You’ve been charged with a serious crime you insist you didn’t commit.
You’re innocent until proven guilty of course, but that court date might take a while to
arrive.
In the meantime your place of residence will be what’s been called the Miami Mega Jail.
You’re still young, have never been to jail before and you’re not a tough guy, so when
you are taken to the floor where you’ll be housed you can’t believe what you see.
Rows of cells filled with scores of men, shouting, screaming, coming up to the bars and threatening
you.
It’s utter chaos.
Waiting for you in your cell is a welcoming committee of 20 angry-looking, dangerous men.
You are no match for these guys, but you’re gonna have to fight, make no mistake about
that.
You’ve just entered an arena of mortal combat.
It’s hard to pick which is the worst county jail in the USA because sadly there are multiple
places which could compete to be the top, or perhaps we should say bottom, of the list.
Anyone who’s had a stay at the place we are going to talk about today won’t be offended
we have chosen it as the worst, that’s for sure.
We should say that if you speak to hardened criminals who’ve been in and out of jail
and prisons they will often tell you that jail is much worse.
Many people say jail is dirtier than prison and much more violent.
The place we are talking about today has been called, “Hell in Paradise”, and after
our research we won’t disagree.
What we’re actually talking about is called the “Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation
Department”, which actually consists of several units including a notorious Boot Camp.
Those who don’t get through that camp will end up in jail, and some of them are still
in their teens.
The Boot Camp is another story altogether, but we will say compared to jail it’s a
holiday camp.
The entire system houses around 7,000 people, although something like 114,000 folks will
pass through the doors each year – that’s about 312 a day.
This is a busy place, that’s for sure.
Still, it’s only the 7th largest jail system in the United States.
Most inmates won’t spend long in there and the average time spent in the entire system
is just 22 days, but you’ll also find people who’ve been waiting trial for as long as
five years.
This brings us to one of the main units, the one place that hits the headlines the most
for its brutal conditions.
It is called the Pre-Trial Detention Center, or is sometimes referred to as the Main Jail.
It usually houses around 1,700 people at a time.
Most of the people there are still technically innocent since they haven’t been proven
guilty, but waiting for that court date might take years.
It’s not easy to settle when in this kind of limbo, and if you walk past the cells on
some floors you’ll see just how unsettled things are.
There are prisoners who have quit even fighting their cases because they just want to get
out of there, innocent or not, they just want to get to prison.
The worst floors are where the alleged most dangerous offenders are kept and those are
floors five and six.
The cells here usually house anywhere from 15 to 25 men and within this group there is
a kind of hierarchy.
As the guys in there like to say a lot, it’s survival of the fittest, so if you’re not
a fighter you might have a hard time.
You want a certain bunk, you’ll have to fight for it.
Ok, you don’t care about having the worst spot in the cell, but what if someone just
takes your stuff?
As one prisoner in there said, “I exploit the weak.”
If you don’t fight for your things you’ll have a hell of a time, and we mean that in
the negative.
If you snitch, you’ll be beaten wherever you go unless you get put into protection.
As another prisoner said in an interview on your first day in his cell you have to fight
simply because they want to check you out as a man.
But why?
His reply was if you don’t fight it’s a sign that something is wrong with you.
Maybe you’re a snitch, because you didn’t want to fight.
It sounds unreasonable, but the prisoner said those are the rules, that’s the code.
The thing is, the prisoners can never clearly explain the rules of the code.
One guy did explain that if a person doesn’t fight one-on-one then in adherence to the
code the whole cell might beat that person.
Sometimes a guy might be beaten for the smallest infraction, and sometimes he might have been
accused of something he didn’t actually do.
“Who stole my food?”
No one replies, and the weakest takes the beating.
You’re powerless, you take the blame.
He had to do it, because he’d lose face if he didn’t.
As everyone says in there, you just have to fight back.
They have a lot of unwritten principles they embrace, and one is called GABOS.
That means, “Game Ain't Based on Sympathy”.
Unlike some federal prisons, it’s unlikely you’ll be taken under anyone’s wing.
Jail is way more gladiatorial than prison, even though we hear less about the brutality
of jail systems.
Just go onto forums where former prisoners talk about their experience in the corrections
system and you’ll find many of them saying jail was way worse.
The irony of course is that most people haven’t even been found guilty yet and they are treated
worse and face more threats.
First timers are absolutely terrified and in many cases they should be; the mentally
unwell get loaded in there; the food is terrible; the cells are filthy and they’ll spend most
of their time in that cell.
You’ll find many prisoners saying they’ll do a “bullet” just to get out of that
hellhole.
A bullet is a year in prison.
Why would jails be home to worse conditions, you might be wondering.
