It stinks to be a guard, or an inmate, at Florida’s prisons
We know a few things about the tape that appears to show an inmate getting pummeled in the courtyard of a Lake County state prison.
It looks bad. Someone on the ground is swarmed by lots of correctional officers, some of them throwing punches. The incident, surreptitiously recorded by an inmate with a contraband cellphone at Lake Correctional Institution, goes on for at least five minutes. The guards have been reassigned, away from inmates, and the state said it has begun an investigation.
We don’t know how or why it started. We don’t know what the correctional officers might offer as a justification. We don’t know their work history. And the state hasn’t confirmed the identity of the inmate who was on the ground.
As many times as the media and public have jumped to wrong conclusions in the recent past, it’s important to get some more information before trying to understand — or comment on — what happened.
But if the guards were in the wrong, is it really surprising that Florida’s prison system isn’t attracting the cream of the crop?
It stinks to be an inmate or a prison guard in Florida.
The Florida Department of Corrections pays starting trainees about $30,150 a year, less than $15 an hour. That’s what Disney World employees will soon make for serving churros to friendly tourists. Once certified, starting correctional officers make $33,500 per year, about $16 an hour. The Miami Herald noted in a 2017 article that officers went a decade without a raise.
Bad pay doesn’t excuse abuse, but considering the challenges and dangers of the job, the compensation for correctional officers in Florida is embarrassing.
Low pay might explain why the number of open positions for officers with the state Department of Corrections grew from 554 to 720 between 2006 and 2015. The vacancies grew even as the total number of jobs for officers in the prison system dropped by about 2,000. Fewer overall jobs should mean fewer vacancies. It gets worse.
During that same period, Florida’s inmate population increased by some 11,500 people, which meant a shrinking number of officers was guarding a growing inmate population.
Prison officials testified earlier this year that staffing shortages were forcing some correctional officers to work 16-hour shifts, and wardens pegged turnover rates at 30-50%. The overall turnover rate as of June was 32%, about one in every three officers.
A 2015 state study of the prison system found the corrections staff was plagued with inexperienced officers and a supervisory staff spread too thin. It also found that more than 10% of the officers hadn’t completed their basic training.
The study also had this important finding that may end up applying to the Lake incident: “...one of (the Department of Corrections’) more important policies, use of force, was found to be confusing, unnecessarily complicated, and lacking clear direction for when force should, or should not be deployed. We recommend this policy be revised.” State corrections officials did not provide the current policy, nor would they say whether it had been revised since that report.
The staffing issue has gotten so bad that the state passed a law this year lowering the minimum age for state corrections officers from 19 to 18. Florida’s not the first to do so, and 18-year-olds can join the military to take on even greater responsibility, so it’s not a crazy idea. It does show how desperate the state has become to fill jobs.
Guarding is difficult in Florida, and so is life as an inmate.
Not that prison time should be a vacation, but inmates are increasingly menaced by gangs. Correctional officers are, too. In one 2017 incident, seven guards were injured in South Florida during a melee involving gangs. A couple of months later, all of Florida’s prisons went on a lockdown because of threats of violence.
In April, four prison guards joked on social media about harming inmates. In May, several Florida inmates sued the state earlier this year for putting people in solitary confinement for prolonged periods. That same month the Florida TimesUnion reported on a culture of violence and abuse aimed at inmates by officers at the Santa Rosa Correctional Institution. The Times-Union, which broke the initial story about the apparent beating at Lake Correctional, also reported on a private Facebook group in which correctional officers joked or boasted about the incident. The exchanges are disgusting.
Part of the problem is Florida’s eagerness to lock people up — about 100,000 in prisons across the state at last count. The state made some small progress through a criminal justice reform package passed by the Legislature earlier this year.
It’ll keep some out of prison by raising the bar for felony theft from $300 to $750. It’ll keep some others out by cutting people a little more slack for ticky-tack violations of their probation. And ex-felons will be able to get occupational licenses more easily.
There’s always a “but” with Florida, and in this case it was the state chickening out on reducing the mandatory amount of time a felon has to serve in prison — and therefore, the prison population — from 85% of the sentence to 65%.
The latest state budget had some good news for the Department of Corrections, with a 6 percent increase to $2.7 billion. But (there’s that word again) there’s no pay increase in the budget for correctional officers. Again.
Florida’s Legislature has demonstrated the ability to get things done when it wants to. What it should want is a far better prison system that respects and protects both the guards and the guarded.