Monsters, Coyotes and Other Native Tales of Resistance

Jan Haaken

August 21, 2026

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Part II, read Part I here.

In Necessity: Climate Resistance and the Thin Green Line, Chief Don Sampson tells a story written by beloved Umatilla storyteller Edith Motanic, “The Monster Who Comes Up the River.” He explains how the monster in this folk tale symbolizes the insatiable appetites of colonial powers that devour Native lands and how the wily coyote, spirit of Indian resistance, tricks the monster and ultimately outwits him. Chief Sampson adds that there is a moral to this contest between the monster and coyote and it concerns competing forces within the human spirit. We all carry the capacity for good and for evil. Indigenous people can become selfish betrayers of their own people.

The Windigo legend circulates similarly among First Nations Peoples. According to Shawn Smallman, author of Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History, the image of the windigo beast “was a means of defining moral social behavior, which could serve as a warning against greed and selfishness.” This cannibalistic forest beast takes over the spirits of victims and turns them into other windigos. Driven by insatiable hunger, the beast appears as a towering, emaciated figure emanating the odor of decaying flesh and arousing feelings of intimate horror.

For many Indigenous scholars and cultural critics, the Native cannon of windigo folklore unfolds historically alongside settler colonialism and reflects as much the anxieties of the colonizers as it does the fears of the colonized. From the late 19th through the mid twentieth centuries, Christian missionaries, white trappers, traders and anthropologists reported what came to be termed windigo psychosis, a mental disorder where the sufferer holds the delusional belief that he is possessed with the evil spirit of the windigo monster and is driven to acts of cannibalism. While a few cases of cannibalism have been documented historically, they generally occur in famine or other extreme conditions of scarcity.

Windigoism and the Psychiatric Gaza

Fascination with windigo psychosis among Western psychiatrists and anthropologists led to a hotly debated controversy in the 1980s over the historical validity of the phenomenon. The challenge for these white experts, including American psychiatrists, was to identify and diagnose cases where the person is driven by madness to acts of actual cannibalism. Scholars in the 1960s began to look more carefully at the case material on which this diagnostic picture was formed. In 1981, anthropologist Lou Marano looked back on reports that circulated in psychiatry of psychosis-induced cannibalism among First Nations peoples. “In the vast majority of cases in which the Indians employ the term there is no psychosis by either Algonkian or European criteria, much less a psychosis involving murder and cannibalism,” Marano concludes. “Unfortunately, anthropologists zeroed in on the bizarre, the grotesque, and the macabre in Landes’s reports rather than on their inconsistencies and their second-hand nature.”

The term windigoism is used very broadly among First Nations and Native peoples, Marano points out, for states associated with “going mad.” Among the Ojibwe, “almost driven to windigo” refers to madness that arises from life-threateningly harsh conditions. The term is invoked with considerable sympathy as it expresses despair and distress of people who are separated from the group or lost. To white anthropologists and psychiatrists, the search for evidence of actual cannibalism in the reports they collected blinded them to the social symbolic meaning of the story. Scholars documenting the phenomenon agree, however, that tales of windigoism circulate among the Cree, one of the largest groups of First Nations and Indigenous peoples in North America, living mostly in Canada from Quebec to Alberta. Missionary settlers among the Cree were a common source of these stories, imposing their own cure of Christian conversion on sufferers.

Decolonizing Family Memory

My mother grew up in Norway Valley, Alberta–an area of Norwegian settlers straddling a Cree Reserve. Working with Tara Houska and other Native activists fighting pipelines transporting oil from the Tar Sands fields in Alberta, led me to revisit my own family history. What do we owe to Indigenous people as descendants of white settlers? In Canada, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), operating from 2008-2015, was one form of recognition and place for reparations. Based on legal settlement between Residential Schools Survivors, the Assembly of First Nations, Inuit representatives and the parties responsible for creation and operation of the schools, the federal government and the church bodies, the TRC opened space for uncovering repressed memories of Native suffering–repressed in white colonial narratives but also among Indigenous people themselves.

For those of us who are conscious of the debts we share as descendents of white settlers, disturbing conflicts arise over how we pass on our own family stories of hardship. As a clinical psychologist, I hold a longstanding interest in family stories passed from one generation to the next and in working through family mythologies. One debt we owe to Indigenous peoples, including the Palestinians, is that they have helped us to understand the historical inter-dependencies of the oppressors and the oppressed. And we have learned how oppressed people can become the oppressor, as we see in the brutal subjugation of Palestinians by Jewish Israelis.

My mother worked as a maid for a wealthy family in Bellingham as a young woman in the 1930s before she married my father. She had many stories about growing up dirt poor in Northern Alberta. Her parents, like many rural poor people, were drawn to Spirit-filled Pentecostalism. Their faith was forged by the hell-fire preachers at revival meetings, those seasonal gatherings of believers and backsliders in tents on the prairies.

