TALLAHASSEE – President Barack Obama’s July 13 sentence commutation of 13 Floridians, including one Orange Park man, has caught the attention of a Florida tax watchdog group to a point it is urging the Florida Legislature to rethink its sentencing guidelines and minimum mandatory sentences for non-violent drug offenses.
Officials from Florida TaxWatch say the more than $2 billion that Sunshine State taxpayers send yearly to the state prison system is the third largest in the country behind Texas and California. “These aren’t choir boys, but there are less costly ways to handle nonviolent offenders and non-sex offenders in ways that intervene, better manage our resources and better manage our risk,” said Dominic Calabro, chief executive officer of Florida TaxWatch. “We’ve had this lock them up and throw away the key attitude, but that comes with a price tag. It has also turned prison into a crime college where they hone their craft and learn how to be worse criminals.”
In 1988, there were 33,681 inmates in Florida prisons. As of June 2015, the head count was 100,050. The Department of Corrections consists of 143 facilities that include 43 prisons, 33 work camps, 15 annexes, 20 work release centers and six forestry camps.
“In the 80s and into the 90s, we had overcrowding so we started a controlled release program. People were only serving 25 percent of their sentences and in the 90s, drug laws became more stringent and we started sending drug users to prison, along with drug traffickers,” Calabro said. from page 1
“Also in the 90s, Florida created an 85 percent rule called Stop Turning Out Prisoners that requires all prisoners to serve 85 percent of their sentences.”
The Florida Legislature passed the Stop Turning Out Prisoners Act in 1995. Sen. Rob Bradley(R-Fleming Island) – a member of the Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee and former prosecutor – suggests the state may have gone too far by treating all criminals with the same severity.
“We have the toughest laws in the country on violent crime, and we need to be tough on violent crime and sex crimes, but when you’re talking about drug crimes, I’m a big supporter of drug court and veterans court as problem-solving alternatives that treat the underlying causes of them being arrested,” Bradley said.
Treating underlying causes is exactly what many critics say prison doesn’t do. Former State Attorney Harry Shorstein said putting drug addicts in prison doesn’t equate with medical treatment.
“They say they do, but they really don’t – they go to prison and the drug addiction isn’t really addressed. So, they come out with a record and an addiction,” he said.
Shorstein said prison doesn’t reform inmates, it merely cages them. While many of inmates deserve imprisonment, he said, Florida laws are set up to have people fail.
“If you’re only a drug addict, I don’t want to pay a lot of money by locking you up,” Shorstein said. “It’s not fiscally-conservative to say ‘round them up and lock them up.’” Bradley agrees nonviolent offenders should be kept away from those who will be a bad influence.
“When you have someone who is just an obvious drug user, we don’t need to exacerbate the problem by putting them in prison where all they do is learn how to be a better criminal. When it comes to nonviolent crimes like drug offenses, it’s very appropriate to have a conversation because it’s very expensive to incarcerate,” Bradley said.
At the same time it is expensive to incarcerate the non-violent inmates, not every drug offender is offered treatment via drug court as a prison alternative because Florida only offers drug court to first-time offenders.
If they relapse, they can get kicked out by judges who have that authority. In the past, TaxWatch has called for judges to have more discretion when it comes to minimum sentencing and for many third degree felonies to be dropped to misdemeanors.
All of these issues intersect as Florida turns flawed people in to hardened criminals by taking a draconian approach to punishment that does not redeem the people Florida imprisons.
“Many of these violent offenders need to be locked up for life because public safety comes first but we often put nonviolent offenders in the same cells with violent criminals and that only makes them worse,” Calabro said.
A Tennessee-based drug treatment group, Addiction Campuses, wants to come to Clay County and meet with law enforcement. The group would like to see Clay County start a program that was recently instituted in Gloucester, Mass.
The police department there had posted on its Facebook page that beginning this past June 1, anyone who walks in to the police station with the remainder of their drugs and paraphernalia would not be arrested, but immediately placed in a treatment program.
The department also made nasal Narcan, a drug that prevents opiate overdose, available at Gloucester pharmacies without a prescription.
“We’d like to see Clay County adopt the program they started in Gloucester because drug addiction is an illness – you have to treat the disease and prison doesn’t work. In Gloucester, people started coming forward for treatment because they were able to ask for help without fear,” Addiction Campuses Public Relations Manager Brian Sullivan said.
“That creates a visible difference in the prison system because they don’t belong there – they belong in treatment. We’re not going to arrest our way out of this epidemic; treatment is the only way out.”
On July 20, Sullivan said Addiction Campuses had called the Clay County Sheriff’s Office and was hoping to hear back from the department.
Meanwhile, Nathaniel Brown of Orange Park will no longer serve life imprisonment for a 2002 conviction for federal drug charges. His presidential commutation ends his sentence on Nov. 10.
This chart from the Prison Policy Initiative in Northampton, Mass. shows the sharp increase in Florida’s prison population from 1978-2011. A Florida taxpayer watchdog groups says it’s time to rethink how the state sentences non-violent drug offenders because it simply is a cost the taxpayers can live without.
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