"Too Tall has, probably, eight, nine gang members that actively are following him." "Every time he sees new guys come in there, he's like, a new guy," "I wonder how he is, you know what I'm saying?" "So, he comes in here and and they're like, they look weird, you know what I'm saying?" "Like, he looks crazy." "Hello." "I'm just all over, I'm ready to go." "I want out." "Yes." "What kind of things did you say troubled you?" "Contraband." "The heavy drug use." "Okay, guys, we're about to go into the Union Civic Facility and we're gonna go in there, we shake them down looking for any form of contraband." "Ladies, step out!" "Come on, everybody on your doors, everybody on your doors!" "Backs up against the wall!" "Backs up against the wall, everybody, come outl!" "No talking." "I want everybody on your doors, everybody on your doors!" "When they do shakedowns, which means they come in the room and search everything." "Everybody gets in trouble." "There have been times where they search the room beside us, there were drugs in there, they sent everybody into lockdown." "Go up against the wall, everybody, come out!" "Come out!" "Hold the noise, no talking." "No talking." "Alright ladies you should be dressed." "You got men on deck, you got men on deck." "Seeing this go down, it takes me back to when I was a CO." "Now I'm saying, the other side." "No talking." "No talking." "It tripped me out a little bit because I've never been through anything like that." "So, I was just kind of watching and the girls were all nervous." "And then I realized" "Jessica left." "She's gone." "I don't know what happened." "They must have pulled her in the middle of the night." "I was disappointed because I felt like I had an ally." "But now I'm just trying to get through this for me." "As soon as I sat down," "I was like, snap!" "I was writing about my time here at Fulton County." "And this was information that" "I had planned to tell Colonel Adger." "As soon as they called us down, I was like," "I didn't move the letters and I knew that would stand out." "There was two little pieces of paper in somebody's mattress," "I would have opened it up if I was an officer." "I messed up, period." "You're in 514." "Youre in 502." "502?" "We got a new wave of inmates, which happens regularly now." "Constantly, I have to judge everybody in a snap decision, you know, for my own safety, just so I can keep myself safe." "What is it?" "Bernard." "In my experience, when somebody moves into your cell, first thing you ask is what are you here for?" "You tell what crime you did, you tell how you're gonna get out tomorrow, 'cause everybody's getting out tomorrow." "My whole life, robbing, robbing, stealing, taking." "If ain't steal it, I'm gonna take it, if I ain't gonna take it, I'm gonna steal it." "My first time robbing somebody was 12." "You want me to tell you why I did it?" "Just like I fit in." "Two years of my years of life been gone in this jail right here." "It's not the place nobody wants to be." "Bernard, he actually knows Too Tall on the outside." "I don't think I slipped up at all but anything can happen at any moment." "613, gonna close you in." "Unless you're writing us, come on out." "When an officer comes in the door and I mean, you're not ready or prepared to come out, they gonna lock you in." "If you get locked in, it means you locked in for the rest of your two hours that you could have been out." "That's a long time being in a room all day, man." "We come out for the five hours from 4 to 9." "You know, everybody lines up at the door open." "But I didn't grab my stuff, my bag got left in the cell." "At first, I thought it was my cellmate who closed the door on me." "Officer McKenzie closed it." "My dad always tells me, like, go crazy, man, makes you turn into an animal." "I didn't know that this is how some of the COs been treating some of the guys up here." "Man, open up this door, man!" "We only have a limited amount of time outside the cell." "Every second counts so it's hard to sit in that cell for a whole hour just waiting." "607, right there." "Put your shirt on sir, so you can come on." "607!" "I was thinking like, don't say nothing to him, don't say nothing to him but" "I was like, man, I gotta say something to him." "I gotta let him know how I feel, you know what I'm saying?" "Like, just give him a piece of my mind, you know what I'm saying?" "Hey, yo, that was some man." "What'd you lock me in there for?" "Hey, Tyler, can we get 607?" "Let me get everybody on the wall right quick." "Hey sir, you might want to step back." "You just locked me in there, lock me in again?" "I had to get whatever was on my mind," "I had to get it off my chest and let him know how I felt." "The last thing on my mind was getting into it with CO." "I know I'm an inmate but you ain't gonna treat me whatever way you want to." "Bed is made!" "Out of your room, stand by your door!" "What is life like in 500?" "You got a group of Bloods there, they have their own Blood politics." "I thought that it was." "Bloods