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| Florida's newest $184 million prison in the cross hairs |
| By sun-sentinel.com |
| Published: 05/11/2009 |
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Florida short of cash to house prisoners Tough-on-crime mentality is being reassessed By Aaron Deslatte | Tallahassee Bureau SUWANNEE COUNTY - The steel doors, microwave sensors, electrified fencing and razor wire that cocoon Florida's newest $184 million prison are meant to hold the state's worst violators. "If he comes here, he's the worst of the worst, he's assaulted inmates, tried to escape, assaulted staff," said Jim Witt, warden of the Suwannee Correctional Institute still under construction about 70 miles east of Tallahassee. "If the Department of Corrections is a hospital, this is intensive care." But the state can't afford to open its doors on schedule in August, and a plan by legislators to give the state-of-the-art facility to private prison contractors was scrapped at the eleventh hour. So it will be sometime next year before the more than 3,000 convicted murderers, rapists and violent offenders begin shuffling through its gates. With the state short on cash and prison beds, Republicans in the Florida Legislature are being forced to reassess the tough-on-crime mentality that has permeated their politics for years. Florida's prison population exceeded 100,000 this year, and state prison officials expect to need more prison beds during the next five years as the number of incarcerated swells past 120,000. Orange and Pinellas counties led the state in that growth rate in 2008, with Orange's incarceration rate growing 15.2 percent to 1,868 new prisoners. The single largest category of growth in crimes was burglary, state records show. "Our prisons are growing faster than anything else in our state," said Senate criminal justice budget chief Victor Crist, R-Tampa. The demand for prison beds led legislators to propose privatizing the new prison in Suwannee County to save an estimated $2.8 million. But Corrections Secretary Walter McNeil and a late-hour intervention by Gov. Charlie Crist managed to persuade Senate leaders to back down. McNeil warned that the private prison contractors weren't trained to handle the worst kinds of offenders who would be housed in solitary confinement in the Suwannee prison. "Operating [a closed-monitoring] institution with reduced and inexperienced staffing in an effort to save money is not an option," McNeil wrote to Senate President Jeff Atwater, R-North Palm Beach. "To do so puts public safety at risk." North Florida legislators, the prison guard union and critics of Florida's two-decade-old experimentation with private prisons also screamed that the move was risky. This year's money crunch also prompted legislators to abandon plans to bond out $300 million in future prison construction. Rather, to address prison population growth, legislators ended years of resistance and included plans to beef up drug courts to find programs for drug users instead of dumping them into the state prison system. Legislators also directed circuit judges to keep more nonviolent offenders who commit lower-level crimes out of prisons. The spending blueprint even lets the Corrections Department start negotiating with counties and other states to take state prisoners when the department is close to running out of beds. The budget also included a $9 million boost for private companies running existing prisons — a boost critics called a payoff to appease private vendors by funding expanded services and construction at their prisons in Bay, Santa Rosa, Glades, Jackson and Palm Beach counties.Read more. If link has expired, check the website of the article's original news source. |
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