Family Stories and Real Experiences in Florida: Incarceration Through a Family's Eyes

[DRAFT v2 - CORRECTED: Scott was FEDERAL (FCI Miami), not state DOC. Story slots bracketed for Scott's nuggets.]

I served my time in the federal system, at FCI Miami. I want to be clear about that from the first line, because it matters for everything that follows. There are two entirely separate prison systems operating inside the state of Florida, and which one holds your person changes almost everything about how you stay connected to them.

If your person was sentenced in a Florida state court, they are in the custody of the Florida Department of Corrections, the FDC, in one of its facilities scattered across the state. If your person was sentenced in a federal court, they are in the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons, the BOP, which runs its own facilities, including FCI Miami, on its own rules with its own phone system, its own mail system, and its own visitation process. The two systems do not work the same way. A family that assumes the state rules apply to a federal inmate, or the reverse, ends up confused, and confused at the worst possible time.

I lived the federal side. So I will tell you what that was actually like, the way it happened to me and my family, and then I will lay out how the state system works too, because most families reading this in Florida are dealing with the FDC, not the BOP. Both belong here. What follows are real experiences, mine, told generally enough that any family walking into either system will recognize their own version of them. The details of your sentence are yours. But the shape of it, the intake, the first call, the first visit, the holidays, the slow work of staying a parent from inside, that shape is shared.

[SCOTT STORY SLOT 1 - THE OPENING STORY: The single experience you want to lead with. The one that puts the reader immediately inside what it felt like for your family. Could be the first time the kids saw you at FCI Miami, the first dropped call, a specific visiting room moment, the day everything became real. Write it the way you remember it. I will frame it and let it run.]

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Before Miami: how the system moved me

Before I ever got to FCI Miami, the system moved me across the country to get me there, and this is a part of incarceration that families almost never see and are almost never told about. I started out held in facilities in Arkansas and Tennessee. Then, to get me to Miami, the United States Marshals Service put me on what everyone inside calls ConAir, the federal prisoner transport network.

It was not a flight from Memphis to Miami. It was Memphis to Miami by way of seven cities, the plane setting down in one city after another to drop off prisoners and pick up others, a slow zigzag across the country in shackles with no say in where you were going or how long it would take. I will say something that may surprise people: the Marshals who ran that transport were a genuinely professional and impressive group, disciplined and squared away in a way I respected even from where I sat. But professional or not, the experience teaches you the first hard lesson of incarceration, which is that you are now moved, not traveling. Someone else decides where your body goes.

[SCOTT STORY SLOT 2 - THE DISTANCE / TRANSPORT STORY: Expand the ConAir journey if you want more of it here, or pivot to the distance your FAMILY had to cover to reach you at FCI Miami once you landed. The drive, what the kids did, what arrival felt like, or the stretches when distance meant the phone was the whole relationship. The thing that makes the distance real to a reader.]

Here is why I tell you about ConAir in an article for families. By the time your person lands at the facility where they will actually serve their time, they have already been moved, sometimes across the whole country, often with no warning to anyone at home about where they were or when they would arrive. Families lose track of a person during transport and panic. If your person goes quiet during a transfer, that silence is usually the system moving them, not something wrong. The federal inmate locator and the facility itself are how you find them again once they land.

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The children in it

This is the part I care about most, because the children are the ones who did not choose any of it.

My kids were 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, and 20 when I went in. Six of them, spread across exactly the ages where a parent's absence lands differently on each one. The 9-year-old does not process it the way the 15-year-old does. The 20-year-old carries it like a small adult and breaks in private. Every one of them needed something different from me, and I had to learn what across a phone line and a visiting room table, from a federal facility, with the limited minutes the BOP allowed.

[SCOTT STORY SLOT 3 - THE CHILDREN STORY: The heart of the piece. A real moment with one of your kids during the sentence. Something a child said or asked, a visit where you watched one of them struggle or surprise you, a birthday or a school event you missed and how you handled it from inside, the moment you realized what one of them was carrying. This is the emotional center. Take your time with it.]

What I came to understand, and what I would tell any incarcerated parent, is this. The 9-year-old needs to hear, out loud and often, that none of this is their fault. Children that age build a private story to explain why a parent disappeared, and the story they reach for is almost always that they caused it. You have to say the words. This is not your fault. I love you. I am still your dad. You say it on every call until it stops sounding necessary, and then you keep saying it.

The 11 and 12-year-olds are in the hardest social years, middle school, where being different is dangerous, and a parent in prison is different. They need you to stay ordinary with them. Ask about their day. Remember the name of the friend they mentioned. Be a parent, not a tragedy.

The 15-year-old can see everything clearly and will test whether your attention is real. Do not lecture from inside. You lose them the second the call becomes a sermon. Ask, and then listen to the whole answer.

