then bureaucrats
and administrators at the highest levels of prison headquarters in Tallahassee, the state
capital.
Others
became police, sheriffs, or businessmen, then county and state politicians,
completely controlling the prisons in “the triangle,” North
Florida counties dominating the prison building boom. They married
and intermarried, they were fruitful and multiplied, and certain powerful
patriarchs controlled large voting blocs. State politicians courted and
pandered to them. Outsiders who got jobs in those prisons were viewed with
suspicion. Most of those soon sought jobs elsewhere.
Is
it any wonder that they got away with murders, and every other act was covered
up and dismissed? In the 1980’s on the TV show, “60 Minutes,” Dan Rather interviewed a prison enforcer who confessed
to murdering another prisoner at the order of a guard. The guard denied it.
What happened to him? He got promoted.
No
matter what “good faith efforts” are undertaken by state politicians to clean
up the Florida
prisons, it is unlikely that anyone would be willing to dismantle the behemoth
interconnected blood and marriage ties that dominate the present-day Florida
Department of Corrections.
Prisoners
who witnessed the first attempt to demolish The Rock described a crane that
swung a steel wrecking ball against the thick concrete wall. The large steel
ball bounced off the wall time and time again, to no effect. It wasn’t big
enough. The construction crew returned days later with a bigger ball.
Old-timers scoffed. The Rock would never fall. To their surprise, the wall
crumbled with the first impact.
To
those who hope to destroy a corrupt system, and rebuild it anew, I say, get a
bigger ball. The little ones you’ve used before didn’t work.
Charlie
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