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As U.S. prepares to release 6,000 prisoners, many come from Florida

 
Published Oct. 25, 2015

They are former smugglers caught tossing kilos of cocaine off the sides of boats, methamphetamine traffickers found with stashes in their homes, and marijuana dealers intercepted by federal agents. And next weekend, when prisons across the country open for the largest ever one-time release of federal inmates, many of them will be returning to Florida.

Agreed to over a year ago by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the release of about 6,000 prisoners who committed drug offenses is the result of a policy change designed to reduce prison overcrowding and offer relief to inmates with harsh sentences. Between Friday and Nov. 2, most of these inmates will transition from Bureau of Prisons custody to halfway houses or federal, GPS-monitored probation. Others — just under a third — will be sent directly to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation proceedings.

Most of the people released will be in southern states, led by Texas, which expects to release more than 500 prisoners. Right behind is Florida, where 295 drug offenders are scheduled to be released on Nov. 1, according to federal estimates. Of those, about 120 will return to the Tampa Bay area.

"We definitely have our fair share of them, there's no doubt about that," said David Rhodes, chief of the Appellate Division of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida.

Local officials say in practice, the number of inmates being set free on Nov. 1 has changed almost weekly, as judges sign last-minute orders reducing sentences. The unprecedented number of releases and not knowing exactly who to expect has forced them to scramble.

In the Middle District, chief probation officer Joseph Collins said he has had to hire five new probation officers.

"We have an idea of what's coming," he said, "but the reality is you can have somebody who was sentenced in California and could be coming back here, so it's going to take a little while for the numbers to settle."

Extending from the Georgia border to Naples in the southeast, the Middle District has prosecuted so many drug cases that it now ranks third in the country for the number of cases affected by the new sentencing guidelines, which are being applied retroactively. Ultimately, officials expect that some 1,500 federal inmates who were tried here will have their sentences reduced.

Why the numbers here are so high isn't entirely clear, Rhodes said. Although Florida was the primary drug smuggling route in the 1980s and early '90s, South American cartels have largely shifted their focus to border states like Texas and California. And while some of the inmates being released are serving lengthy sentences that date back to the height of Florida drug trafficking, most are not.

A review of a dozen cases of men who were prosecuted in Tampa and are being released Nov. 1 turned up incidents primarily dating back to the early 2000s.

In one case from 2003, a man was caught ferrying hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from South Florida to the central portion of the state, perhaps suggesting the high numbers here may have more to do with the local appetite for illegal drugs than the pattern of the trade.

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"There are marijuana cases, cocaine cases, meth cases — there's everything," Rhodes said. "There are people who have been in prison for a really long time and some that got relatively short sentences that are being reduced a little further."

Nationally, most of the inmates being set free are black and Hispanic men and most of them were caught with cocaine (crack or powder), followed by methamphetamine. The Bureau of Prisons has so far refused to release their names.

Although most offenders who applied for the reductions are getting them, some are ineligible because they are career criminals or are considered too dangerous to release.

The releases are happening under a policy change known as "Drugs Minus Two," which refers to the scoring system used by federal judges to determine an inmate's possible sentence. The system assigns numeric values to different factors like the type of crime the person committed, their criminal history, and whether the defendant used a gun. Under the new policy, the value given to drug trafficking was decreased by two levels.

For eligible inmates, this has translated to an average sentence reduction of about two years. On average, they will have served nearly 9 years of what was originally an 11-year sentence, though some of the inmates being released have been in prison for more than 25 years.

"These people were sent away at a period of time when politics collided to hurt them — sentences were high and violent crime was up," said Tamara Lave, an associate professor of law at the University of Miami. "It's much better to be selling drugs right now than in the '80s."

Contact Anna M. Phillips at aphillips@tampabay.com or (813) 226-3354. Follow @annamphillips.