The 18 and 20-year-olds are adults deciding, consciously, whether to keep you in their lives. You earn that. You show up as someone worth keeping.

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What carried us

I have said in everything I write that my wife never spoke a single word against me to our children across all 66 months. I want to be precise about why that mattered, because it is the most important thing in this entire article.

She had every reason to. I put six kids and her into a situation I created. She could have let the children's love for me curdle, and no one would have blamed her. Instead she protected the relationship between me and our kids as if it were a thing worth saving, because it was. Every good thing I have with my adult children today traces directly back to her choice not to poison it when she had the chance.

[SCOTT STORY SLOT 4 - THE OUTSIDE PARENT STORY (OPTIONAL): A specific experience of what Sabrina carried, or a moment you recognized it from inside, or the visit where you said thank you and meant it. NOTE: Sabrina's full voice is getting its own silo, so this slot can stay light here, a single concrete moment, with the depth living in her strand.]

If you are the one inside, the single most valuable thing you can do on a call is not to give instructions about the household you cannot see. It is to tell the person carrying everything on the outside that you see them. Name what they are doing. Thank them for it specifically. I did that as often as the phone allowed, and I would tell any incarcerated parent the same.

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How staying connected works, federal versus state

This is the practical part, and in Florida it splits in two. Find out which system holds your person before you do anything else, because the rules are different.

If your person is FEDERAL, in the BOP, like I was at FCI Miami:

Phone runs through the BOP's system, TRUFONE. Your person calls you from an approved contact list. Federal inmates get a monthly minute allotment, and under the First Step Act that has included a meaningful block of calling minutes per month, so the federal phone picture is often better than families expect. Email runs through TRULINCS, the federal email system, which you access from the outside through CORRLINKS, by setting up an account and accepting your person's contact request. It is not open internet email. It is monitored, text-only, and worth every bit of the trouble to set up, because between visits it becomes the daily thread of contact.

Money for a federal inmate's commissary account goes through the approved federal deposit channels, which your person can tell you how to use, and which fund both commissary and their phone and email.

Federal visiting starts with a visitor form your person sends out to the people they want approved. You fill it out, send it back in, and wait for the facility to clear you before you can visit. Once approved, federal visiting tends to be on weekends and holidays, in a visiting room, and the specific schedule is set by the facility.

If your person is STATE, in the FDC, the system most Florida families are dealing with:

Phone goes through Securus Technologies. You set up a prepaid account, fund it, and your person calls you from their approved list. Per-minute rates fall under the FCC's Martha Wright-Reed caps, which are in effect at prisons and large jails with a facility fee allowed on top, though the FCC revised the original caps in 2025, so confirm the current rate when you set up the account.

State mail is digital. Florida has moved away from delivering physical personal mail at its facilities and uses a contracted service that scans incoming mail and delivers electronic copies to inmate tablets. You mail to the processing address the FDC specifies, not to the prison, and your person reads a scan. Photos and a child's drawing arrive as an image on a screen rather than something a parent can hold in their hands. It is worth knowing that going in. Legal and privileged mail still goes directly to the facility.

State visitation is weekend-based and requires being on the approved visitor list first, a process the incarcerated person starts from inside. Until it is processed, no one visits. Video visitation is available at many state facilities.

For either system, one rule holds: before any long drive, call and confirm. Facilities go on lockdown. People get moved or placed in restricted status with no notice to the family. A five-minute call the morning of a visit can save a wasted day on the road. The FDC main line for state facilities is 850-488-5021. For a federal facility, call the institution directly or check the BOP inmate locator.

And then there is the weather, which does not care which system you are in. Florida is a hurricane state, and the season runs June through November every year. Storms close visitation, interrupt mail, and sometimes force facility evacuations. Families here learn to watch the forecast the way they watch the visiting schedule. Build it into your expectations.

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Where this leaves you

Florida holds two prison systems inside one state, and the first thing you have to know is which one holds your person, because the federal BOP and the state FDC do not work the same way. I was federal, at FCI Miami, moved there across the country by the Marshals before my family could even settle into where I would be. That distance, the transport, the size of it all, none of it was in my power to change, and none of it will be in yours.

What is within your power is everything that crosses that distance anyway. The call you make on a consistent schedule. The CORRLINKS message or the letter. The words you say to the 9-year-old every single time. The lecture you do not deliver to the 15-year-old. The thank-you you say to the person carrying the household. The relationship you protect, on both sides, so that when the sentence ends there is something whole to come home to.

I did my time and came home to children who still wanted me, because their mother protected that and because I did the work from inside to deserve it. That is the whole point of this. The child waiting at home, somewhere in Florida, is waiting for exactly that work. Do it.

[END DRAFT v2 - awaiting Scott's story nuggets for slots 1-4]