are Bloods and Crips are Crips but, in here, they kinda all unite and Too Tall is the boss of both of them, as far as I know in our zone." "It almost seems like if, if he doesn't like how things go, he goes to his violent self." "If Too Tall doesn't like something, it can get ugly." "I was writing down what I saw amongst the pod with, you know, with inmates and officers." "There's a lot of information, a lot of good information." "I was thinking of all the scenarios of what would happen if they found the letter but the one that kept popping up in my head was retaliation." "As an old CO, I know, now they knew that somebody knew that they weren't doing what they were supposed to do." "I didn't want them to take it out on me or the other people in the pod." "Clear, clear." "Jessica, even though it was a short stay, gave us good information." "While we didn't find any significant contraband, but that doesn't mean there isn't any in the zone." "Inmates are good at hiding things, so we're likely to have to come back again." "The minute they let us go back to our cell, even though they told us to make our beds," "I was not worried about a bed." "I didn't care if my bed was made up," "I suffered that little consequence." "I wanted to know if my letters were there." "I went through everything and it was gone." "I messed up." "I was scared, I didn't know what to do, that's why I started doing the signal," "I was panicking." "I don't wanna talk about it in front of people 'cause it's personal." "I don't wanna talk about it out in the open space." "Period." "I know ya'll said don't write nothing down, so I was sitting here like, okay, how can I do this without it being stuck out?" "I wrote about everything in my life and it's starting to look like a book." "But I started writing last night, it was about a chapter here and I slipped it in the cover and as an old CO, I know, put it in an envelope and they're not really gonna go through it," "I knew that." "And I thought everything was going good and this just made me feel like" "I knocked myself all the way down." "I am so sorry." "I'm sorry." "My hunch is that it's going to be okay." "We'll follow up, if you want us to keep going." "I wanna keep going 'cause now, like I said," "I feel like I have to find a whole bunch more information." "This guy right here gonna make me rich." "We got a lot in store but we can't tell you guys just yet." "But this guy..." " It's in the works." " Yeah." "He gonna make me rich." "Desmond is my roommate, he moved in about three, three weeks ago." "He's a good guy and him and I joke all the time about, you know, it kinda sucks that we came to jail to meet one another." "He's thought his whole entire life that he would die before he was, you know, 30 years old in the streets, you know, he's said that." "You know and I feel like, man, there's so much better for you in this world, like he's a smart kid but that's the life they live." "When you grow up in the streets, it affects you because it's like you gotta become a person that you really don't wanna be." "It's pretty much like a dog-eat-dog world." "Everybody's just living, trying to make it to see another day but people don't follow the rules and if they did, they wouldn't be in jail." "I didn't really expect to learn what I've learned from being here." "But I've learned about the problems with, you know, the inner city gangs and things like that through him." "I'm just so exhausted that you forget what your mission and purpose and goal is and that psychologically takes its toll on you." "Man, man, you alright?" "You alright?" "I think somebody called me and I turned around, just kept walking and I turned right into it and smacked my head onto the iron staircase." "And I was exhausted, that could have been part of it too." "Everybody on the wall," "Listen up, everybody on the wall!" "Everybody on the wall, facing the wall, right now." "Come on out here sir." "Fulton County ain't man." "I have no idea if I need stitches, they didn't give me ice." "Been up here since four o'clock this morning." "Yeah, I mean, it's deep, so, from what I can see," "I think I need at least some glue to glue it back together so it's not open." "So it's not getting infected." "I told 'em I would scream," "I didn't want to go back to my room and go to sleep." "They said, you gotta come and I gotta sit up here for eight, nine hours just to see somebody for five minutes." "He ain't even ate yet!" "That aint fair they aint ate though." "Why would they feed them?" "It's just very loud, very dirty and I just had a massive headache." "There's nobody watching us, really, no medical people observing us to see, you know, if anybody was ill, sick, getting worse, getting better." "It's unacceptable." "They're not bad people and they're treated like the scum of the earth." "They said I wasn't medical clear to up to a floor yet 'cause of them scratches, so..." "It's a waiting game." "We ain't got no control." "It's almost 12 hours again." "12 hours." "Man, just give me a band-aid