One beloved family story passed on from my mother unfolded around her own brave and adventurous mother, Ma, following her older brother Ole who had gone before her, leaving Norway in 1906 to arrive in New York City. She then traveled to northern Minnesota where she secured a job as a cook in a hotel. Eight years after marrying my grandfather, Pa, a Norwegian farmer and carpenter, the couple migrated with their four young children to an area at the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan, not far from what are now the tar sands oil fields. My grandpa had seen a post in their town, a railway hub in Minnesota, that announced land grants for white settlers by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. White settlers served as paramilitary sites protecting the rails going through Indian country. My grandparents had seven more children in a cabin that was built by Pa at Frog Lake–an area of Scandinavian settlers that became Norway Valley. The settlement straddled the Reserve of Frog Lake Nation–a band of Cree. My mother liked to tell us stories about her brothers running away from the lashings of Pa and how the brothers found sanctuary from his abuse among the Cree.

Of the many pioneer stories about family hardships that were passed on in my family, the story that put Frog Lake in Canadian history books was not among them. In 1885, twenty-three years before my grandparents arrived at Frog Lake, the largest violent resistance to white settlers in Canadian history took place. The Frog Lake Massacre, or what the Cree call the Frog Lake Rebellion, was organized by a band of Cree that had settled in the area but had not yet accepted the government’s reserve site. In resisting treaty demands and the decimation of buffalo that had left the Cree people in a state of near starvation, Chief Big Bear and Wandering Spirit, the war chief of the band, organized a campaign to seize weapons and food supplies, targeting the Hudson Bay Company post. Cree men attacked and killed nine whites in the small settlement of Frog Lake. Eight Natives, including Wandering Spirit, were hanged on Nov. 27, 1885 in the largest mass hanging in Canada’s history.

My mother and her siblings are now dead and I have no way of knowing what they knew of this history, although a commemorative grave in their town honors the white settlers who were killed. Local records from the region suggest that the massacre was a formative cultural memory for whites as well as for Indigenous people: “After the Indian uprising of 1885 twenty-five years passed before the influx of white settlers began to move into the area…Because of the wide-spread publicity that stemmed from the rebellion, Frog Lake was the place to which the pioneers came.” My grandparents were among those pioneers, encouraged by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to settle in Frog Lake alongside the Reserve as part of a larger program of Indian pacification.

Solomon (Sa-we-pah-u) Delver, a Cree member whose family story is recorded along with that of my grandparents in Frog Lake, recalls another legacy of the era.

When I was a very small boy, I don’t know how old I was, I was sent to the Roman Catholic Residential School at Onion Lake. I was there for twelve years. My dad had sent me there to learn to understand the language of the white people. It was hard for me to be brought up as an orphan. I stayed with the nuns; they told me I am really a Roman Catholic which is how I was brought up. I used to ask a blessing before every meal I had. I used to go to Church in the evenings and in the mornings to the service in the Chapel before breakfast. I remember all these things when I was in the Residential School. It was hard far away from home, but it was the only way in which I could understand the White men.

Delver explains how his father sent him to the residential school to learn the language of white people. Yet laws passed in Canada made removal of Native children from their families and severing ties with their cultures mandatory. There were 25 residential schools in the province of Alberta and many were open until the last of the schools closed in the 1990s. The network of boarding schools was established by the Canadian government’s Department of Indian Affairs after the Indian Act of 1876 and administered by Christian churches, primarily the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church. Smaller denominations ran Residential Schools as well although their religious oppression may have taken more subtle forms. The Doctrine of Discovery, the papal edict of the late 15th century subsequently incorporated into international law that provided religious authority for European conquest of the continent, was a guiding worldview, supported by a series of Supreme Court decisions in the US and Canada, that justified claims on Native lands.

Solidarity and Survival

In my deeper understanding of my mother’s stories and my own familial work of “decolonizing history,” I still find a place for one of my mother’s favorite memories of the Cree. She liked to tell the story of being sent to fetch fish from an ice trap at the age of 10 and getting lost in thick fog in trying to find her way home. She remembered releasing the reins of her horse, knowing that the animal would know the way. In the fog surrounding her, she realized that she was passing through the Cree Reserve and closer than she had ever been to the Indians. The story ended with Mom’s girlhood astonishment: “After I passed through, I realized that they were not going to hurt me. The Cree Indians were actually good people.”

The monstrous violence inflicted on the Cree by white settlers never found a place in her family stories. Nor was there a place for recognizing Indigenous peoples’ own right to resist their colonizers. It is up to us, as descendants of those settlers, to join in the ongoing work of Indigenous resistance. As ravenous industries devour more of life, land and the planet itself, our collective survival lies in that shared struggle.

