The buzzing in my ears wakes me before the sun does.
Mosquitoes.
Again.
I’m buried beneath layers of sheets and loose T-shirts despite the suffocating New Jersey heat. Sweat runs down my chest and neck, soaking the fabric wrapped around me like armor. It’s close to 95 degrees inside the housing unit, humid enough to make breathing feel thick.
Still, the mosquitoes find exposed skin somehow.
Smack!!!
I slap my shoulder too late.
The walls around my bunk are stained with hundreds of black smears — dead mosquitoes mixed with human blood. Tiny reminders that none of us are really sleeping here anymore. We’re surviving nights.
Welcome to FCI Fort Dix.
There are no air conditioners in the housing units. Not for inmates anyway. Officers have them, of course.
Rumors float around the compound the way they always do in prison. One story says Fort Dix was once allocated funding for air conditioning upgrades, but the money disappeared into pointless fencing projects instead. Low-security inmates are fenced in like escape artists they bake in asbestos-filled buildings with black mold creeping across the ceilings.
The rumor goes further: The fencing contractor was connected to the former warden’s husband. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it isn’t.
That’s another thing prison teaches you: When transparency disappears, rumors become their own form of truth.
I climb down from my bunk already drenched in sweat. Around me, men cough through another morning. Fort Dix has its own soundtrack: hacking lungs, buzzing insects, toilets that don’t flush properly, drug-addled inmates talking loudly, feet scurrying at the sound of jingling keys, and the occasional scream when someone finally snaps.
I head to my prison job in the laundry room, one of the few places with air conditioning. Not because the workers were mercifully offered relief from the heat. But because the officers demanded relief for themselves.
The unit has one massive, old air-conditioning machine left behind after staff upgraded their own offices with newer systems. The old one became ours by accident, like scraps tossed from a table.
Most mornings, the officers assigned to laundry stay hidden in their office with the door shut, enjoying the cool air while 10 inmates run the operation themselves. I’ve often wondered what exactly the correctional officers are paid to do here.
At Fort Dix, inmates joke that officers only have two real responsibilities: Count inmates. And lock doors. Neither is necessary in laundry.
Still, taxpayers fund six-figure salaries while inmates police themselves inside deteriorating buildings filled with mold, vermin and contaminated water.
Today is different though. The officers are outside their office tossing a football back and forth like teenagers reliving high school glory days. One of them — broad shoulders, Oakleys, swagger — fires passes while us inmates stand around silently watching. I’ll call him “Macho Man.”
An inmate nicknamed Spider raises his hands hopefully.
“Yo, throw one over here,” he says with a grin.
Macho Man pumps his arm like he’s about to pass him the ball, then smirks and lowers it.
“We don’t interact with inmates like you.”
The laughter from the officers is immediate.
Spider drops his hands awkwardly.
“My bad, sir.”
Nobody says anything after that.
That moment lasts maybe five seconds, but prison life is built out of moments exactly like it. Small humiliations. Constant reminders that, to many staff members, you are no longer viewed as fully human.
Not a citizen. Not a father. Not a son. Not even a person who made mistakes.
Just an inmate.
I put on latex gloves and a face mask before starting work. Officially, it’s for chemicals used in the laundry. Unofficially, it’s psychological, a small illusion of protection from the sickness that constantly circulates through Fort Dix.
COVID tore through this compound repeatedly. So has flu outbreaks, staph infections, respiratory illnesses and unexplained skin conditions. Men cough for months here. Mold stains spread across ceilings above bunks where people sleep, breathing it in.
The smell never fully leaves either: mildew, sewage, sweat, standing water, rot.
Sometimes it feels less like a federal prison than an abandoned building people forgot to condemn.
“Hey, Kali.”
I turn around.
It’s Husky, a sex offender who oversees much of the laundry operation. Like many low-security prisons, Fort Dix often functions through inmate hierarchies quietly tolerated by the administration. Certain inmates become unofficial extensions of staff power — rewarded with privileges, influence, or protection. At Fort Dix, sex offenders make up more than half of the population and thus run everything. If you upset the wrong “SO,” suddenly your laundry will be “lost.” Your food portions will shrink. Commissary shopping lists will disappear. Personal rumors start circulating. Investigations start.
