Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille for BuzzFlash: Florida’s Lowell Correctional Institute: “Where the days are as dark as black coffee”
June 23, 2022
By Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille
There have been investigative reports, Department of Justice reports, and numerous opinion pieces, about the dangerous and sexually exploitative conditions at Florida’s Lowell Correctional Institute, but none of them has had the public impact as Keiko Kopp’s TicTok videos. Whether her viral videos will spur change remains to be seen.
Six years ago, I wrote a story titled “Florida’s Lowell Correctional Institute: A Women’s Prison From Hell.” My opening read: “At Central Florida's Lowell Correctional Institute, the largest women's prison in the country, the most salacious of women-in-prison movie scenarios meets a real life "Dante's Inferno"; in this case, the nine circles of suffering embody day-to-day life.” The story was based on a Miami Herald investigative report that found the Lowell prison was “a cesspool of corruption, where prisoners have been forced to exchange sex for basic necessities, where rape and sexual assault have become routine, where the smuggling of drugs and other contraband is rampant, and corruption and cover-ups proliferate.”
Little has changed in the intervening years.
Lowell, which opened in 1956, is the nation’s largest women’s prison, according to a 2019 Federal Department of Justice report. As of November 2019, the prison complex housed more than 2,200 inmates and had a staff of nearly 600, the report said. It is also the state’s only prison for pregnant women.
The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division report found (https://www.wuft.org/news/2021/01/08/lawmakers-seek-reforms-after-report-of-abuse-at-womens-prison-in-ocala/) “the Florida Department of Corrections had been aware of, yet failed to prevent, ongoing sexual abuse at Lowell, … for over a decade,” News Service of Florida reported.
A group of four Democratic female Florida legislators were appalled at the report’s findings – which included accusations of rape and other forms of sexual abuse. “There’s no room for this type of abuse. And these officers need to be held accountable,” Rep. Susan Valdés of Tampa said during a video conference with reporters. They proposed several legislative measures to address treatment of inmates such as HB 165, which died in the Florida House’s Criminal Justice Committee.
According to the DOJ report, “Lowell has a long history of tolerance for sexual abuse and harassment, which continues to the present,” the report said. “In interviews with the department prisoners spoke of sex between staff and prisoners as a regular event, suggesting a normalization of sexual abuse by staff. Some current and former staff made similar representations.”
So what has Florida’s response been? In February 2021, the now retired Secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC), Mark Inch, claimed that federal investigators took a “finite number” of cases at a large prison over a long time “and overgeneralized them to conclude that we have systemic sexual abuse. I disagree.”
According to a June 2021 Prison Legal News (PLN) article, “The prison was given 49 days from the release of the December (2020) report to institute recommended remedial measures or face legal action. FDOC Secretary Mark Inch said he welcomed the investigators’ findings and would gladly work with DOJ to rectify the situation. As of PLN’s publication date June 2021, DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has not yet taken any action.” https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2021/jun/1/doj-florida-womens-prison-subjects-prisoners-unconstitutional-risk-sexual-abuse/ An internet search, has been unable to find a report of any DOJ actions as of June 2022.
As reported by PLN according to FDOC disciplinary logs, there has been reported disciplinary action against some guards between 2017-19, but many have continued their duties with no real consequences.
The Keiko Kopp Story
At great personal risk, Keiko Kopp, a former female prisoner at Lowell, used 60-second TicTok videos to expose these patterns of abuse and the absence of governmental response or accountability. Her reports from inside the prison “have accumulated more than 8 million views and 153,000 followers since they began mid-summer of last year (2021),” Katie Hyson reported for NPR’s WUFT radio.
Kopp, who is serving as three-year sentence, “used the prison’s communication kiosks to pass short videos to her mother, Kathy Moyer, who posted them to the TikTok account @kay_livenews,” Hyson noted. “Kopp, 32, said Lowell staff threatened to send her to administrative confinement — a disciplinary cell with no access to communication kiosks or phones — if she didn’t stop the account.”
Every Kopp TikTok video begins with:
“Hey guys, this is Kay coming from Lowell CI, where the day is as dark as black coffee.”
Kopp’s September 7 video was wrenching. It was a story of her being pregnant and losing her child. “But the full story of losing her child — the powerlessness of incarcerated pregnancy, the pain of a violent birth, the love for a baby she’d named — couldn’t fit into 60 seconds,” Hyson reported.
Keiko Kopp’s story as reported by Katie Hyson:
Years ago, she left an abusive relationship and lost her vehicle and the jobs it had allowed her to work. She resorted to odd jobs on Facebook, anything to care for her four kids and get a new place.
In 2018, Kopp agreed to sell a friend methamphetamine. She brought 2 ounces to a Best Western in DeFuniak Springs.
