What's Happening in the Everglade's Won't Stay There

By Dave O.

A lifetime ago—or maybe a handful of decades back—I walked the tiers and policed the halls of the Eastham Unit, one of Texas’s oldest and most brutal prison units. Eastham was an old-school Southern prison through and through: two parts head-knocking, one part toeing the line, and all of it shot through with the brutal rhythms of forced labor and institutional racism.

This is a story about moral injury: the psychic wound that comes not from what is done to you, but from what you are made to do—what you witness, what you participate in—under the stripe of authority. The term may be clinical, but the experience is anything but. It is a reckoning of conscience. A shattering of one’s belief in the basic decency of the structures you served.

At Eastham, cruelty wasn’t a malfunction. It was the operating system. It was not only tolerated—it was ritualized, mythologized, and, for those who played along, rewarded. It wasn’t just about sadism—it was about bureaucratized brutality, where beatings weren’t just allowed; they were tools of control. Building tenders—violent inmates unofficially deputized by the state—were armed and given more power than the guards. As one former tender put it:

“We had clubs, bats, chains, knives—everything—and we formed what we called a ‘whupping line.’”

— *Newsweek*, “Inside America’s Toughest Prison,” Oct. 6, 1986

The system turned prisoners against each other, white, Mexican, and black, turned guards into perpetrators and accomplices, and turned silence into currency. Those who resisted the logic of force were marginalized, punished, or simply worn down. Promotions went to those who lied on reports, looked the other way, or did what the warden didn’t want to sign his name to.

One correctional officer remembered watching inmates being stomped unconscious—then instructed not to clean the blood:

“Leave the blood on the floor, man, so those motherfuckers can see it.”

— *Newsweek*, “Inside America’s Toughest Prison,” Oct. 6, 1986

That wasn’t just cruelty—it was messaging. A daily display of terror. I saw inmates who were badly beaten in the Major’s Office put on display in the central hallway, made to stand for hours for others to see.

What do you call a system that demands this of its people? What kind of internal contortions must a person perform to survive it?

And what should we make of a system that doesn’t turn to cruelty in defiance of the public, but in obedience to it? Because let’s be clear: brutality wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t a dirty secret. It was theater. Texans were proud of units like Eastham, Coffield, and Ellis—prisons that clung to vestiges of a brutal past. It was pageantry. It was punishment made visible so the public could feel reassured that vengeance was being served. The guards didn’t invent that desire. They answered to it. They were rewarded by it.

Keep that in mind if you're expecting ICE officers to have a sudden epiphany. So long as the work feels rewarding, and the modern American zeitgeist continues to applaud cruelty dressed as policy, the machinery will keep running. Its grotesque nature will only grow. These systems don’t just reflect power—they reflect public appetite.

A public hunger for retribution shaped the institution’s every gesture—from the boots we wore to the reports we filed, to the beatings. The racism, cruelty, and brutality weren’t just an unfortunate excess. They were expressions of collective will, disguised as discipline. And that may be the hardest truth of all.

M. Scott Peck, reflecting on the moral vacuum that gave rise to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, wrote that *“evil is live spelled backward.”* Evil, in Peck’s definition, is not a monstrous other—it’s the erosion of empathy in the name of structure. It's the bureaucratic smoothness with which unspeakable things become protocol.

Hannah Arendt saw it too. Her notion of the “banality of evil” wasn’t an exoneration—it was a diagnosis. Ordinary people, following procedures, checking boxes, enforcing rules. The system feeds on obedience and rejects conscience.

When I think about the worst moments at Eastham—the beatings, the cover-ups, the casual racism woven into every corner of the place—I don’t just see the cruelty. I live with the complicity. I see the ethical culture that groomed it, protected it, promoted it, and infected me.

And that’s where moral injury lives—not in the blood, but in the silence that followed. In the shrinking feeling at what I allowed myself to be a part of. In the dull ache of knowing I said nothing when something should have been said.

To be clear, I did not have discernible moral objections to the work most of the time I was doing it. I was young, dumb, and poorly integrated in my emotional, intellectual, and moral life. I hadn’t yet developed the internal vocabulary to name what I was part of. But I know now that systems like Eastham don’t operate in defiance of the public—they operate as expressions of it.

This shouldn't be lost on anyone who’s read Lord of the Flies. American policing in its most typical form is run by Jacks—people who conflate leadership with domination. At its worst, it’s when the Rogers take over: the ones who dominate not out of desire for order, but because of a lust for control. The ones with a sadistic streak. What I saw at Eastham was a system that cultivated Rogers—sought them out and sometimes gave them keys to the building. That’s not about law enforcement. That’s about appetite.

Not every correctional officer beat inmates. Not every officer who did felt regret. But for those of us who do regret—for those of us left to navigate the contradictions of duty and humanity—the wound is real.

And it echoes.

It echoes in the political leadership of this country, which is dominated by sadists and sociopaths. It echoes in the weaponization of law enforcement and the normalization of cruelty dressed as law and order. It echoes in the militarized ICE raids on immigrant communities by masked marauders. It echoes in the joyful launch of an immigrant detention facilities deep in the Everglades It echoes in the administrators who say “it’s policy” and the masked agents who will claim “I was just doing my job.”

Moral injury isn’t just a personal scar. It’s a social signal. It tells us when a system has broken faith with the human beings inside it. It’s not a weakness—it’s a warning.

We live in a moment of performative cruelty. We are governed by people who mistake sadism for strength. If you feel sick watching it unfold, as I do, that’s not moral confusion. That’s moral clarity.

You don’t need to have been inside Eastham to recognize Eastham in the world around you. Bull Connor, My Lai, Kent State, Attica, Ferguson, Derek Chauvin, Abu Ghraib, Rikers Island, the Chicago Police Department’s black site at Homan Square—when we let sadists have their way, bad things happen.

But naming what’s wrong isn’t enough. We must imagine what’s right. Moral imagination is the capacity to envision a world beyond cruelty, to see dignity where others are told to see threat. It’s what sustains courage, even in systems designed to crush it.

If you’ve seen it—if you’ve felt that sick recognition—then the question is not just what you’ll say or do. The question is what world you’re willing to imagine into being.

Because silence, once again, is complicity. Imagining something different—and acting on it—is the first refusal.