Posted on 10/08/2019 10:09:14 AM PDT by Red Badger
With a camera hidden in a hollowed-out Bible, peeking through the “O” of the word “Holy,” and a pair of rigged reading glasses, Scott Whitney secretly filmed the world behind bars, inside one of Florida’s notoriously dangerous prisons.
For four years, the 34-year-old convicted drug trafficker captured daily life on contraband cameras at the Martin Correctional Institution. He smuggled footage dating back to 2017 out of the prison, and titled the documentary “Behind Tha Barb Wire.” The video — given to the Miami Herald — allows the public to see with their own eyes the violence, rampant drug use and appalling conditions inside the prison.
As the Herald previously reported, Florida prisons have gone to great lengths to withhold video footage and other documents from news outlets, as well as family members of inmates who have died in custody.
To keep from releasing records, the agency has cited medical privacy laws and legal exemptions; sharing video footage specifically, it said, could jeopardize a facility’s security system and endanger prison personnel.
Whitney’s film, perhaps, underscored other reasons Florida’s Department of Corrections is keeping videos and records under wraps.
“We finna show y’all ... how we live in here that y’all ain’t seen,” said one inmate participating in the documentary.
From scene to scene, Whitney’s footage revealed an unkempt and decaying environment and demonstrated how little the officers care about their responsibilities or the inmates.
In one nighttime video narrated by Whitney in a hushed voice, a guard passed by his prison cell carrying a flashlight, yet never glanced inside. He remained oblivious to Whitney, who was openly filming at the time.
“They don’t check to see if we’re living, they don’t check to see if we’re safe,” Whitney said.
The video confirmed that homemade weapons and violence are hallmarks of life at Martin Correctional Institution, which the Herald said had 31 deaths in the past six years, including five homicides. Whitney modeled a makeshift stab-proof vest for the camera in one scene; in others, prisoners held a homemade knife and a “lock-and-belt weapon.”
The film documented mold covering the kitchen and mice popping in through crumbling walls. It also memorialized Hurricane Irma in 2017, when inmates from other prisons were transported to and housed at the facility, sleeping on the floor.
Most saliently, though, it captured the widespread drug use inside the prison.
“You got the war on drugs on the street, but once we get here you don’t care about the drugs,” he said to the camera.
Scene after scene showed inmates slumped over, stumbling to the ground, dragged across the floor and “twaking out.” One man lay face down in a pool of his own blood and another was rolled out on a gurney.
The culprit, Whitney said, was K2, a synthetic cannabinoid also known as “twak;” the Herald listed the drug as the most frequently confiscated contraband and the leading cause of overdose deaths.
Whitney continued, “You know you might not wake up any day you smoke that.”
The Florida Department of Corrections Office of Inspector General has opened an investigation into the video.
The agency wrote in an email to The Post on Monday: “The Department uses every tool at their disposal to mitigate violence and contraband within our institutions. Correctional Officers are diligent in their efforts to search inmates and common areas to eradicate weapons and remove dangerous and illegal contraband. At the forefront of our priorities is an agencywide effort to recruit and retain correctional officers statewide.”
Inmate-produced footage is extraordinarily rare, even more so when its trafficked out of a prison, Ron McAndrew, a prison consultant and former warden, told the Herald.
While gruesome and graphic photographs from inside prisons in Alabama and Mississippi were leaked and posted online earlier this year, the first example of footage from a contraband phone making its way online, he said, was in July at another Florida facility. A prison captain and two guards were arrested and fired after a video of officers beating an inmate was uploaded to YouTube.
Under Florida law, contraband cellphones can result in new felony charges and add prison time to an inmate’s sentence. Or, there’s the threat of solitary confinement — a fate Whitney has experienced, the Herald reported.
On September 19, Jordyn Gilley-Nixon, a prison reform advocate and former inmate, uploaded two minutes of Whitney’s footage to YouTube. Since then, prison officials have housed Whitney in isolation. If he’s released from solitary confinement, Whitney, whose drug trafficking sentence ends in 2040, promised to continue filming.
Not completely. He and OJ have something in common in that they were both acquitted of murdering their spouse (or ex,) but found civilly liable.
And that's the name of that tune...
If they were kept busy during the day maintaining roadside ditches, growing their own food by hand or making little rocks out of big ones, they wouldn’t have time for all this BS.
“TWAK”
.
Okay.
Well, once Trump buys Greenland...
Re: #34
Is that little rascal still around?
Twak then THWACK!..................
Yes, he’s still breathing free air...........He’s 86........
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Blake_(actor)
And he’s still looking for the real murderer.................
>>If you ever met most of these guys you would thank your lucky stars we have such places
Ever see Richie Pryor’s comment on that? It belongs on this thread:
The whole thing is great, but just watching the first 1:05 tells the story.
Following the law won’t keep you out of prison.
Too many liberals have whined that prisoners shouldn’t work. Sorry, libs, it’s not like they have maid service or mama coming in cleaning up when inmates sling poo everywhere.
In TX, the inmates must clean up after themselves and paint the walls and mow the grass and remove ick from the showers. Doesn’t mean they don’t sling poo though just they have to clean it up.
“Mumble, mumble, man, ya know, mumble.”
Maybe by 2040, he’ll learn to speak English.
Instead of complaining, he could clean the mold himself. But, noooooo.
Wanna tell that to my family?
Yes, I’m sure that elderly flower importers that get jail for not filing a form deserve all they get in prison. I hope some of you get the same treatment tou are so willing to foist on others.
Here is a choice from him: this prison or one of the British Prison Ships off Manhattan during the Rev.
Not appalling enough, judging by the rate of recidivism.
It would appear that somehow drugs are getting into that prison, and it is the job of the guards to prevent contraband from entering the prison.
It would then seem like guards are involved in smuggling drugs into the prison.
Guards that smuggle drugs into prisons or aid in smuggling drugs into prison are corrupt.
The real question is whatever happened to Fred?
Maybe we need a better class of prisoners?
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