TALLAHASSEE -- As emotions run high, lawmakers are again fast-tracking privatization of South Florida prisons while the state rushes to shut down seven others, an economic and political one-two punch that is creating anger and anxiety statewide.

The Senate Budget Committee voted 13-5 Wednesday to fast-track privatization of prisons in the southern tier of the state. Correctional officers who were not allowed to testify shouted “Shame, Shame!” as security personnel hovered near lawmakers.

Republican lawmakers are determined to overcome a judge’s rejection of last year’s privatization plan and pass a plan that can survive legal scrutiny. The current proposal, which would amount to the largest expansion of prison privatization in the country, would replace the state with for-profit vendors at 30 prisons in 18 South Florida counties. Only the South Florida Reception Center in Miami-Dade County, a point of entry for inmates, would remain state-run.

“I don’t have a particular bias for public or private,” said Senate Budget Chairman JD Alexander, R-Lake Wales, privatization’s leading advocate. “But I am charged, for one more year, with making every dollar count.”

For-profit prison vendors would be required to run prisons at a cost of at least 7 percent less than what state-run prisons cost taxpayers. Opponents say the savings would be outweighed by the loss of jobs, economic dislocation and lack of accountability.

“You don’t have all the facts,” former state Sen. Ron Silver of North Miami Beach, a lobbyist for the Teamsters Union, told Alexander.

Alexander says cheaper prisons would stave off cuts to schools and healthcare, and the pursuit of privatization has become his final legislative crusade. But opposition is building on multiple fronts.

Correctional officers and unions say privatization is being rushed and will cause widespread disruption to families, where it is common for two or more members of the same family to hold prison jobs.

And opponents are reviving past privatization fiascoes, including overbilling by prison operators and botched outsourcing of prison food services and inmate medical care.

Prisons are not just warehouses for criminals. In the jargon of modern-day politics, they are job creators — especially in struggling small towns where few job opportunities exist. But with the state pinched by a $1.4 billion shortfall and with the prisoner population shrinking, officials say it is a waste of money to keep empty prison dorms open.

Prison guards are incensed that over the past year the Department of Corrections has quietly moved the most troublesome and costly inmates from South Florida prisons to prisons upstate, making the southern prisons more attractive to profit-minded prison vendors. A spokesman for the system, Ann Howard, said 79 inmates in the south are classified as “close management,” out of a total of 10,000.

Silenced by senators Wednesday, the workers became even angrier, until Alexander met with three dozen of them for an hour and listened to their concerns. They included Sarah Babineaux, 40, who earns $32,000 a year after eight years at Martin Correctional, one of the South Florida prisons that would be privatized.

She said she lies awake at night, not knowing where her next job will be.

“It’s stressful,” she told Alexander. “My 17-year-old is looking for a class ring and I don’t know where I’m going to purchase it.”

Herald/Times staff writer Tia Mitchell contributed to this report.