Campaign Action
A group of incarcerated men risked their lives and their freedom over the last four years to create what is thought to be the first-ever prison documentary shot entirely by inmates. Behind Tha Barb Wire features the camera work of Scott Whitney, who in 2015, began shooting video with contraband cameras; only footage from 2017-present was smuggled out of the prison, but that shorter time period makes it no less horrifying. The video has been obtained exclusively by the Miami Herald.
Over a period of years, the convicted drug trafficker used specially rigged, almost cartoonishly oversize eyeglasses fitted with hidden cameras and a hollowed-out Bible with a lens peeking through the O in HOLY to capture the gritty, ugly, violent world inside Martin Correctional Institution, one of Florida’s more notoriously dangerous prisons.
The footage reveals the appalling conditions of the prison facility, as well as what happens when the guards aren’t watching—which happens more often than one might think.
Whitney filmed men brawling or ready to swing locks at each other, inmates passed out on synthetic drugs, mold covering the walls of the kitchen like a coat of dark paint, easily accessible drugs smoked in plain view, makeshift knives traded for a few dollars’ worth of food and other scenes from daily life in a Florida prison.
Behind Tha Barb Wire wasn’t just Whitney’s work; the Herald reports that he’s the vice president of the team, who created a contract and even required inmates to sign release waivers. The incarcerated men speak directly to the camera, and narrate what’s happening, as it happens in the prison, which Whitney refers to as “Murder Martin.”
The inmates involved are painfully aware of the secrecy that typically surrounds their everyday existence, hardly captured by the sanitized portrayals seen in shows like MSNBC’s Lockup or 60 Days In on A&E. “We finna show y’all some real shit, man, on how we live in here that y’all ain’t seen,” one documentary participant promises.
Unfortunately, Whitney, 34, is already paying the price for his filmmaking: The Herald reports that he’s been in solitary confinement since Sept. 19, when a former inmate and prison reform activist, who’d also been sent the footage, uploaded less than two minutes of it to YouTube. In the description, the activist, Jordyn Gilley-Nixon, notes that “nothing you have seen on A&E can prepare you for what you are going to experience by witnessing these videos.”
She’s right. Gilley-Nixon told the Herald that the footage shows how little correctional officers care about the inmates or their responsibilities, noting that “things that are going on would not be going on if staff was present at their job post the way DOC mandates.”
The Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) ignored all requests for comment until the Herald published its exposé on Oct. 4. After publication, the paper notes that silence ended when it received an unsigned statement from the FDC that vowed to investigate the video, insisting that “(t)he department uses every tool at their disposal to mitigate violence and contraband within our institutions.”
Whitney, who is serving a sentence that ends in 2040, was caught with a cell phone before, and endured solitary confinement for 60 days as punishment. Production resumed quickly that time, but this time, the guards might actually be watching. Nonetheless, the incarcerated filmmaker insists that he will continue to film, if he ever is released from solitary confinement—a cruel practice facing increasing resistance across the country, and over which the FDC is currently being sued. According to the FDC itself, inmates in “close management,” as the department calls it, are only evaluated every 90-180 days for release to looser tiers of supervision; according to the lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in May, FDC has kept inmates isolated for years.
Note: This video is extremely graphic, but it must be seen by those of us with the power to incite change.
***
It’s worth noting, as the Herald does, that the FDC has worked very hard in the past—spending public funds in court—to keep footage from the press, as well as from the families of inmates. Then-Governor, now-Senator Rick Scott made headlines in 2011 when the FDC agreed to participate in MSNBC’s Lockup, only to have Scott back out of the contract after production started, blaming new Corrections Secretary Ed Buss, who ultimately resigned. In the end, Scott backed right back into the contract, earning the state $110,000.
This also isn’t the first shocking video created by a Florida inmate to make it to the outside in 2019. On July 8, inmates uploaded video to YouTube, showing a large group of guards at Lake Correctional Institution beating Otis Miller. Group Facebook chats where guards involved joked and jeered about the beating also surfaced, and two officers and a captain were arrested and fired. As one commenter on the YouTube video noted, “Thank God for the cell phones in the prisons. If it wasn't for the inmates recording this video, the world will still be blind on the fact that officers in the prisons are killing people just like the officers on the streets.”
It also isn’t just Florida. Photos published by the Montgomery Advertiser in April were given to the Southern Poverty Law Center by an anonymous source, thought to be an employee within the Alabama corrections system. Arguably, the images, thought to be at the St. Clair Correctional Facility, are even more graphic than the edited video released Friday by the Miami Herald. At the time of publication, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) had just been excoriated in a 56-page report by the Department of Justice, which stated that ADOC staff “underreported prison homicides, dismissed sexual assaults as consensual “homosexual activity” and failed to disclose at least 30 prisoner deaths to federal authorities in a two-year period.”
The report reveals federal investigators have found “reasonable cause” to believe Alabama prisons are violating the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, banning cruel and unusual punishment.
Alabama's prison system has for years been plagued by systemic understaffing, a crisis which prison officials acknowledge exacerbate violence and mental health concerns within its walls. Prisoners were left tied up for days before a staff member noticed them. Stabbing victims bled from stab wounds while officers on the opposite side of a fence searched for a key to get through.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the DOJ report didn’t even tackle every aspect of prison life.
The 56-page report — which outlines incidents of extreme sexual torture, a rampant internal drug trade and widespread use of makeshift weapons such as a lawn-edging blade "hatchet" — only covers prison living conditions and prisoner-on-prisoner violence. A probe into staff-on-inmate violence is ongoing, as a federal subpoena for documents related to the issue is currently pending.
A little over a month after the Alabama photos were published, shocking photos and video were smuggled out of two Mississippi institutions—Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman and South Mississippi Correctional Institution—and posted on social media by a former inmate and the fiancée of a currently incarcerated individual. These gnarly images, combined with letters from inmates, prompted activists to demand a federal investigation into those facilities.
Again, these are just a handful of the cases we know about. As most of the reporters writing these stories note, inmates and their families have been decrying prison conditions for time eternal. Yet because society generally looks away from the incarcerated, their pleas for humane conditions are not heard, or are dismissed by the majority of people with the power to demand the government do something about it. Furthermore, as private prison companies continue to view the captivity of human beings as a profit center, their bottom line takes credence over simple decency.
Of course, it’s not just private prison companies that rely on incarcerated people for their profits. Not by a long shot. HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver covered this extensively this summer. It’s worth a watch.
These stories and images are so hard to take in, but may they awaken the prison reform activist within each of us. Due to a Clinton-era law called the Prison Litigation Reform Act, it’s nearly impossible for incarcerated people to pursue legal recourse against the institutions that abuse them, and family members of inmates are often dismissed when they attempt to advocate for their incarcerated loved ones. Anyone who’s visited a prison will agree that correctional officers are extremely harsh and suspicious of anyone who dares to care about an inmate.
With rampant corruption and societal indifference, plus no sort of oversight from the courts, it’s obvious: We, the general public, are the ones whose voices can make a difference.