This is the second piece of a four-part series. These can be read along with other weekly commentary on her Substack page.

Jan Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist and documentary filmmaker.

Crime College: What Prison Really Teaches

Emmett Tatter

 August 7, 2026

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Image by Emiliano Bar.

A friend once said to me, “Prison seems like a crime college for some and a complete waste of time for others. It doesn’t rehabilitate people in ways that a year or two in a mental health program or house arrest couldn’t do better. Mostly, it feels like a warehouse system that lets the wealthy and connected bilk tax dollars in the name of fighting crime.”

This is my answer.

When I hear “complete waste of time,” I’m talking about what I saw day in and day out. Men sat on racks, staring at concrete walls and bars surrounded by chaos, waiting on count time, chow, and mail that never comes. Guys shuffled through bullshit “anger management” and “thinking errors” classes taught by people who’d rather be someplace else, then walked back to the dorm to find the same violence, the same K-2 smoke, the same corrupt staff. Nothing changed except the scars. We served the time. The time didn’t serve us.

I went in at twenty-one, facing a life sentence, and ended up serving a ten-year mandatory sentence in the Florida Department of Corrections. “Corrections,” yeah right. By twenty-two, my first job inside the DOC was wrapping bodies. I worked in the hospital at Lake Butler Reception and Medical Center, tucked within a region littered with prisons in Northeast Florida. One of the first bodies I wrapped was a man so consumed by depression and psychosis that he ripped off his own toenail and cut the veins in his elbow until he bled to death. The smell of congealed, coagulated blood didn’t leave my nostrils; years of therapy won’t wash it out. Taking men down after they hang themselves in confinement, untying the knots, lifting them onto a gurney, rolling them in plastic, tagging their toe, and placing them in a morgue freezer, fractures something deep inside my psyche. I watched an old VHS tape that showed me how to wrap men up like giant tootsie rolls and tag a body. I was supposedly “educated” in the proper technique and etiquette, but I wasn’t really. An inmate taught me, during the heat of the moment, while a lifeless corpse stared back at me. “Watch and learn.” Talk about a thousand-yard stare. I soaked it all in. I learned how to close a steel door on another soul and walk away like it meant nothing. That was my freshman year at crime college.

Death is constant and deliberate. I thought prison was where inmates did their time, learned a lesson, and then went home. It isn’t. It’s where people die on whims. Officers put hits on your head because they think you disrespected their girlfriend, a nurse, in some infinitesimal way. Inmates die over jealousy, greed, and ego. Killed, because a renegade guard wants to send a direct message and gets another inmate to carry it out. That happened to me: one officer tried to recruit me to kill another inmate he didn’t like because the man might be getting out, was actually innocent, and had a lover visiting him every weekend. He asked me at the canteen window while I was just trying to get back to my bunk and read a book, Meanwhile, he was eating honeybuns and drinking Mountain Dew, casually asking me to murder somebody when I had less than three years left on my sentence. Murders get written up as suicides and “medical incidents” because DOC investigates itself. That’s the kind of setup that ought to be hit with the RICO Act. Inside, there are no real checks and balances. It’s the sly fox guarding the henhouse and writing the incident report when it’s really the fox killing the hens.

At Suwannee CI Annex, they threw me in confinement and made sure I knew I was nothing. They screamed at me to kill myself through the confinement window, blowing a whistle the whole time. They laughed while they put me on a seventy-two-hour property strip: no mattress, no clothes, just freezing air, concrete, boxer shorts, a steel sink, and a steel toilet. Try sleeping like that and tell me how it goes. They tortured me. They sprayed me with their chemical agent of choice, “Black Jesus,” laughing about how, after they spray a Black boy with it, it makes him holler for Jesus, his true master. That wasn’t correction. It was racist chemical backed by paperwork that lets it keep going indefinitely.

I’ve seen a man struggle to breathe after inhaling chemical agents. That’s just another day at school. Hearing him fight for air was one thing; watching officers lift him up and slam him onto a steel grated walkway on the second tier of my confinement wing, right outside my cell door, was another. I heard the sound of his windpipe crushing. Then the breathing turned to gargles, and then there was nothing, because he was dead. Knowing officers did the killing changes everything about what prison really is. This school is death, plain and simple. It stalked me constantly. It whispered at the edge of my vision. DOC wants me dead one way or another, inside those walls or after I walk out through those razor-wire fences.

Guess that was my sophomore year.