and let me out of here, I wanna go back to my, my cell and I'll just deal with this." "I get to a point where I think," "I don't know what else I can bring to the table and then something will prove me wrong." "Walking in these shoes has been completely eye-opening." "I'm in my cell, one morning, and we hear people getting loud." "Marcus complains and they decided that he was nitpicking at something he shouldn't have." "You know, Mark is a kid." "He just kinda real like, bossy, like, he running stuff and he has no ground to push up on nobody right now." "'Cause he doesn't have any money, he doesn't have any commissary." "Hey!" "Get around on the wall, on the wall!" "On the wall." "I believe that it keeps happening because the guards are not paying attention to what's going on in their zones." "You want some more bro." "It's funny 'cause I have seen Marcus approach guys certain ways that he wouldn't say the same to like," "Too Tall." "They're gonna probably jump him again." "But I don't think this time is gonna end as well as it did the other times." "Yeah, I can't believe I was in medical that long." "It was a small cut, which should have taken an hour, it took all day." "Obviously, the facilities are extremely lacking but as far as like, the procedure that they did and my eye required some glue." "You know, that was exactly what I thought should have been done and it would have been done." "Tower six, pod six zero five." "This is exactly why I was put here to do this." "As stupid as it was, running into the staircase, you know, I was able to check on medical and see what that was like and see that process." "Dude, that place..." "Every time I start to feel bad for myself and I have that self-pity," "I have to remind myself there's just another person here going through the same thing that these people are going through, so, I chose to be here and they didn't." "Hello, please hold while we attempt to connect your call." "You may start your conversation now." "Alright." "The people that are in your room are the people that you most talk to." "And Mauri doesn't really come out a lot, so I haven't really had much interaction with her." "She looked at me like, with a look that was saying, like, a confirmation look." "I was like, you know." "And she looked at me like, yeah, duh, I did know." "She just didn't know how to come to me and ask me." "It's a good feeling knowing there's another participant." "And I don't feel so alone." "If I wanna bounce something off her, she wants to bounce something off me, we can." "Knowing Michelle's in the program," "I felt like," "God had moved over the clouds and let the sun shine down." "It gave me energy to push through this whole thing." "Because it's like, together, we can feed off of each other's energy." "They're gonna team up against Marcus for two reasons:" "One, because he claims to be in the game that he's not." "And two, he's not fighting." "He has to fight." "As soon as it quiets down, you know that they're moving in on somebody and everybody looks over their shoulder to make sure they're not coming for you." "They just kind of surrounded him and I didn't know what was going on." "Just like that, it just came out of nowhere like," "I mean, it just came out of nowhere." "It's hard because" "I do feel like I need to step in but it's wrong in the eyes of the gang." "It's their rules, not my rules." "I feel like it's not worth it to put myself on the chopping block because, you know, I'm kinda blending in well and that's not where I wanna put myself." "I didn't come back out til it was time to eat dinner, so it must have been like, 6:30, seven." "Everybody gotta stand at their door, wait to get called around, the top people come out first and then the bottom come out." "And I'm thinking, you should be good now, you know what I'm saying?" "I shut the door, which locks automatically, and he comes over to make a point to unlock the door with his key." "Usually, unlock it from the control thing." "Like, maybe he wants me to go back in my room or get my food." "But I'm like," "I'm like, nah, he wouldn't do that to me, what, make me go and eat my food in there?" "There's no reason he wasn't done with it, you know what I mean?" "In his mind he's like, nah, this is gonna go on the rest of the night." "A lot of people don't like Officer McKenzie because, you know, he tries to come off as tough." "It's my way or the highway, you know what I'm saying?" "Saying, what ya'll gonna do about it?" "Basically, got that kind of officer." "Yeah?" "Come on." "I done messed up now." "We don't know what's going on." "This fog just keeps getting thicker and thicker." "I see like, a whole bunch of guards in there holding shotguns and I didn't know what to expect really after that." "The scariest thing that could possibly happen in here is your cover being blown or somebody finding out that you're not who you say you are." "I'm screwed." "I know how these type of people think about people like me, you know, informants or whatever you wanna call it."