How Florida DOC kills like a serial predator and calls it rehabilitation
Some stories don’t start where you think they will. Mine doesn’t begin with my arrest or the first time a door was locked behind me. It starts in a prison hospital, standing over a body I had just helped wrap in plastic, realizing I no longer knew how to feel like a person. Whoever I’d been before wasn’t who I was anymore; now I was the one applying the toe‑tag to this dead man.
I started serving time on this sentence in January 2010. I spent about ten months being shuffled through multiple county jails before I could even imagine what the state prison system had in store for me. My first prison job, as a hospital orderly at Florida’s Reception and Medical Center in Lake Butler, began in early 2011 and lasted until July 2012. By then I was twenty‑two, less than a year and a half into a ten‑year sentence, already letting it sink in that the rest of my twenties would belong to a place built around other people’s suffering and pain.
The training they gave me for handling death was a couple of hepatitis shots and an old VHS tape about wrapping bodies like tootsie rolls. That was it. No real instruction on what I was about to see or how it would live in my head afterward. On paper, I was entering a “correctional work program” that was supposed to mimic a real job and support rehabilitation. In reality, I was being drafted into the dirtiest, ugliest work the system had to offer, with no monetary payment and no plan for what it would do to me.
I went in thinking I’d be buffing floors and painting walls. I did that: ran the buffer until the tile shone, scraped off old peeling paint, slapped fresh coats of beige over older layers of beige, mopped up spills in hallways that smelled like disinfectant and fright. What I didn’t understand at first was that the real work, the work the system depended on us for, was tending to the dead and the almost dead. In that first stretch on the job, from early 2011 through July 2012, I helped wrap close to a hundred bodies, possibly even more than that fucked up number. And remember, to them we weren’t people, but inventory, less than a number. How did an officer describe it to me? “You’re trash. Filth. You’re always gonna be a piece of shit convict. This the best job you’ll ever get.”
Some of those men had been sick for a long time. Their skin broke open when we rolled them over on their sides, sores so deep I could see their spines, that white slippery color encased in rotting flesh. Others were there because something sudden had happened in a cell or on a yard, an assault, a so‑called “medical event”, a suicide. My job was to help clean them, slide the plastic underneath, and seal them up for the morgue and its freezer. The state called this rehabilitation and work training. To me it felt more like being absorbed into someone else’s killing pattern.
Another killer? A serial killer? Maybe.
Inside, people die from beatings, from neglect, and from “natural causes” that arrive suspiciously soon after the state takes them in. Deaths are ruled “no wrongdoing found” or left “under investigation, pending investigation” until any urgency drains out of them, right down the same drain I’d squeegee rotting flesh to. The same department that locks you in also writes the official story of how you die, and it almost always finds a way to say the system did nothing wrong. Absolutely fucking nothing. That’s what I mean when I say DOC behaves like a serial killer: it targets people the public’s been taught not to care about, repeats the same methods over and over, and controls the record well enough to keep doing it.
Working in that hospital put me right inside that pattern. I was the one called to confinement after a man bled out using his own torn‑off toenail as a blade. I was the one stepping into the cell and seeing the congealed pool of blood, the smell that hit the back of my throat, the body that had just been a man in such deep despair he used his own toenail as a weapon. I was the one mopping up what was left while officers cracked jokes.
I was unprepared to see officers laugh at men in the hospital wing who were in psychosis, smearing or eating their own shit. Unprepared for blood dripping on me in the psych wing, red rain spattering my suit after a man got hold of a razor and cut himself, then flung the blood into the toilet and all over the walls. I used to be able to taste the rotting meat in the back of my throat. One day I wrapped four bodies in a single shift and wrote to my mom about it. How the fuck do you even write a letter like that to your loved one? I wasn’t even looking for reassurance. Writing that letter was my early version of mental health care, the only way I knew how to get it out.
The fact that this was my first job in the department and that my only real instruction came from other incarcerated men says a lot about our criminal justice system. Free inmate labor did the most brutal work imaginable while I was there. Officers and staff and all of us knew we were the lifeblood that allowed the prison hospital to operate. Officially, almost everyone inside is supposed to be in a full‑time correctional work program that builds skills and supports rehabilitation. On the ground, the real world, where I stood, the program looked a lot more like a steady supply of bodies to keep the killer killing.
At the time, I told myself it didn’t affect me. I put on that damn suit, did what needed to be done, and tried to convince myself that feeling numb meant I was strong. It took a year and a half after my release to admit that numbness was its own kind of wound. It took a mental health crisis in 2021 and two years of counseling to start naming what was happening inside my mind. Nobody from DOC called to ask how the hospital work had followed me home. There was no debrief, no guidance on how to live with images most people only see in their worst nightmares.
I came home a felon, like tens of thousands of others, with no guide and a head full of fucked up images I’d never been allowed to process. I’d spent nearly all of my twenties in Florida prisons, including those years in the hospital, and then I was simply shooed out the gate, dropped back into the free world as if nothing wrong had ever taken place. The message was the same as it had always been: be fucking quiet, be a good fucking little inmate, and when you come home, good fucking luck.
Trauma inside prison is almost universal, and I’m only talking here about one small portion of it, what it means to be used as unpaid labor in a place where death is routine. Prison systems give people jobs as gruesome as this and then release us without offering real tools to unlock our own mental prisons afterward. Nationwide, people in prison generate billions of dollars’ worth of goods and services every year, often for pennies an hour or nothing at all, but almost nothing’s invested in helping us deal with the damage that work leaves behind, unless there’s a profit in it. I remember wheeling men down to dialysis and cancer treatments, then bringing them back to the cot they’d die in, with missing limbs. I remember stacking stretchers in the hallway because the morgue was full. I remember the way some men grabbed my arm with the last of their strength just to steady themselves. Describing what it felt like to be the last face some inmates ever saw gives me shivers.
Here’s the part that makes this complicated. I’m glad I was there. I’m glad I could hand a shivering man an extra blanket, help someone frail to the bathroom, or just stand close enough that they knew another motherfucker really saw them. I didn’t know their full stories or why they were in prison, but I knew they deserved better than what the fuck they were getting. I may have been undertrained, but I cared. Those small acts of care are the only reason I can stand to remember some of what I saw. They’re also part of why the trauma cuts so close to my heart. It’s impossible to do that kind of work with your heart open while the state tries to desensitize your mind and strip your humanity and walk away unscathed.
That’s the thing about a serial killer that operates as a state agency. It doesn’t just go after the people it cages. It also goes after everyone it uses to keep the machinery operating at full capacity, then abandons them when the job’s fucking done. The pattern shows up in the bodies, in the paperwork, and in the lives of the people it chews up and spits out. Stopping that pattern means more than closing a few units or writing new policies. It starts with telling the truth about what this work really is, what it does to the people forced to do it, and refusing to pretend the damage is an unfortunate side effect instead of part of the damn design.
Demanding an end to this killer’s reign comes next.