Prison is a crime college because it forces you into the ugliest curriculum just to stay alive. Orientation is confinement. No books, as the officers like to say, “use your damn imagination, boy.” I stared at myself in a tiny, faded, scratched metal mirror inside the cell and went bonkers. I’d count ten-thousand steps back and forth across the cold hard floor, lose the number at six thousand, start over, and do it again. I’d listen to suicide echo down the wing when a man hung himself and his feet banged against the bunk. That copper smell hangs in the air when someone slashes their arms with a razorblade. That metallic stink hits hard and makes every sense in my body light up. Guards blow their damn whistle, play their terrible “Night Games,” and douse men with the orange mist of Black Jesus. They bang on somebody’s window, then stroll down the tier blaming another man, while the inmate dunks his own T-shirt in his toilet bowl, desperately wrapping it over his face to keep out the spray, and scrambles under the bunk, taking shallow breaths through his nostrils, just his nostrils, or he might choke to death.

On property strip, everything’s taken. Imagine a stripped-out closet, white boxer shorts, a cold steel rack without a mattress, and a steel toilet. In some places the AC blasts like a punishment of its own; in others, you bake and swelter in your own sweat. Either way, you’re trapped in it. I shivered for three days and learned the only way to sleep was to do a thousand jumping jacks just to get my blood moving, then sit on the metal toilet, fold my arms over my chest like I’m jumping out of a helicopter, tuck my head into my knees, and steal twenty minutes before the cold catches me again. Once I found an ant and started talking to her like she was my last friend on earth. I watched her walk circles and squares across the floor and saved cornbread crumbs because I figured she was hungry too. I’d headbutt that damn tin mirror that barely reflected my face and told myself I was a lion, a warrior, somebody who could handle anything and never break.

Screw this.

Damn these officers.

And anyone who thinks they can break me.

You’ve got to choose who you’re going to be from the get-go, or you get swept up into the crime college, where the lessons make strong mothers weep.

At Taylor Correctional Institution, crime college turns into advanced seminars. The dorm goes dark at lights out. K-2 smoke hangs in the air. Guys bug out on spice and think they’re snakes or talk to the devil. Men strap up. They tie magazines to their ribs with plastic wrap, wrap their arms with blankets and sheets, and lace their shoes tight, because there’s nothing worse than being caught in socks when the knives come out and rubber soles are the only chance you’ve got. Swords get bent off cooking racks in the chow hall bathroom, broken back and forth until the metal fractures, then smuggled to the dorm and sharpened for hours on concrete, and the back-and-forth grinding sound becomes the prison’s lullaby. Shanks get carved from fence wire and Plexiglas. Razors handed out for shaving turn into weapons. Locks swing in canteen bags or hang off belts to smash whoever’s in front of you.

Most dorm riots are more about fear and control than murder. Most guys aren’t trained assassins. They’re scared men trying not to die. To kill somebody, you’ve got to be fully committed, and most aren’t. That’s why I saw more blood and stitches than toe tags during riots. But one-on-one, when there’s real beef or a guard wants someone gone, the danger spikes and the curriculum gets more advanced. Every time a dorm erupts, the lights flip on and off, the intercom screams “Back to your bunks,” and everybody starts scrambling to hide weapons in vents and walls, washing blood from under their fingernails with bottled water, putting on that clueless, lifeless mask for the search teams when they enter the dorm. I stood naked on slippery wet tile while officers barked their orders: arms up, mouth open, tongue out, turn around, spread your ass cheeks, squat and cough, one foot up, other foot. Then we were herded into a hot dayroom with a hundred and twenty other men, pressed against the wall, wondering if the knife hidden over my bunk by my gang-member bunkee was about to end up in my face when a sergeant demanded to know if I was in a gang.

Yeah, that happened.

That’s what most people call “doing time”: eight and a half years of advanced riot practice, knife practice, survival practice, and sitting on bunks watching TV. Nobody’s talking about real mental health care. Nobody’s talking about house arrest with structure. It’s ten years of mayhem and then, if you’re lucky, a bus ride home with a head full of shit you never had a chance to process.

Some of my professors at crime college were inmates. Some were officers.

At Lake Butler, the hospital walls used to say, “Browns Stick Together,” a reminder that brown-shirt officers protect each other first and last. Their oath doesn’t even mention prisoners. It pledges loyalty to fellow officers, superiors, and the institution. The people they’re supposed to correct don’t exist anywhere in it. That’s the lesson they hand out, ruler in hand, striking anyone who misbehaves.

Prison seems hopeless and a complete waste of time if correction is the true aim. You walk out more wrecked than you went in. For me, it became a war zone I chose to turn into a classroom. And don’t get me started on the monotony, the waiting around, the endless question of what’s going to pop off next. Half the time there’s literally nothing to do. It’s all on you to decide who you want to be and what you’re about. Where’s the real guidance.

Junior year.

