Florida prisons may violate policy by locking people in unsanitary shower stalls for hours on end
This story was published in partnership with the Tampa Bay Times.
The Florida Department of Corrections has been locking incarcerated people in shower stalls, often for hours at a time, in clear violation of prison policy, Insider and the Tampa Bay Times have found. Several prisoners say they've had to eat meals and go to the bathroom in the cramped, unsanitary stalls.In interviews and letters, 14 current or former Florida prisoners described corrections officers locking them in showers at prisons across the state, including at one juvenile facility. Twenty-two lawsuits also describe the practice. The allegations relate to incidents at more than 30 facilities over the span of two decades. Some prisoners said they were held for an hour; others for eight hours, 12 hours, or longer.
One man, Kobi Anderson, said that on his 17th birthday in 2011, he was held in a shower for eight hours at Indian River Correctional Institution, a youth facility in Vero Beach that has since shuttered. Since then, he estimates he's been held in shower stalls at a dozen facilities across the state.
Another man, Milton Thompson, said he was confined in a shower for 23 hours this past summer while at Blackwater River Correctional Facility in the Florida Panhandle. He was given no bathroom breaks — only a plastic bag to defecate in.
Some nine months earlier, he was also trapped in a shower overnight, this time at Okaloosa Correctional Institution, an hour northeast of Pensacola. The stall was dirty, he said, the smell of feces overpowering.
"When they feel like they want to punish you, they put you in the shower for hours," Thompson said. "They do that all the time. That shower will drive you crazy."
Thompson was one of several prisoners who said prison staff used the shower stalls as punishment. Others said staff used the stalls as temporary holding facilities as they were being transferred to solitary confinement or to a prison's disciplinary court.
Many prisoners described, in lawsuits and interviews, being locked in shower stalls with fresh injuries or while in acute mental distress.
Frank Vinci, for instance, said in a federal suit that while he was imprisoned at Apalachee Correctional Institution, northwest of Tallahassee, in 2008, officers threw him against the wall and smashed his face. Following the assault, officers locked him in a shower for six hours without medical treatment; he ended up defecating there after his requests to go to the bathroom were ignored. A judge dismissed Vinci's case in 2012 after finding that Vinci had failed to exhaust the prison's grievance processes.
Fifteen years after the assault, Vinci runs a diner in East Texas, but he said he still lives with a metal plate in his face and lives with chronic pain from the attack.
Isnel Rigaud alleged in a federal suit that while at Dade Correctional Institution, outside Miami, in 2014, he was locked in a shower after being sexually assaulted by a corrections officer, Sgt. Jason Mathis, in the facility's confinement unit. Rigaud said he, too, was held for hours without receiving medical attention for his injuries. Mathis denied the allegations and later resigned; the case settled.
D'Alessandro's case was settled in 2018. Keohane won her case over being denied gender-affirming care, but it was reversed on appeal; her 2021 petition to the Supreme Court was denied.
Last May, while at the Wakulla Correctional Institution Annex, another men's prison, Keohane said she declared a hunger strike after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill restricting access to gender-affirming care. Officers put her on suicide watch, she said, but they left her in a shower stall for five hours as they tried to find an open suicide-watch cell. She wasn't provided her medication while in the stall and was served peanut butter at dinner there despite her peanut allergy.
Several men said they were locked in shower stalls for extended periods while in tight restraints. One of them, Jean Joassin, said in a civil complaint that in 2012 he was put in the shower for two hours at Suwannee Correctional Institution, about an hour and a half west of Jacksonville, while in ankle shackles and handcuffs so tight they cut his wrists and ankles. He said an officer, Paul Martens, then stepped on the shackle chain, slammed him to the floor, grabbed his testicles, and said, "This is what we do to wild monkeys n—."
Martens, who has since resigned from the department, said in a declaration that he never abused or mistreated Joassin. "I denied those false allegations then," Martens said in an interview. "I still deny them." The case was dismissed in 2016.
Kayla McLaughlin, communications director for the Florida Department of Corrections, confirmed that it's against department policy to use showers as holding cells. The policy, she said, "only allows the temporary placement of an inmate in a secure shower cell for specific purposes and never while restrained or unattended. Meals are not served to an inmate while in their cells."
When asked why the department appears to have violated its own policies for decades, she said, "If a staff member is found to have violated this procedure, they are held accountable for their actions."