Well, they’re not really meant to keep a person too long.
The problem is, even a short stint can be hellish and some folks do much more than a
short stay if their trial is delayed.
Prison is supposed to offer some kind of comfort…
Prison is hell with benefits, jail is feeling constant pain in purgatory and the worst part
is you don’t know the way out.
Because of that, inmates are often mean, and angry, and frustrated, and sometimes just
plain crazy after coming off an 18-month-long crank-athon.
All that said, imagine being sent to the worst of these places?
Let’s get back to you being taken up to the 6th floor in Miami.
Once in a cell the guard walks off, and those guards have admitted that they can’t respond
to violence fast enough to stop it.
They admit they leave the inmates to their codes.
Those guards openly say that there’s nothing they can do about the severe beatings, the
stabbings, the theft.
There just aren’t enough of them to be everywhere and see everything.
Once that guard walks away, you are left to battle it out on the 5th and 6th floors of
this ugly, old brown building.
But why?
Why can’t they just get along?
One prisoner answered that, saying, “The code is the code.”
What does that mean?
It means if you are seen to have disrespected someone you fight, you strap up.
You don’t reason with a person because this is not a reasonable place to begin with.
People not from the streets, they say, don’t understand the code of the streets.
This kind of wild west attitude goes back to what scientists have called a, “culture
of honor.”
You dishonor a guy, you fight, you draw swords, you take ten paces and shoot.
In the outside world we have evolved out of this for the most part, but inside prison
this code, this culture of honor, still pervades.
On top of theft and fighting the Main Jail in Miami has been called one of the worst
in America for other kinds of male-on-male abuse.
Terrible things can happen when guards only patrol the cells once an hour.
Weaker inmates are just left like prey among apex predators.
Thankfully, the jail has made a lot of improvements in the last few years, one being a lot more
cameras have been installed.
Then there’s the issue of this jail housing many people who are taking psychiatric drugs.
Inmate fights often break out when a mentally ill person is acting in a way that other inmates
don’t like.
As the Marshall Project reported, “Miami’s jail system is the largest institution for
mentally ill people in Florida.”
Mentally ill people often become the prey, and end up on the floor with 20 men taking
turns to pummel them.
This is how withdrawal is treated.
On any given day men walk in and out of the infirmary.
It’s like a revolving door splattered with blood.
In fact, there has been so much violence that the Department of Justice said the Miami-Dade
jail system was way out of control and prisoners as well as guards faced too many dangers.
Something had to be done, said the department.
A few years back the jail faced a lot of scrutiny after eight people died in just five months.
The DoJ said the three deaths of mentally unwell people was particularly disturbing.
One guy who was in for driving while suspended went in on a Saturday and was dead the next
Monday.
Two more died within a week, with a commissioner saying the system is, “extremely broken.”
It turned out that from the eight that died one had jumped off a landing to escape prisoners
that were coming after him to beat him.
Knives were also mentioned.
The worst floor, that has since closed down, was sometimes called the “Forgotten Floor.”
It was the ninth level where most of the mentally ill people were kept.
This was where prisoners were often left and neglected, and in too many cases took their
own lives.
Back in the day on this level prisoners slept on the floor without blankets, although as
a psychiatric facility it was supposed to be humane.
Some prisoners were found to be drinking from toilets, and when this hit the news the place
was called, “horrific”.
There was a public outcry.
But as you’ve heard, there are still problems when someone with mental issues gets locked
up with modern day street gladiators and bullies whose code willfully lacks humane values.
Not all the floors are as bad as the stories we have talked about, and in some cases particularly
dangerous or vulnerable people will be housed alone.
Nonetheless, end up on one of those high floors in the main jail and you will certainly see
what it’s like to be confined in one of the toughest jails in the world.
There are other problems, too, of a more unusual ilk.
In 2019, 17 people were rushed to hospital from this place due to some sudden illness.
Several staff came down with it, too.
What happened?
No one really knew.
The bomb squad was even called in after a strange liquid was found, but that turned
out to be harmless.
The most likely reason people just started keeling over was smoke fumes from some toxic
drug.
If inhaling smoke fumes from a distance can bring a person down with a vicious nausea,
what on Earth could they have been smoking in there?
Nerve gas?
It just shows how crazy that place is.
We’ll leave you with a review we found on a Facebook page dedicated to this jail:
“Welcome to hell.
A person would be better off dead rather than enduring the abuse and torment of being incarcerated
in this filthy, disgusting sewer.”
You don’t want to get sent to Miami Jail but you do want to click on one of these two
videos.
So go watch this video now for another great video from The Infographics Show or this one
over here.
You can only choose one though so pick and go watch another video right now!