Florida DOC’s slogan is “We Never Walk Alone.” On the outside it sounds like teamwork. Inside it reads like gang writing. It means the most powerful crew in the system doesn’t wear colors. They wear badges. It means when a guard beats you, sprays you, kills you, writes you up, ships you across the state, or hides you in confinement, there’s usually a good old boy network behind him smoothing paperwork and closing ranks. A few years back, three Florida prison guards were arrested as active members of the Ku Klux Klan for plotting to murder a formerly incarcerated Black man, and I knew one of those officers, personally. They wanted to stage it as a medical emergency and place a fishing pole in his hands while he was just trying to catch a meal in the St. Johns River. That case made the news, but plenty of plots don’t. The names change. The culture doesn’t.

There was Officer Jerk, weather-beaten, pushing fifty, with the murderous intelligence of a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass. He’d line us up and ask, “Who’s a pedophile on this wing.” Whoever got pointed out had to say the age of his victim. Under twelve. Under six. That’s more than enough. Jerk’s slap would drop the first man, urine soaking his pants, blood coming out his mouth and ears. Then Sergeant Dread, known on the compound for killing people with one open palm once he slipped on black leather gloves, would go looking for a second-class project. I’d see him slap a person so hard I knew the administration would have to make up a story, like an English assignment at school. First the seizure, then the fall. Anything but the truth. Inside Lake Butler and other camps, inmates are in gangs, but so are certain officers, and their gang has all the real power.

Senior year.

Then there was Officer Colon. Puerto Rican. Skinny. Rat-faced. He acted like every woman on the compound wanted him. The kind of man who liked to have an inmate cuffed behind his back before he starts punching, who loved spraying defenseless men with chemicals, setting up guys he doesn’t like with knives or drugs, and getting off on watching people suffer. He had a girlfriend, Miss Piggy, who ratted out my friend Kennedy’s relationship with Nurse Marie. Kennedy wasn’t hustling Marie. It was mutual respect and love, one thing prison is supposed to erase. Piggy’s jealousy got Kennedy fired and beaten. After that Colon turned his eyes on me. Flaco brought the message: “You’re dead, Tatter.”

When guys on the pound told me Colon had put a contract hit on me, two ounces and a phone on my life, they said no. In a place where people will kill you for less, turning down that kind of payment is love. It doesn’t change the math. “Just because we didn’t take it,” they said, “doesn’t mean another dude won’t.” What a math lesson this school’s providing. I made a Plexiglas knife, taped it to my leg under my blues, weighed down by it like I had Frodo’s ring, walked into the psych ward ready to make it him or me. My mom already knew the plan. If I hadn’t called by six-thirty, she’d be calling administration, calling Tallahassee, doing anything she could to stop the coverup. Colon sat in his chair, boots on the desk, three officers around him, tapping a pen like he was controlling the room with sound while my fingers inched toward the knife. After my speech I prepared, he dropped his chair with a bang, slammed the pen down and said, “Okay, Tatter. It’s dead. Don’t you never walk down that hall while she’s working unless you’re escorted by another officer.” The hit was cancelled. Knife unused, thankfully. Just another day at work.

That’s what mercy looks like in this college.

For almost everybody around me, prison was a complete waste of time. For me, it became a war zone I chose to turn into a classroom. Inside that crime college, I started the first inmate-led yoga program in the Florida DOC. I designed classes so men could work through trauma and heal their bodies and hearts. I studied Spanish and practiced skits with friends. I read every book I could get my hands on and used those books as mentors, leaning on them for support and inspiration. If they were going to cage my body, I was going to free my mind.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s books gave me history, honor codes, values, and morals to stand upon. David Benioff’s City of Thieves showed me how bad things can get and still leave room for humor and humanity. Unbroken gave me courage when I felt literally broken from food poisoning, forced to spend hour after hour in confinement while officers decided whether I was faking or high on K-2, fluids draining out of every part of me, and still wanted me working the next day at the front gate. “This too shall pass” became my mantra. I adopted survival as a mission; live, make it back home to my family and loved ones. Our families serve hard time too. They’re hostages of DOC right alongside us. Every missed birthday. Every canceled visit. Every phone call that costs way too much. My mom drove to see me, sent books, showed up for me the day I got out, and fought for me when my brain broke. She did a ten-year sentence in her own way, and then more on the outside dealing with my flashbacks and probation bullshit. When we talk about “public safety” and “correction,” we never factor in the mothers, fathers, and kids, chained to those prison timelines. They’re paying for this crime college just as much as we are.

And college is expensive.

All this might be okay if prison actually provided rehabilitation and support afterward. It doesn’t. Prison doesn’t heal trauma. It multiplies it by some crazy amount. It does nothing to fix behavior that community alternatives and mental health care couldn’t handle more humanely, more safely, and far cheaper. It’s a big, expensive revolving door of recidivism, and then they point to that revolving door as an excuse to build more prisons.

I went for another degree after graduation.

