While several conservative leaning states have passed major criminal justice reform legislation over the past decade, Florida isn’t one of them.
What You Need To Know
- A state lawmaker wants more inmates to be eligible for parole
- Most Florida inmates serve their entire sentence
- Florida mandates that inmates serve 85% of their sentence
Take for instance, the issue of early prison release.
Due to the state’s determinate sentencing requirements that inmates must serve a mandatory 85% of their sentence, most inmates in Florida’s correctional system are released only when their sentence ends.
Tampa Democratic state Rep. Dianne Hart is refiling legislation in advance of the 2021 session that attempts to change that.
One bill already filed this month would bring back parole for eligible inmates.
Though the system technically still exists via the Commission on Offender Review, very few inmates are granted release this way: just 28 in 2018-2019, according to a report by state economists.
“We’ve got to give you an incentive to do better – to feel better about yourself, and know that at some point, you’re going to get out,” Rep. Hart told Spectrum News on Thursday. “But the Commission on Offender Review is – the best I can say about it is – it makes no sense. There are no real parameters. There’s no real guidelines. There’s no real requirements on what it is that you have to do to get out.”
Hart’s bill would compel the Commission on Offender Review to focus on an inmate’s completion of specific programs, their behavior and the “lack of risk to the public.”
“We’re not talking about letting somebody out who has been in trouble [in prison],” says Denise Rock, the executive director with Florida Cares Charity, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of incarcerated people.
Noting how strict the Dept. of Corrections is in terms of issuing disciplinary reports, Rock says that in most cases the parole eligible inmates are people who are likely “senior citizens who have aged out of crime.”
Hart will also soon reintroduce a “gain-time” bill designed to lower the 85% sentence requirement to 65%, allowing nonviolent or first-time offenders to be released for good behavior. That bill, which has previously been filed in the Senate by St. Petersburg Republican Jeff Brandes, has been rejected by Florida GOP House members in recent years.
The Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research, which evaluates policy for the Legislature, produced an economic study of the proposal when it was pending during the 2019 legislative session. It concluded that a reduction of nearly 7,600 beds in the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) would save nearly $74 million immediately and $860.4 million after five years.
The Dept. of Corrections was handed a severe black eye last week when the U.S. Justice Dept. released a report alleging there was “reasonable cause” to believe that authorities at Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala failed to protect female inmates from sexual abuse by the facility’s staff. The report also said that corrections department officials have documented and been aware of such sexual abuse at Lowell since at least 2006.
Hart says that she has visited Lowell “at least five times” since 2018 and has heard enough dark tales from female inmates to know that it was no secret what was happening there.
“I know that our wardens have known,” she says. “I know that our Secretary [of Corrections Mark Inch] should have known. I know that the Dept. Secretary [Ricky] Dixon, he had to have known. You promoted people up out of Lowell that were a part of that era when women were being raped and impregnated, all those terrible things. And you just kept promoting them.”
In the wake of the Justice Department’s announcement, Tampa Democratic state Sen. Janet Cruz called on Gov. Ron DeSantis to request that the warden at Lowell Correctional, Stephen Rossiter, resign.
Hart says she will host a press conference next week with former inmates from Lowell who will tell more about the conditions at that corrections facility.
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January 01, 2021 at 08:24AM
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Tampa Lawmaker Refiles Bill to Bring Back Parole - Bay News 9
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