A rule against using showers as holding cells
The Florida Department of Corrections has long faced criticism for its treatment of prisoners. The Miami Herald revealed that a prisoner named Darren Rainey died in 2012 after being forced into a scalding-hot shower for almost two hours as punishment for defecating in his cell at Dade. Sources inside the prison told the Herald the showers were used to punish prisoners with mental illnesses.The reporting led to the prison's warden being fired, the secretary of corrections stepping down, and the launch of federal probes.
A Florida Department of Corrections rule, first issued in September 1999 and obtained by Insider through a Sunshine Act request, says showers "may be used for temporary placement of an inmate for the purpose of conducting an unclothed search or application of restraints in preparations of an escort," as McLaughlin said.
The rule also explicitly prohibits detention in the stalls.
"Secure shower cells will not be used as a holding cell," it reads. "The inmate will not be left restrained or unattended while in the shower. Meals will not be served to an inmate while in the shower cell."
Some said they were locked in the cramped stalls for speaking out. In 2003 an incarcerated plaintiff named Daniel Medberry alleged in a civil suit in state court that officers at Union Correctional Institution, outside Gainesville, verbally abused him and locked him in a shower in retaliation for filing grievances. Glenn Smith said in a federal suit that while at Okeechobee Correctional Institution, southwest of Vero Beach, in 2005 he was placed in a shower stall after he protested getting assigned a cellmate. Darrel Cummings alleged in a federal suit that while at Taylor Correctional, southeast of Tallahassee, in 2007 he was locked in a shower after requesting, and being denied, medical assistance. (All three cases were decided for the defendants. Cummings' request for a new trial, after one of the jurors fell asleep, was denied.)
In a 2019 federal class action challenging Florida's use of solitary confinement, prisoners at Santa Rosa described being held in showers — sometimes for hours — prior to being interviewed by attorneys as witnesses in a class-action suit. Some said they were held in restraints without access to food, water, or a bathroom.
(In responding to those claims in court, the Department of Corrections said that Santa Rosa did place prisoners who were being interviewed in shower cells but that the allegations that prisoners were fully restrained, unable to sit down, and denied food, water, and access to the bathroom were "simply untrue." Attorneys for the department said the prisoners were fed from food carts that came around while they were in the showers. That would have violated department rules.)
Kelly Knapp, a senior staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center who was counsel for the 2019 class action, said she believes the showers were used to deter prisoners from speaking with their attorneys about prison conditions.
"If they were subjected to those kinds of conditions before they talked to us, they were reasonably afraid of what happened after they talked to us," she said. "It interfered with our fact-finding ability and ultimately our ability to hold the prisons accountable."
The case was dismissed last year after the plaintiffs lost class certification; McLaughlin, of the Florida Department of Corrections, said the plaintiffs were ordered to pay the department over $210,000 in legal fees.
James Cook, a civil-rights attorney in Tallahassee, has received letters from multiple prisoners describing detention in showers. "They may go without meals, they may go without anything to drink, they may spend the night in a shower without bedding," he said.
Balancing food trays, surrounded by filth
Insider has found a few instances of prisoners being placed in showers in other state systems. A Virginia prisoner alleged in a 2017 federal suit that he was assaulted by officers, bitten by a guard dog, and thrown into a "shower holding cell" while at River North Correctional Center. An incarcerated plaintiff alleged in a 2019 federal lawsuit that he was left in a moldy, bug-infected shower stall and forced to stand for six hours at Lawrence Correctional Center in Southern Illinois. He said in his complaint that an officer told him he was kept in the shower as retaliation for filing a report against him. (Both cases were dismissed.) And in an Alabama case that recently settled, a prisoner said that in 2020 an officer at William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility assaulted him, maced him, broke his glasses, and left him in a shower for an hour.But the practice in those states doesn't appear to be as systemic as what's happening in Florida. David Fathi is director of the National Prison Project at the ACLU, which has litigated prison condition cases across the country for decades. He said he'd never heard of prisoners intentionally being locked in showers for extended periods of time.
Alan Mills, executive director of the Uptown People's Law Center in Chicago, said while he'd periodically heard from prisoners who said they've been "forgotten" in the shower in Illinois, he'd never encountered instances of men being given their trays of food there.
"That does take away the 'It was an accident' defense. You fed them in there, so you obviously knew they were there," he said.
Though Florida's policy bars meals from being served in the showers, 11 prisoners from facilities across the state said meals were served to them while they were locked in a stall.
