A state of ‘collapse’ in Florida’s prison system
Florida locks up too many prisoners and pays too few officers to watch them.
This perilous situation has prompted the Department of Corrections to close three of its 50 major institutions so it can concentrate inmates and staff elsewhere. The agency should use the sensible expedient of early release for inmates who are elderly, ailing or nonviolent, but it can’t.
Having abolished parole like 15 other states, Florida is one of six whose laws require even nonviolent offenders to serve at least 85% of their time despite good behavior. Sentences have grown longer — by 22% since 2007 — largely because of 108 mandatory minimums that tie judges’ hands, even though declining crime rates undercut the grounds for such severity. It’s the result of politicians who pander for votes by cracking down on crime without paying for it.
The department’s own strategic plan describes “a system in crisis.” But to Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, one of the Legislature’s frustrated criminal justice reformers, that’s too mild.
“They’re no longer in crisis,” Brandes says. “They’re in collapse.”
Brandes and other lawmakers last session sought to reduce the earned-gain time threshold to 65% for inmates serving time for nonviolent crimes such as simple larceny. Strongly opposed by some sheriffs, it failed. So did eight others that would have relieved pressure on prisons by making the system more humane and less arbitrary.
‘Probably eight things’
“Of course we should be looking at parole,” Brandes told the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board. “We should be looking at elderly release, we should be looking at medical release, we should be giving judges more discretion. There are probably eight things we should be looking at.”
Parole exists only for inmates sentenced before 1983. Seriously ill inmates can be released conditionally, but very few are.
According to the Legislature’s research agency, it cost some $59 a day to house a prisoner in 2019 but only $5.47 to supervise the same inmate in the community. The agency, known as OPPAGA, also recommended imprisoning fewer people.
Florida’s progressive legislatures of the 1970s sought to temper punishment with rehabilitation. The shift began in the ’80s, when soaring crime rates and a growing youth population brought a series of irresponsible tough-on-crime laws.
A 2018 study by the Crime and Justice Institute (CJI), commissioned by the Legislature, said Florida’s incarceration rate was 10th-highest in the nation and 21% above an average that itself is highest among all major nations. More than one of every four humans in jails and prisons worldwide are in America.
Florida has fallen far behind in educating and training prisoners to be released as law-abiding citizens. State law explicitly extols punishment above rehabilitation.
“Research has demonstrated that longer time spent in prison is not associated with lower recidivism and long sentences may
be adding significant costs to the taxpayer with very little or no improvement in public safety,” CJI said, and longer sentences have a “criminogenic” effect on low-level offenders, making them more likely to commit new crimes.
Lock-’em-up mentality
The CJI report noted that 31 other states had reduced imprisonment and crime rates since 2010, while in Florida nearly two-thirds of all sentences are for nonviolent crimes and nearly half of new prisoners have no current or prior offenses.
CJI advised Florida to reclassify drug possession as a misdemeanor, at least for first-time offenders. It called for major changes in how the Criminal Punishment Code stacks offenses to make sentences longer, for reducing mandatory minimums and for releasing geriatric inmates who comprise a growing share of the prison population. The 85% requirement should be limited to violent offenses, CJI said.
Florida’s own experience, largely forgotten, is relevant.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 decision in Gideon v. Wainwright that entitled a felony defendant to a court-appointed lawyer led to 1,252 Florida prisoners being released early. Only 13.6% of them returned to prison for new crimes, compared to a 25.4% recidivism rate among a control group, matched for backgrounds and crimes, who had served all their time, according to a master’s thesis by the department’s statistician.
Prisons by definition are the worst of all possible places for people to learn to function properly in an open society. That’s why rules for visitation, mail and telephone calls should be as user-friendly as possible.
Yet the Department of Corrections wants to create another barrier between inmates and families. A proposed rule would divert nearly all incoming mail to JPay, a prison contractor for email and internet access, where it would be digitized and forwarded electronically to inmates’ loaner tablets. Inmates or their families would have to pay for hard copies of letters or photographs.
The rationalization is to cut down on drugs and other contraband, but it would be at a tremendous emotional toll.
The Legislature’s Joint Administrative Procedures Committee raised sharp questions about the proposal at a July hearing, where inmates’ relatives strongly denounced it. The panel wondered how depriving inmates of “their only tangible, tactile connection with families and friends” would contribute to the state’s duty to “provide a safe and humane environment for offenders and staff in which rehabilitation is possible.”
There is no good answer. The scheme should be scrapped.