Sergeant James Booker
speaker
93 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Sergeant James Booker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You got a guy out there, a young lady out there, that has probably gone through something similar like you have, and because they heard your story, it gives them hope, it gives them direction, because a lot of people don't know which way to go or which way to turn in order to put themselves in a position to even start the fight.
Well, I grew up in Pensacola, Florida. I as well come from a law enforcement background. My mother, she was in law enforcement. She retired as a major with the Escambia County Sheriff's Department. My sister, she retired as a lieutenant with the Escambia County Sheriff's Department. And my older brother, he worked for ATF and he also worked with the
as an investigator for the state's attorney's office in Pensacola as well. So that kind of got my path going because once I left the Marine Corps, you know, I wanted to stay in service. I wanted to do a part in service. I always liked to serve. That was my whole thing. And then coming from that background, seeing it as I was a young child, I said that was something that I felt
you know, I could transition into, and that was something I felt I would be good at. So when I got out of the service, um, I looked for an opportunity to, um, get into law enforcement. So I actually kind of a short story. I was. Didn't know where I was going. I was on my way to Miami because I heard a lot of things was progressive of African-Americans in Miami. So I said, well, you know what?
I loaded up my car after three months of being out of the service, didn't know where I was going. Didn't have any family. I jumped in my car and I headed south. So I actually stopped in Gainesville, Florida. And I was at this restaurant called Wags Swags, and it was a breakfast place. So I'm sitting there and I'm going to age myself for a second. I'm reading a newspaper.
So in the newspaper, they said they was hiring for correction officers. So I'm like, okay, you know what? Let me look into this. Not knowing that the place I applied for was Florida State Prison. And when I went and I did the application, they hired me the same day.
Not knowing that they was quite desperate for staff, quite desperate for someone with a background coming from the military that they were looking for. So that started my journey into the correctional process. And that was back in 1983. So that's when I started. So I stayed there, transitioned from Florida State Prison to Gainesville Road Prison. And then from Gainesville Road Prison, I then
I transferred into the Bride County Sheriff's Department, and I got to the Bride County Sheriff's Department in 1986, I believe, 1986. I retired recently. I've been retired now 12 years now, this September.
Well, I love to tell this thing. Most people think in Florida that there's like, you know, multitude of prisons. It's only one prison in the state of Florida. It's only one. And that's Florida State Prison. That is the only building that bears the name prison, which is Florida State Prison. Everything else is a correctional facility or it's a work camp or something of that nature.
So I actually worked at the only prison in the state of Florida. So at that prison, it was like, the very, very hardcore. And I'm like, again, I'm gonna age myself. These are guys that, as we say, stood on business, these guys, yeah, they, they were not snitches. These guys would kill you at the drop of a hat.
You know, they weren't meant something they, they, they, they truly lived by code and their, their code was serious. Um, and being a young man coming out of the military, And going into such a place and coming from a disciplined place, believe it or not, that place has real discipline within the prison community. And I don't think a lot of people understand that.
You can't do a lot of things because you're an inmate. You can't do certain things like you want to do unless you get permission. If a guy want to stab a guy, he got to get permission. He just can't go stab this guy. It doesn't work like that. I think people, when they see TV, they think, oh, this guy, You know, you see a movie and a guy stabbed a guy. No, it's not like that. It's politics.
It's big politics. And if you're from a certain part of Florida, then you're basically in that bus with those guys from Miami. Are you in part of central Florida or wherever you are? And if you're a guy coming in from another state. You got to pick a bus. And it's totally different. And I think people don't really know the dynamics that goes on there.
Because if you think about it, you got some of the most ruthless guys that you would ever know. Every guy you see on Channel 6, 7, and 5 on the 6 o'clock news that did a heinous crime, most of them ended up there. And they're all in one place. Just think about that for a minute. You got a lot of predators, a lot of psychopaths. You got a lot of mental health. You got all this in one place.
So you got to have order. And the order, they basically set the tone for what the order would be. And I know that may not sound right, but honestly, they basically ran the prisons. We just managed it. They ran it.
Absolutely. Because the cocaine thing blew up during the early 80s. It was like a wildfire. The prisons actually couldn't handle it. And I'll tell you another thing, too. Same thing when AIDS came about. The prison system wasn't ready for it. And it blew up. And I mean, it blew up. But that's a dynamic that you don't even think about that guys coming in and they're sick and they get AIDS.
And it's like, OK, how do you deal with this? Because it was like crack cocaine. It took off like a wildfire, you know. But and I tell you a quick little story. When I first got there and in Florida State Prison, I was going to age myself. I'm young. Most of the guys who work there, these guys were bricklayers. They were mechanics. These guys had jobs. They were older men.
So I'm basically a kid when I walked in there. And so it was one of those situations where when you're coming in, being a young guy, it was very few of us. We were looked down upon because it's like, okay, you're here to take our job. No, I'm here to work.
So a lot of the older guys, they were very threatened by younger guys coming in because we could relate to the inmate population because we weren't much older if we were not the same age than most of the guys who was incarcerated. So it wasn't that adversarial thing where we were in conflict with them because we listened to the same music. We knew the same people.
When I mean knowing the same people, like people who were in the music industry, that type of thing. We knew them. So in a lot of the older guys, they were disconnected and all they knew was pounding ground, you know, guys like, like dogs, treat them like, you know, mess, you know, found on them if they had the opportunity.
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