Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature’s massive state employee cuts are part of the struggles facing the state’s troubled prison system, the new head of the state’s corrections agency said this week. (Photo by Carolyn Allen via FLGov.com)
By Ashley Lopez
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
As state lawmakers look into Florida’s troubled prison system, a high level official in the state’s corrections agency told legislators that personnel cuts are the root of many of the agency’s problems.
Late last year, FCIR took a look at how the state has dramatically reduced its staff in the past decade. The sharpest state employment decline has been happening under Gov. Rick Scott’s administration.
According to a workforce report compiled by the state, while the nationwide average number of state workers per 10,000 in population was 211 in 2012, Florida had just 111 that year—almost half the national average.
While the state’s population has grown by 4 million since 1998 and its budget has increased by $25 billion since 2000, Florida has almost 10,000 fewer established positions in the State’s Personnel System, State University System, State Legislature, Courts System and Justice Administration combined, than it did 15 years ago.
As part of a series, FCIR noted three particular agencies have been feeling the squeeze and it’s had some very serious consequences. Those agencies included the Florida Department of Children and Families, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.
Well, we can add another agency to that list: the Florida Department of Corrections.
According to The Miami Herald/ Tampa Bay Times,
In an unprecedented moment of candor, Florida’s newly installed prisons chief told a Senate committee that private contractors have provided inadequate medical care to Florida’s inmates while crumbling infrastructure and years of staffing cuts have fostered “culture” problems in the massive agency.
Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Julie Jones had intended to present the Senate Criminal Justice Committee with a variety of reforms she is proposing to the system that has seen a 13 percent increase in inmate deaths in the past year, but the committee had other ideas.
…Jones agreed with lawmakers that “Yes, we have a culture issue,” but noted that unless they restore hundreds of positions cut from the budget in the first four years of Gov. Rick Scott’s tenure, other changes might be inadequate.
“Staffing is key to lowering the temperature in these facilities,” she said. Jones added that training was also needed to raise the level of professionalism and change expectations.
“They feel they don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing,” she said of staff. “They’re doing it the way their daddy did it and their granddaddy did it.”
Among the problems the state’s prison system faces is a potential federal probe into whether the state is infringing on the constitutional rights of inmates. Whistleblowers from around the state are accusing prison guards of abuse, and some incidents have led to suspicious deaths.
Furthermore, state lawmakers are trying to assess whether state agencies are properly equipped to investigate or penalize prison staff when they abuse inmates. Besides political turmoil at higher levels of the agencies, whistleblowers say staff at the respective prisons actively covered up previous instances of abuse.