For example, Jeremy Johns and Kevin Stover each said in interviews they were locked in showers while housed at Charlotte Correctional Institution, north of Fort Myers. Johns said he was kept in the showers barefoot for up to eight hours in nothing but his boxer shorts. The men described the stalls as narrow and extremely unsanitary and said they had to balance their trays of food and eat while standing. Stover said he was deprived of drinking water, too.
"There's nowhere to sit but on cold concrete — it's not properly cleaned or sanitized," he said. "It's just torture." He said he's been held in the showers numerous times over the years at facilities across the state, once for up to eight hours.
Johns said he and other men had, at times, resorted to cutting themselves in a desperate gambit to force their release from the stalls.
Jason Tucker, who's currently incarcerated at Century Correctional Institution, in Florida's panhandle, said he's been held in shower stalls dozens of times over the past two decades he's spent in and out of various state prisons. He said when he's exhausted from standing, food tray in hand, he has no choice but to sit down. "You're going to sit down on that dirty-ass shower floor," he said, describing black mold, food crumbs, bugs, and mice in the stalls.
Tucker said he was maced by officers at three different prisons — Jackson Correctional Institution, Taylor Correctional Institution, and the Northwest Florida Reception Center — and then, each time, left for hours in a shower stall.
When he was at Taylor, southeast of Tallahassee, in about 2017, he was kept in a stall completely naked, he said. He described the experience as dehumanizing.
"Just because I'm in prison doesn't mean I'm an animal," he said. "It's belittlement to them."
Last February, Stover was placed in a shower at Charlotte for 6 ½ hours, a grievance report obtained by Insider says. In the report, Stover said a Sgt. Laux placed him in the shower at about 3 p.m. It wasn't until about 9:30 that night when another officer finally released him.
"There is no where to sit, no water to drink, no place to use the bathroom, dirty and unclean and cold!" Stover wrote in the grievance. It was denied a month later.
McLaughlin, the corrections department spokesperson, confirmed that Theodore Laux is currently a sergeant at Charlotte. She said he would not provide comment.
"The shower holding cell is inhumane, unsanitary, and it's cruel-and-unusual punishment," Stover said in an interview. "It's not right."
Prisoners and their attorneys described other forms of humiliation.
Knapp, the Southern Poverty Law Center attorney, said Florida prisoners have reported being locked in shower stalls to receive their mental-health counseling, without any privacy.
"I had to do these sessions while standing and restrained in a shower cell," Admire Harvard, a transgender woman, said in a 2021 declaration about her time at Florida State Prison, a men's facility near Jacksonville. "It was dirty and moldy, and I had to speak to the counselor through bars."
Uncomfortable being overheard by nearby officers, she didn't divulge her struggles with gender dysphoria. In an interview, Harvard said she had nearly a dozen counseling sessions while locked, often in restraints, in filthy showers at Florida State Prison from 2015 to 2019. "It just caused a lot of anxiety," she said.
Keohane, the transgender woman now at Wakulla, said she too was required to have her mental-health sessions while locked in a shower at Florida State Prison. She worried about being overheard by officers and prisoners nearby. "It was totally not confidential, not a safe environment," Keohane said. "It was really tough."
'You don't even feel human'
Being confined in the shower can have dire consequences. In April 2018 a 66-year-old diabetic prisoner named Lynn Hamlet almost died after being locked in a filthy shower in the confinement area at Martin Correctional Institution, an hour northwest of West Palm Beach.According to federal court documents, including a brief filed in circuit court, Hamlet was locked for nearly an hour in a handicap-accessible shower in the facility's disciplinary confinement unit. The stall quickly began to fill with water, saturating a potato-chip bag filled with feces and urine, possibly left behind by the last desperate man held there. The water soon reached his ankles, which had open wounds, the result of his diabetes. He said he begged a nearby guard, Officer Brandon Hoxie, to let him out of the shower. Hoxie allegedly refused, accusing Hamlet of defecating in the shower himself.
Hamlet's attorneys said in the brief that an unnamed man had previously been held in the shower for 12 hours straight and, denied a bathroom break, relieved himself there. The suit alleges that Hoxie failed to check whether the shower was clean before placing Hamlet there.
Kylie Mason, communications director for the Florida Attorney General's Office, which is representing Hoxie in the suit, said no one was available for an interview.
Tyrell Whitty, who's currently incarcerated at Martin, was Hamlet's cellmate at the time of the incident, according to Hamlet's deposition. Whitty said in an interview that Hamlet had struggled with seizures and diabetes symptoms while they bunked together and that officers repeatedly refused to call medical for help. He said Hamlet was locked in a shower at least twice while they were cellmates.
