Despite many opportunities, Legislature is failing to pass criminal justice reforms

Ugly facts contradict Gov. Ron DeSantis’ boast to the Legislature that we live in “America’s liberty outpost, the free state of Florida.”

The Gulag State would be more fitting. Florida incarcerates its citizens at a higher rate than 40 other U.S. states and every other nation worldwide. Of every 100,000 of our people, 444 are in state prisons and 330 are in local jails. The prisoners are disproportionately Black, imprisoned at a rate more than four times higher than whites. Florida prosecutes more children as felons than any other state, and that’s more than three times as likely to happen to Black kids as to whites.

The perpetually crisis-ridden prisons, now under their seventh leader since 2008, have nearly 5,800 officers too few to safely supervise some 84,000 inmates, with nearly 2,000 more waiting in local jails and a sentencing surge expected from trials delayed by COVID-19. Four of every 10 new underpaid correctional officers quit within their first year and 60% are gone by their second anniversary.

The governor’s harsh politics demand more of the same, rejecting the sensible, cost-effective reforms that most legislators understand but dare not say endorse. The bootlickers are afraid to defy what the governor declared in his State of the State address Jan. 11.

“We will not allow law enforcement to be defunded, bail to be eliminated, criminals to be prematurely released from prison or prosecutors to ignore the law,” he said. “These soft-on-crime policies have been tried in communities throughout the country to disastrous results: Crime has skyrocketed, morale for police officers has plummeted and quality of life has been destroyed.”

That was raw meat for his right-wing claque with no basis in fact. The Crime and Justice Institute, a Boston-based nonprofit consultant retained by the Legislature, reported four years ago that 31 states had reduced both their imprisonment rates and their crime rates since 2010 — among them Georgia, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, which are hardly known for being “soft on crime.”

DeSantis and the Legislature are poised to spend even more on salaries and hiring for a Department of Corrections that already gets $2.7 billion for prisons and probation services.

The costlier and sadder toll will be the lives wasted — and new crimes bred — by excessive sentences in prisons where Florida law expressly states that punishment is the primary purpose and rehabilitation is only a secondary goal.

The institute’s report, profiling Florida as a harsh outlier, warned that “long sentences may be adding significant costs to the taxpayer with very little or no improvements in public safety.” Florida sentences have lengthened notably in recent years.

The report recommended a variety of reforms, including fewer than the present 108 mandatory minimum sentences — nearly half of which are for drug laws — and requiring only violent offenders to serve at least 85% of their sentences, which the law now requires for all.

Four years later, none of its advice has been followed except for a 2021 law raising the bar for charging theft as a felony. Formerly $300, it is now $750, still lower than in 45 other states.

DeSantis’ remarks succeeded in dooming any other substantive reform this year, according to Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, who is vice chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. Plenty of good bills have been filed, but the only three that have had any committee hearings don’t address the crux of the problems.

“Florida desperately needs a new vision for its correction system, because today it doesn’t correct; it simply warehouses,” Brandes wrote in a lengthy and informative Twitter thread on Florida’s criminal justice problems.

Bot now, Brandes is term-limited, so, as he told the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, “someone else will have to take up the banner.”

That “someone” should be every citizen who wants his or her tax money spent more wisely.

Brandes believes the state should restore parole, which Florida effectively abolished for prisoners sentenced after 1993, but there is no pending legislation to do so.

The three bills that have been heard and approved without objection at their first committee hearings (all bills have to run a multiple reference gauntlet) certainly deserve to become law.

■ House Bill 195 allows minors to expunge arrest records for nonviolent felonies once they complete diversion programs. DeSantis vetoed last year’s more liberal version, despite unanimous votes in both houses, in response to ill-founded objections from sheriffs.

■ Senate Bill 260 renames the Criminal Punishment Code as the Criminal Public Safety Code. The change may be cosmetic, but the significance matters.

■ Senate Bill 1200 enables prosecutors to file their own motions to vacate wrongful convictions. The bill is in response to exonerations recommended by conviction review units in Broward County and four other judicial circuits. Each state attorney had to ask the Innocence Project or other defense counsel to file the necessary motions. The bill, which was requested by Melissa Nelson, the state attorney at Jacksonville, also requires judges to hold prompt hearings on the motions. Nelson believes there should be a conviction review unit with statewide authority, like North Carolina’s, and she’s right, but that’s a bridge too far for now.

With more than half the session remaining, there is, indefensibly, no sign of movement for a long list of other bills that should have been enacted long ago. Bills that would prohibit trying 14- and 15-year-olds as adults, restrict use of solitary confinement, limit use of the death penalty and reduce the minimum time served from 85% to 65% of one’s sentence have all failed to get a single hearing.

There is no good reason for Florida to remain against the grain of sentencing reform nationwide. Genuine conservatives espouse it. As expressed by Americans for Prosperity, “Differences in the sentences imposed for the same or substantially similar crime that are not justified by public safety or the harm caused to individuals and communities undermine trust and credibility in the law, our courts and the justice system.”

Florida fails by those measures and will continue to fail until it elects a governor who, unlike the incumbent, appreciates the difference between conservatism and cruelty.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.