It was 2011, one of Lake Butler RMC’s fucked up years. They’d just stopped selling tobacco, so everyone inside the dorm was on edge, the kind of tension that cuts, like a razor blade the officers were prone to pass during the night shift. When I say everyone was wound tight, that meant the COs as well.

Once the four o’clock count passed, chow would be called. I remember returning to the dorm to a mess; guards were tearing everyone’s house up. When I say house, what I really mean is our steel bunk with a shitty mattress, a terrible pillow, a scratchy polyester blanket, and a locker. For the person sleeping on the top bunk, a floor locker made from steel (heavy as shit) that sat at the foot of the bunk. For the bottom bunk, the coveted steel locker had four wheels, a top desk drawer and one compartment where you could store your little possessions.

Fights would break out sometimes over who would get the bottom bunk, but generally they went to people with seniority (how many years in), or sometimes to the top bunk guy who might have a little pull on the compound. Like me. I’d only been inside actual prison for a year, maybe even less, but walking back to the dorm after chow I knew the officers wouldn’t spare anybody. Top bunk, bottom bunk, they don’t give a fuck. Anybody can get it, and that’s what the hell they set out to do. Tear your life apart.

Lockers would be flipped over, all your measly possessions thrown across the dorm, guys scrambling over each other trying to pin down that one letter from a lover or mother, thrown far, far away from your own bunk. Beds all fucked up, blanket on the dirty ass floor, everything within that coveted roll locker emptied and torn to shit, and when I say torn to shit, I mean it. Pictures ripped apart, or missing.

It was a real shit show after some renegade officer decided they wanted to fuck with somebody. It’s funny, you’d think it was a hundred officers whipping through the place like an F5 tornado, but it was a two-man team alone, a sergeant and one officer, who could really do damage. And they sure did. There were close to eighty of us inside those dorms, but........

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