Whitty said he too has been held in the showers at Martin — on at least three occasions and for up to six hours — as a form of punishment. He said he was served meals while locked in a stall, where he ate standing up to avoid sitting in the muck on the shower floor. He said he's seen blood, feces, urine, mosquitos, and even frogs while trapped in the stalls.
"The showers are filthy," he said. "They're nasty."
Insider submitted a records request in early April to the corrections department, asking for a log of people sent to the showers the day Hamlet was held there, as well as surveillance footage and other records related to Hamlet's incident. The agency has yet to provide any responsive documents.
Multiple prisoners said people often would urinate or defecate while trapped in the showers and deprived of bathroom breaks. Finding feces in the showers, they said, is common.
Thompson, the prisoner who said he was held for 23 hours in a shower at Blackwater, said that whenever he has asked officers to let him out of a shower stall to use the bathroom, they have ignored his pleas. He sometimes has had to relieve himself in the stall. "You don't even feel human, being in here," he said. "They treat you like you're nothing."
One man who's been held at Santa Rosa and asked not to be named, fearing retaliation, said he has sometimes refused to take showers because of all of the feces and urine that had accumulated, opting to wash at his cell's sink instead. He was one of several prisoners who said the showers were rarely cleaned.
He said he was locked in a shower stall four or five times at Santa Rosa. When he was given a food tray in the stall, he said, he worried about feces getting in his meal. He described having to sit down on the shower's filthy floors, after reaching a point of exhaustion from standing for hours, as "unbearable."
"You can sit down if you want, but Lord knows what you're sitting down on," said Kobi Anderson, the man who was locked in a shower at a juvenile facility in 2011. Anderson, who's now incarcerated at Calhoun Correctional Institution, west of Tallahassee, said he's seen blood, urine, and feces in the stalls.
Dale Knappenberger, who was released from Columbia Correctional Institution, west of Jacksonville, in September after 15 years behind bars, said he too has defecated in the showers after spending hours locked there without a bathroom break. "If you've got to poop bad enough, you're going to poop in the shower," he said. "It's routine throughout the system that they don't clean."
He said that almost every facility he's been to in Florida used showers as holding cells.
Alonzo Cole, who is being held at Blackwater, said he has been kept in the showers late into the night. Last January he was forced to sleep in a shower with no mattress, socks, or shoes, he wrote in a document describing the incident. He was forced to urinate in the stall, the foul smell lingering as he tried to sleep.
Later that month, gang members stabbed Cole in his sleep. After going to medical, he wrote, he was again placed in a shower cell, stuck there for almost 12 hours while in acute pain from the stab wounds.
A life-threatening infection
For Lynn Hamlet, the prisoner with diabetes, his exposure to feces while locked in the shower at Martin caused a bacterial infection that nearly cost him his life.As the infection ravaged his urinary tract, liver, and heart, Hamlet lost control of his bladder and bowels, records show. After being rushed to a hospital in Miami, where he ultimately spent two months, he lost the use of his legs and could no longer stand or use the bathroom on his own.
The infection also destroyed his heart valves, so he had to undergo heart surgery, according to the appellant brief. He became so sick that "he begged and prayed to die."
The 11th Circuit affirmed a district court decision dismissing the case, holding that Hoxie, the officer Hamlet said refused to release him from the shower, was entitled to qualified immunity. In June, Hamlet's attorneys filed a petition to the Supreme Court to review the case; the court has yet to respond.
Hamlet did not respond to a message requesting comment. A letter sent to Hamlet by Insider was returned after the corrections department claimed it posed "a threat to the security, order, or rehabilitative objectives of the Correctional System." Citing the pending litigation, his attorney, Damilola Arowolaju, declined to make Hamlet available for comment. McLaughlin said the Florida Department of Corrections doesn't comment on pending litigation.
"He was placed in unsanitary conditions, he notified prison officials of the unsanitary conditions, and prison officials didn't immediately remediate the situation," Arowolaju said.
"He needed life-saving heart surgery. His life will never be the same."
This project was completed with the support of a fellowship and grant from Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.
Credits
Reporter: Nicole EinbinderVisuals: Annie Fu, Chelsea Feng, Rebecca Zisser, Tara Anand
Research: Emma Rose Brown
Copy Editors: Jonas Dominguez, Kevin Kaplan