My brain finally short-circuited in January 2021, after I’d been back in society since August 2018. I wasn’t on drugs. I was on years of institutional warfare. I fought multiple guards, unfortunately, and got shocked more than half a dozen times with tasers. I woke up in a hospital bed with a broken face, orbital fractures, stitches, and two black eyes. Then they dragged me to a suicide cell in a turtle suit on battery, on law-enforcement charges. The system calls that correction, but it was a real breakdown built out of trauma and lack of sleep, taught by the state and then ignored.

Dude has it summed up right, I’d say. A year of mental health care or structured house arrest does what steel doors, concrete walls, and razor fences never will. My real rehabilitation didn’t happen within the belly of the beast. It happened because, the minute I bonded out, my mom drove me straight to Epic Behavioral Healthcare in St. Augustine. I showed up every week, sometimes twice a week, for two years. I got properly diagnosed with complex PTSD. I learned how to breathe again, started my yoga practice again, and finished my memoir, COUNT TIME. After a brutal year fighting for my freedom, the court gave me six months of house arrest and five years of probation, with a mountain of fees waiting to bleed my wallet dry. Those six months of house arrest, tied with Epic Behavioral Healthcare and actual structure, did more for public safety than ten years inside ever did. I was with my family and loved ones, I knew I’d messed up, and even then, I wanted something different from the life I was living. I wasn’t happy. I was lost. As I focused on self-improvement, my determination kept growing. I promised myself I’d commit to changing my life and do whatever was necessary to make myself and my family proud.

None of that came from DOC. Please call prison what it really is, or what it should be called: state-sponsored human trafficking and a mass-incarceration nightmare. Every contract is built on our bodies and a massive amount of sweat equity. Phones, emails, video visits, money transfers, commissary, food, medical care, laundry, PRIDE labor, private prisons, and each time a family sends a dollar, somebody gets rich. Every time a man picks up trash on the side of the road or sews a uniform, somebody sells the product at full price while he earns pennies or nothing. In Florida, we earned zilch unless we were fortunate enough to land a job at PRIDE. Follow the money from every prison contract, every JPay transaction, every commissary markup, every food invoice, every medical payment, every phone fee, every money transfer cut, every bond that builds a new facility, every dollar of inmate labor that goes into a product, and you end up in one place: state capital. The people who’d have to authorize a real investigation are the same people whose names are already on the contracts. The mob would be impressed. I know they would. The paperwork, the silence, the insulation from accountability. It’s a rigged network engineered to be untouchable.

Even letters are part of the warehouse scam now. Physical mail’s banned. Every birthday card, kid’s drawing, and family photo gets intercepted, scanned by a for-profit contractor, and delivered as a digital file on a tablet, and families can’t even send stamps anymore, which were a form of currency and a way to write about what really happens inside prison walls between a daughter and a dad, a son and a mom, grandparents, aunties and uncles, friends, and lovers. They say it’s “contraband reduction,” but states that tried the same thing saw overdoses go up, not down. Cutting off real mail isn’t about safety, hell no, it’s strictly about control and erasure. It’s about making a person disappear while he’s still breathing and charging enormous fees every step of the way, and it makes me sick.

Go watch The Alabama Solution on HBO Max or rent it on Apple TV and sit with it. That’s really happening in prisons. I know it is in Florida, too. All the killing, corruption, and human farming. Alabama, Florida, all these states are generating tons of cash by trapping people, renting out their labor, skimming their wages or not paying them at all, and calling it, ta-daa, “justice.”

Florida’s the worst system I know, but these stories aren’t unique. They move across states like franchises with different logos but the same lucrative business model.

Grrrrrrr.

Inside Taylor CI, I watched a man die, struck with locks again and again by four guys while two more stabbed him, less than twenty-five yards from the dorm. I watched young guys like Sam come in with thirteen months and turn into targets. Sam looked white but was Latino. A predator with life was already sizing him up. Then, at master count, an officer walked in calling count time and stopped at Sam’s bunk, then made poor Sam walk the dorm, sashaying his hips, flicking his wrist, saying “whoops, did I do that” around the perimeter of the dorm like freaking Urkel until count cleared. If Sam wasn’t a target before, he was after that.

School’s in session.

Another day, a sergeant thought an inmate had told on her, and she walked that man into every dorm on the compound, more than a thousand men, and announced he was a snitch and a “chump-bitch.” That’s a conscripted death sentence. The man was beaten so badly you couldn’t recognize him. That’s crime college. That’s our lesson from the judicial system. I learned what one sentence from a guard can do to my life, and it was a real eye-opener.