“You hear what happened to your people?” Husky asks.
By “your people,” he means Ryan, a young Asian inmate who everyone knows struggles socially and emotionally. Most of us suspect he is somewhere on the autism spectrum.
Ryan had been assigned to kitchen work, but he couldn’t handle it. The responsibilities, pressure, confusion — it overwhelmed him constantly. He begged staff repeatedly to remove him from the job.
Instead, they decided to make an example out of him.
“What happened?” I ask.
Husky lowers his voice.
“They finally took him to the lieutenant’s office.”
Everyone already knows which lieutenant he means.
At Fort Dix, certain officers develop reputations inmates whisper about like urban legends. This lieutenant is infamous enough that almost every former Fort Dix inmate knows his name instantly. I’ll call him “Mr. WWE” because his preferred method of conflict resolution resembles body slamming inmates like a professional wrestler.
According to witnesses, Ryan was brought into the office and threatened for refusing work assignments.
When Ryan still resisted, the lieutenant walked calmly outside, paced in a small circle, then suddenly grabbed his radio.
“Assault on staff! Assault on staff!”
Within seconds, officers flooded the area.
What happened inside afterward depends on who tells it, but the ending is uncontested: Ryan emerged barely conscious with a spit hood* over his head, unable to stand on his own. Dragged to the SHU with his feet lifeless behind him.
Later, we heard he’d been maced and beaten badly enough to require medical attention. Of course, officially, force is always justified. Paperwork protects paper. Officers always cover for their own.
By evening, the institution had moved on like nothing happened. Just another day at Fort Dix.
After work I head toward chow hall and pass a line of officers barking orders at inmates.
“Tuck in your shirt!”
“Pull your pants up!”
“Hat off!”
Inmates are searched and written up for squirreling away extra morsels of food for a later snack. The intensity of focus would almost be comical if there weren’t so many problems requiring attention:
Buildings infested with black mold.
Broken toilets.
Cockroaches crawling across floors at night.
Mice darting under bunks.
Water that is very suspect..
Asbestos in the walls.
Overcrowded dormitories.
Extreme heat.
Limited medical care.
Suicides.
Mental health crises.
But somehow manpower always exists to enforce shirt-tucking with military precision. The contradiction becomes impossible to ignore after enough years.
This isn’t an argument against rules. It’s a question of priorities. What exactly is corrections correcting?
Because from where many inmates stand, the system often appears more invested in control than rehabilitation, more concerned with compliance than humanity.
I’ve been incarcerated in California state prisons too. That system was violent, chaotic and deeply flawed. But eventually, outside oversight forced public scrutiny. Judges, advocates, investigators and federal intervention exposed horrifying conditions and demanded reforms. California was forced to answer questions.
These same issues plague the federal system many times over. The Office of the Inspector General is charged with providing oversight of BOP facilities. But it has never visited here. Plus even at prisons where it has investigated, from what I hear they haven’t changed much.
Most Americans will never see places like Fort Dix firsthand. They will never smell the mold, swat mosquitoes through sleepless nights, or watch mentally fragile inmates be carried half-conscious from lieutenants’ offices.
And maybe that’s the biggest problem of all.
The public doesn’t know. Or worse — people assume people in prison deserve whatever happens to them once the doors close.
I’m not writing this to excuse crime.I am responsible for my actions. I belong in prison for the harm I caused. But accountability cannot only apply to inmates. A government institution should not become immune from scrutiny simply because the people suffering inside it are incarcerated.
Being consigned to prison, isolated from family and friends, is our punishment. It is not neglect, humiliation, sickness, fear andt abuse hidden behind razor wire and bureaucracy.
If society stops caring about how human beings are treated in its custody, eventually the system stops seeing us as human at all.
*A spit hood is a mesh or fabric restraint device placed over a person’s head by law enforcement, corrections officers, or medical staff to stop them from biting or spitting. It allegedly blocks the spread of germs and bodily fluids, but remains controversial due to risks of restricted breathing.
