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Editorial: Prisons need strong push for reform

 
Gov. Rick Scott and state lawmakers need to acknowledge the atrocities occurring in state corrections facilities and actually fund the reforms the system so desperately needs.
Gov. Rick Scott and state lawmakers need to acknowledge the atrocities occurring in state corrections facilities and actually fund the reforms the system so desperately needs.
Published Dec. 24, 2014

The more the curtain is pulled back on Florida's prison system, the more dark corners are exposed. Gov. Rick Scott and state lawmakers need to acknowledge the atrocities occurring in state corrections facilities and actually fund the reforms the system so desperately needs. Without that, new Corrections Secretary Julie Jones is all but destined to fail to root out a corrupt culture that for decades has blurred the lines between those who are in prison for a crime and those employees who are committing them while on the clock.

Things were supposed to be getting better in Florida's prisons on the heels of a series of Miami Herald stories over the past year that exposed an alarming number of brutal and suspicious inmate deaths involving corrections officers, including a 50-year-old mentally ill inmate who was left in a scalding shower for two hours and a 27-year-old who was repeatedly gassed while undergoing respiratory distress. Before he retired, Secretary Michael Crews earlier this year fired dozens of officers tied to the cases and promised to create a searchable database, stretching 14 years, of prison deaths. Going forward, Crews said the Florida Department of Law Enforcement would oversee all future prison death investigations, providing a welcome outside review of prison employees' actions in each case.

But as the Herald reported earlier this month, many fired employees have gotten their jobs back; the database contains reports so heavily redacted as to make them all but meaningless; and FDLE has announced it needs about $8.4 million more and 66 more staff to handle such investigations.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the state prison system and the Herald continues to compile more stories of suspicious prison deaths stretching from Santa Rosa to Miami-Dade counties — including one chilling narrative involving Bernadette Gregory, 42. The wheelchair-bound inmate at the Lowell prison in Ocala allegedly hanged herself by tying a sheet in a double knot and twisting it several times around her top bunk, all while handcuffed. The day she died in 2009, her fiance received a letter from her detailing how she was being threatened by corrections officers and how a captain had hit her in the head with a radio. She had filed a complaint.

But the internal investigation into Gregory's death was never reviewed by any outside investigator and was filed away without a second look. That standard operating procedure — out of sight and out of mind — has made it far too easy for far too long for state officials to deny the reality of Florida prisons. And the victims, all convicted criminals, are not the most sympathetic. But they are largely powerless. And a democracy that tacitly condones such disregard for human life stains the very values it claims to hold most dear.

The Project on Accountable Justice, a bipartisan prison reform group, has offered up serious ideas about how to shake up Florida's corrupt system. But no ideas for reform will mean much until state leaders acknowledge the atrocities that have happened and fully commit both money and energy to changing the very culture of the state's penal system. This is not Julie Jones' job alone; it's the job of every elected official hired by voters to run a just and moral state government.