I’m not pretending everyone’s innocent. I know dudes who’d literally eat your face and then eat the fruit cocktail at chow and not think twice about it. Flesh eaters exist. Child rapists exist. Predators exist. But most of us aren’t that. Most people inside made a series of terrible choices inside systems of poverty, racism, hate, addiction, and a legal structure where a halfway decent defense costs more than a family will ever be able to afford. Plenty of people caught in the jaws of the legal world are forced to let a judge decide their fate while the District Attorney hangs a crazy amount of time over their head. They plead guilty and pray the person on the bench won’t railroad them and send them into a den of thieves, rapists, liars, and killers, where the real predators are built into a predatory system that locks you up, throws away the key, and uses our bodies as punching bags.

Chief Judge Pamela L. North told me that if I’d caught these charges in Maryland, I never would have served a ten-year mandatory sentence. That shook me. What is justice? Who is it truly for? What does it really mean when the same crime in a different zip code doesn’t bury a young man for a decade. It isn’t some clean, universal idea. It’s a map of power, politics, and profit. And I was stuck on the wrong part of the crumpled-up map.

Dr. Kelly Vannan’s trash can slide during a Lifelong Learning Institute lecture at Flagler College I helped co-lead says it all. She told the room that’s what society thinks of us, that we’re trash. She said that once we are sent to prison and the doors slam behind us, that nobody thinks about the trash once it’s thrown out. When I spoke, I put that trash can back up on the screen and said this: the mob looked at trash and turned it into a multibillion-dollar business. That’s exactly what our government, the DOC, corporate shareholders, and executives think about. They look at the incarcerated and see money. They’re banking on the public not thinking about any of us because silence breeds profit. Mass incarceration is a for-profit epidemic. It’s a corporate warehouse program where private contracts, bed quotas, and slave labor are dressed up as public safety. From Jim Crow attitudes in administration to modern slave labor on production lines, the incentives all point the same way: lock us away, sign more contracts, and extract a shitload more cash.

I guess now I’m part of the Lifelong Learning Institute college program after the education prison taught me.

I’m not the only one saying this. The Marshall Project ran Joey Heilman’s essay, “I Spent 78 Days in a Violent Youth Jail. I Have PTSD For Life.” Seventy-eight days. Barely three months, and I’m not taking that away from him in the least. Twenty-two years later he’s still screaming in his car, still snapping back to beatdowns in the dark, still feeling his nervous system flip into survival mode at his kid’s school picnic. Less than one summer in a juvenile cage and his mind’s wired for flashbacks, fright, and panic. So what do you think a ten-year mandatory sentence in maximum-security adult complexes does? What about twenty years, or thirty, or seventy-eight days? What do you think wrapping bodies and dodging hits and watching officers kill people does to a person? It’s sure not “correction.”

It’s structural damage. It programs people like robots to mess up.

Without real help, all most people ever really do is stare at walls and bars, surrounded by wild shit, and call that “doing time.” What guidance is there in that? You’re stripped bare of identity and reduced to a number, an inmate, and a body in a crummy, uncomfortable bed. It takes a real solid mind and a shit-ton of stubbornness not to get swept up in the DOC shitstorm, into the boredom, the violence, the dehumanization, and the slow grind that eats your soul.

When you walk out, your sentence isn’t over. Every flashback adds more time. Every panic attack adds a few more minutes to your stay in college. Rehabilitation after prison should be the system’s priority, but it isn’t. The Department of Corrections is not trying to heal anybody. They want you as broken, desensitized, and scared as possible. They want every mistake to drive up the recidivism tally and give them another excuse to play “Captain America,” posing like heroes in front of a razor-wire backdrop while cashing in their dirty prison poker chips for cold hard cash.

Courtrooms aren’t built to find truth. They’re stages where conflicting stories compete. Real defense costs a fortune, and innocent people go down every day just to fit a prosecutor’s narrative. People get sentenced to death who are completely innocent. In this setup, it isn’t about what happened. It’s about what you can prove, and whichever story wins becomes the decree. If you can’t afford a story that beats the state, you lose your life. That’s the game. That’s crime college inside, story war outside, and warehouse profit on top.

Here’s the part DOC never wants you to see. Former criminal defense attorney and retired Chief Circuit Court Judge Pamela L. North read my memoir, Count Time, and provided this blurb: “No more proof is needed that behind prison walls lies abundant untapped talent than this riveting account of prison life by Emmett Tatter. Far from portraying himself as a saint, Tatter provides us with a truthful description of his time inside, revealing questionable morality at times, also known as human behavior. All told in the most colorful and graphic manner.”

That’s a judge who’s seen thousands of cases, telling you straight that behind prison walls lies “abundant” untapped talent. We aren’t trash, nor villains, and not all of us are beastly monsters. We are human beings, screwed up and flawed, with questionable morality like every person walking the streets, but still capable of telling the truth in living color and changing our lives. That’s the heart of this. DOC isn’t a superhero. It’s not the brave guardian in some comic book. It’s a worldwide syndicate in a flashy costume sporting a damn cape. It warehouses human beings, erases their gifts, bleeds them of everything, and then sells you the story that it’s saving the day.

