By Reality Check
This is a three part story that comes from an inmate who is incarcerated in the Florida State Prison System. His name has been change to protect him from any negative repercussions. There are also graphic details of everyday prison life. Therefore, please be warned – if you are sensitive to details – don’t read it!
PART 1 of 3
He committed suicide, diving headfirst under the wheels of an 18 wheeler truck while it was moving at 40 mph. It was the most gruesome death I have ever seen in prison. I can still hear the bones cracking in his neck and back breaking as the wheels crushed him. He had a life sentence and decided he could no longer endure the suffering so he took his life. I was 20 feet behind him along with 30 other men who were walking to the prison exercise yard.
As shocking and gruesome as the experience was, none of us shed a tear. We all made mental notes of this man’s final outcome when the day to day mental torture of a man’s demons combined to drive him to the deepest waters of insanity. Then, we disengaged visually and emotionally and continued to move forward physically and mentally, re-engaging with our own personal struggles and burdens.
Unfortunately, blood baths and carnage are an everyday reality for convicts. It takes a herculean level of spiritual strength to maintain possessions of your ability compassion towards another human being’s pain. Cut wrist, cutthroat, hangings, knives through the necks, ice picks pushed through eyes, scolding hot water poured on a sleeping man’s face. Prison guard kicking man literally to death. Bodies thrown off the top floor of the cellblock, Neck‘s broken, bodies twisted as they land.
The environmental culture of psychotic behavior eats at your humanity daily, yet as 56 mean sat in the TV room watching the evening news, when the image of Mr. George Floyd’s body pressed and pin to the pavement with the knee on his neck, hit us, along with his cries for mercy, something inside the soul of every hardened man in that room, Black and white, collapsed.
By the time the commentator revealed George had died, men were trying to hide their faces to hide their tears. George stripped us of our emotional disconnect and set fire to our humanity. Some, like myself, let the tears flow freely, drowning in the waters of broken hardness, under shackles from the dictates of macho etiquette.
As many times as the men in that room have seen men killed by prison guards, and the reality we live with daily, the images of George fighting to escape death under the knee of the oppressor still damaged us. Despite the multifaceted forms of sadistic and abusive treatment we see the guards dish out daily, every man in that room was touched, tortured and traumatized by those images. The walls around our hearts crumbled, the floodgates of our souls opened up.
Every single day of prison is a pantomime of constitutionalized oppression and State sponsored and protected abuse. Day after day, year after year, badge wearing state sponsored murderers kill men for fun, for bragging rights, for initiation into the ranks of the good old boys club.
Imagine living behind these walls away from the eyes of society with 30 officers like Derek Chuavin running the prison day-today. With no cameras to record the daily dose of racially motivated abuse. You think what you saw was a bold and blatant disregard for the camera that was recording him with his knee on George’s neck. I’m qualified to inform you that there are levels to the sadistic bonus of the Derek Chuavins of the world that I pray you never have to personally see.
The fires these types of men start will scar your soul with third-degree burns… for life. Let’s be perfectly clear about what it is that we are looking at on that video. 20 years of being an observer to this Satanic soap opera has given me pristine clarity regarding its roots and its fruit.
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