The arrest report reveals it was a controlled purchase — her friend was a confidential informant.
Kopp and Moyer both said Kopp never used, only sold.
Kopp fought her case for two years, during which Moyer said her daughter seemed to be pulling her life together and started a cleaning business.
Then, two days before Christmas 2020, she discovered she was pregnant.
The doctor warned it was a risky pregnancy since she’d recently miscarried, and urged her to come in for screening. The earliest available appointment was Jan. 6.
On Jan. 5, she was sentenced to the mandatory minimum of three years in prison and a $50,000 fine for charges of drug trafficking.The judge sent her straight to Walton County Jail.
Walton jail staff were arranging another medical appointment for her. They provided supplemental nutrition as Florida law requires for incarcerated pregnant women: a sandwich and fresh fruit, three milks a day, prenatal vitamins.
On Jan. 21, that all ended when she was transferred to Lowell.
On June 24, 2021, Kopp’s baby, named Raven Faith, was born and died.
Kopp’s videos depict the grim reality of Lowell: The sick go untreated for weeks on end; prisoners were not tested for COVID, despite more than 200 deaths in Florida’s prisons; the distribution of basic supplies for hygienic care, including soap and toilet paper is severely limited.
Kopp’s broadcasts are serious, but she breaks up the traumatic content with discussions of prisoners’ creative adaptations to prison life, like “using underwear elastic as a hair tie, watercolor pencils as eyeliner,” Hyson noted.
Prisoners’ using social media to air their views is a relatively new phenomenon, and is often forbidden by prison officials. In 2015, Dave Maass reporting for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/hundreds-south-carolina-inmates-sent-solitary-confinement-over-facebook) found that, “In the South Carolina prison system, accessing Facebook is an offense on par with murder, rape, rioting, escape and hostage-taking.”
Back in 2012, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) made “Creating and/or Assisting With A Social Networking Site” a Level 1 offense [PDF], a category reserved for the most violent violations of prison conduct policies. It’s one of the most common Level 1 offense charges brought against inmates, many of whom, like most social network users, want to remain in contact with friends and family in the outside world and keep up on current events. Some inmates ask their families to access their online accounts for them, while many access the Internet themselves through a contraband cell phone (possession of which is yet another Level 1 offense).
“In 16 cases, inmates were sentenced to more than a decade in what’s called disciplinary detention,” Maass reported, “with at least one inmate receiving more than 37 years in isolation.”
Keiko Kopp is also taking a big risk. “Florida forbids use of prison communication kiosks for ‘relaying, streaming, or rebroadcasting through any medium,’” Hyson reported. “When asked for comment on the account, why rebroadcasting is a concern, and whether administrative confinement is a standard response, a Florida Department of Corrections spokesperson only responded with the regulations and pointed to what is allowed: ‘Inmates’ first amendment rights may be exercised through their ability to regularly communicate with legal representatives, family, friends, etc. through an array of established and easily accessible methods.’”
The number of imprisoned women continues to rise. Rep. Yvonne Hayes Hinson, D- Gainesville, visited Lowell in mid-September to check on the pregnant women. “The pregnant women are having trouble getting nutrition,” Hinson said, “and that nutrition is having an effect on their fetuses. And some of them are being born in distress and stillborn.”
It’s more than five years since The Miami Herald’s investigative report shined a light on the horrific and abusive conditions at Lowell, and a year-and-a-half since the Department of Justice devastating report. While Florida DOC and the federal government may be negotiating changes, no concrete changes have been made public.
A prison reform advocate Debra Bennett-Austin “doesn’t think Lowell can be reformed,” Katie Hyson pointed out. “She’s on a mission to shut it down, along with her team of formerly incarcerated women who form the board of Change Comes Now (https://changecomesnowfl.org/).”
According to Hyson, “It’s worth the risk to Kopp. She is determined to make the remaining two years of her sentence mean something, to get word out about what’s happening to the people around her. She plans to keep fighting for them after she’s released.”
And what of Keiko Kopp now? Her last TicTok was in October of 2021. According to a December 2021 ABC Action News’ Crisis in Corrections investigation https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/i-team-investigates/crisis-in-corrections/florida-inmate-uses-tiktok-videos-to-expose-prison-issues, Kopp received a letter from the Lowell warden stating that posting her videos violated Department of Corrections policy and that she would face suspension of visiting privileges if she continued. The ABC report concludes with the statement that, “Recently, Kopp was granted a request to transfer to another prison closer to her mother’s home.”
This transfer may have ended Keiko Kopp’s reporting from Lowell as she serves out the rest of her sentence. But Kopp broke new ground with her TicTok recordings and serves as an inspiration to others behind bars that struggle to get their voices heard.
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