What a hero.

Learning this is how you truly graduate from the prison system’s colleges.

Not everyone outside is blind. PEN America believes in incarcerated writers and lets us put our stories on paper. Reginald Dwayne Betts went from solitary to Yale Law and built Freedom Libraries because he knows books save lives. Shaka Senghor, Ian Manuel, Keri Blakinger, and a whole army of people turned years inside into work that helps instead of destroys. My life is part of that same ecosystem. Les Standiford, a New York Times bestselling author and founding director of the Florida International University Creative Writing Program, called Count Time searing and unforgettable. Dr. Baz Dreisinger, author of Incarceration Nations, justice worker, professor at John Jay College, and founder of the Prison-to-College Pipeline, said my voice is a warning the world needs to heed “now more than ever.” John DeDakis, an award-winning journalist, former senior copy editor on CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, and mystery-suspense novelist, called my story a raw, wrenching argument for prison reform and self-reform. Professors who support my work, Kelly Vannan, Kim Bradley, Mandy Miller, and Allan Marcil, all saw the same thing: behind the mugshot and DOC number, there’s a real face staring back at you.

And it’s me looking at you, and you looking back at me, at eye level.

My life proves the stigma’s bullshit. The only things that ever changed anyone I knew inside were the things the state tried to keep out: books, education, yoga, real mental health care, and real connection. My first love was reading, and books mentored me when nothing else could. That’s why Freedom Libraries matter. That’s why PEN America matters. That’s why inmate-led yoga classes matter. Real journalism matters. On one rec yard, we stood on prison grass and learned how to breathe together, and it helped. It changed our bodies and minds. It gave men something besides violence to show up for. It instilled real passion, the passion to be better and to become resilient against the clutches of the DOC dream snatcher.

We don’t need more prisons. We need community mental health clinics on the front end of crime. We need house arrest and ankle monitors tied to therapy, classes, and work instead of warehousing people in concrete boxes. We need Freedom Libraries and PEN America style writing programs in every jail and prison so that once a person falls in love with letters and the books they read, they’ve got another way to live and a real chance in the free world. A chance to dream. We need inmate-built yoga and trauma recovery in every dorm, not just on one yard or in a couple of classrooms where some crazy convict, me, decided to teach downward dog. We need real reentry on the back end: housing, jobs, union-backed training, ongoing therapy, mentors, and someone who believes in you, the stuff the system pretends is optional. We also need to take the first step and choose to be different. We must decide to change, and with real programs and someone telling you that you’re something other than a piece of shit convict, it makes your chances a hell of a lot better.

Build that, and prison stops becoming the first answer. The crime college is closed. Warehouse programs shrink, people heal instead of rot, and the state stops using bodies as sweat equity and starts treating them like actual human beings. It stops killing us and making our loved ones cry. Then you finally start living in a country where “public safety” means safety, not profit.

That question made me want to answer it. This is it. For most men I lived with, prison was ten years of staring at walls and learning how to survive violence. For me, it was redemption, and I refused to let hell own my story. I turned that college into my classroom for revolution. Yoga classes. Spanish skits in the dorm. Books stacked on the bunk. Therapy when I got out. I’m living proof that if we give people real tools instead of crap, they can make their time count instead of letting the big house count them as trash.

Until that happens, prison keeps winning. Look at recidivism and look at all the death counts inside the almost 1,700 prisons, and that’s just prisons, not county jails. Look at overdose and suicide after release. Vegas doesn’t have shit on DOC. You walk into prison and the odds are stacked against your soul. You walk out, and DOC is standing there with open jaws, waiting for you to stumble so it can swallow you whole again.

Do this. Watch The Alabama Solution. Let the killing, corruption, and slave labor sink in. Then look back at everything I’ve told you here about Florida’s prisons, about crime college, about the warehouse program, about untapped talent wasting away behind a system that doesn’t give a damn.

Now be honest and ask yourself one final question.

The superhero with state-sponsored crime colleges popping up all over this country like poisonous mushrooms isn’t saving us.

So, who are the real gangsters?

And who the hell’s paying their salary.

Maybe the superhero you’ve been cheering for is just the gangster in costume, or suit.

Emmett Tatter is a writer, prison reform advocate, and certified yoga teacher based in Saint Augustine, Florida. He served a ten-year sentence in the Florida Department of Corrections and lectures on mental health, addiction, and criminal justice at colleges including Flagler College and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His memoir COUNT TIME is seeking publication with endorsements from NYT bestselling author Les Standiford, Dr. Baz Dreisinger (author of Incarceration Nations), former Chief Judge Pamela L. North, former CNN editor John DeDakis, and others.

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Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist Alexander Berkman 1912

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist · Alexander Berkman · 1912 · Contents · Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....