Miami Herald Logo

Fred Grimm: Amid prison scandal, we’re stuck with Scott while Georgia has the real deal | Miami Herald

×
  • E-edition
  • Home
    • Site Information
    • Contact Us
    • About Us
    • Herald Store
    • RSS Feeds
    • Special Sections
    • Advertise
    • Advertise with Us
    • Media Kit
    • Mobile
    • Mobile Apps & eReaders
    • Newsletters
    • Social
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Google+
    • Instagram
    • YouTube

    • Sections
    • News
    • South Florida
    • Miami-Dade
    • Broward
    • Florida Keys
    • Florida
    • Politics
    • Weird News
    • Weather
    • National & World
    • Colombia
    • National
    • World
    • Americas
    • Cuba
    • Guantánamo
    • Haiti
    • Venezuela
    • Local Issues
    • Crime
    • Education
    • Environment
    • Health Care
    • In Depth
    • Issues & Ideas
    • Traffic
    • Sections
    • Sports
    • Blogs & Columnists
    • Pro & College
    • Miami Dolphins
    • Miami Heat
    • Miami Marlins
    • Florida Panthers
    • College Sports
    • University of Miami
    • Florida International
    • University of Florida
    • Florida State University
    • More Sports
    • High School Sports
    • Auto Racing
    • Fighting
    • Golf
    • Horse Racing
    • Outdoors
    • Soccer
    • Tennis
    • Youth Sports
    • Other Sports
    • Politics
    • Elections
    • The Florida Influencer Series
    • Sections
    • Business
    • Business Monday
    • Banking
    • International Business
    • National Business
    • Personal Finance
    • Real Estate News
    • Small Business
    • Technology
    • Tourism & Cruises
    • Workplace
    • Business Plan Challenge
    • Blogs & Columnists
    • Cindy Krischer Goodman
    • The Starting Gate
    • Work/Life Balancing Act
    • Movers
    • Sections
    • Living
    • Advice
    • Fashion
    • Food & Drink
    • Health & Fitness
    • Home & Garden
    • Pets
    • Recipes
    • Travel
    • Wine
    • Blogs & Columnists
    • Dave Barry
    • Ana Veciana-Suarez
    • Flashback Miami
    • More Living
    • LGBTQ South Florida
    • Palette Magazine
    • Indulge Magazine
    • South Florida Album
    • Broward Album
    • Sections
    • Entertainment
    • Books
    • Comics
    • Games & Puzzles
    • Horoscopes
    • Movies
    • Music & Nightlife
    • People
    • Performing Arts
    • Restaurants
    • TV
    • Visual Arts
    • Blogs & Columnists
    • Jose Lambiet
    • Lesley Abravanel
    • More Entertainment
    • Events Calendar
    • Miami.com
    • Contests & Promotions
    • Sections
    • All Opinion
    • Editorials
    • Op-Ed
    • Editorial Cartoons
    • Jim Morin
    • Letters to the Editor
    • From Our Inbox
    • Speak Up
    • Submit a Letter
    • Meet the Editorial Board
    • Influencers Opinion
    • Blogs & Columnists
    • Blog Directory
    • Columnist Directory
    • Andres Oppenheimer
    • Carl Hiaasen
    • Leonard Pitts Jr.
    • Fabiola Santiago
    • Obituaries
    • Obituaries in the News
    • Place an Obituary

    • Place an ad
    • All Classifieds
    • Announcements
    • Apartments
    • Auctions/Sales
    • Automotive
    • Commercial Real Estate
    • Employment
    • Garage Sales
    • Legals
    • Merchandise
    • Obituaries
    • Pets
    • Public Notices
    • Real Estate
    • Services
  • Public Notices
  • Cars
  • Jobs
  • Moonlighting
  • Real Estate
  • Mobile & Apps

  • el Nuevo Herald
  • Miami.com
  • Indulge

Fred Grimm

Fred Grimm: Amid prison scandal, we’re stuck with Scott while Georgia has the real deal

Fred Grimm

fgrimm@MiamiHerald.com

    ORDER REPRINT →

April 10, 2015 06:26 PM

Nathan Deal is nobody’s idea of a liberal. This is the guy who rammed the infamous “Guns Everywhere Act” through the Georgia Legislature last year, allowing gunslingers to pack heat in churches, bars, nightclubs, libraries. Before that, he made his name railing about undocumented immigrants. Gov. Deal is just plain crazy right wing.

So if ultra-conservative Deal has the guts to champion prison reform amid the loony politics of a state like Georgia, why the hell can’t we get some like-minded leadership down here in a state of comparatively moderate inclinations.

Surely, Rick Scott must have noticed, now that he’s on his fourth Department of Corrections secretary in four years, that something’s amiss with Florida’s prison system.

Over the last year, the Miami Herald has been reporting one horrific incident of inmate abuse after another. During Gov. Scott’s tenure, prisoners have been routinely doused with pepper spray and tear gas by guards, treatment that left some them dead in their cells. In one ghastly incident, a mentally ill prisoner died after being locked in a scalding shower closet.

Sign Up and Save

Get six months of free digital access to the Miami Herald

SUBSCRIBE WITH GOOGLE

#ReadLocal

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating more than 100 prison deaths of inmates.

Guards regularly covered up their involvement in suspicious deaths, while the DOC’s Inspector General’s Office pretended not to notice. Several current and former inspectors told state legislators that they had been ordered to ignore evidence of guard brutality. This testimony was elicited despite an order from the DOC hierarchy warning inspectors to keep their mouths shut.

All that, yet the governor had little to say about Florida’s prison crisis. Not even after the last week’s corrections scandal reverberated through the national media with the arrest of three guards charged with plotting the murder of a black inmate at DOC’s Reception and Medical Center in Lake Butler. The guards were identified as members of the Ku Klux Klan. To put it more specifically, they ran with the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

When a prison employee adopts the title “Exalted Cyclops,” it may be time for a governor to take notice.

Not our governor. After months of news stories that begin, “In the latest scandal out of the Florida prison system,” Scott has remained oblivious. The corrections calamity didn’t rate a mention in his January inaugural address.

Up in Georgia, meanwhile, Gov. Deal has made penal reform a personal mission. Over the last four years, under Deal’s leadership, mandatory minimum sentencing has been modified. Judges have been given more discretion in sentencing.

While Florida has been brutalizing inmates, Georgia has added prison education programs. The famously conservative governor has pushed through programs aimed at reducing the number of juveniles and adult non-violent drug offenders in Georgia lock-ups. The state’s prison population, which had been rapidly increasing in the years before Deal took office, has been reduced from 56,432 to 53,383. “A lot of people said that’s not a topic that a Republican governor ought to be talking about,” Deal told the Summit on Criminal Justice Reform last month.

But a Republican governor, at least one interested in leadership, can do exactly that and couch it as a fiscal necessity. Scott oversees a prison system with more than 100,000 prisoners and 22,000 employees that sucks $2.3 billion out of his annual budget. Surely, it must have occurred to his political consultants that Floridians expect their governor to repair this $2.3 billion sump of mismanagement, abuse, killings and cover5-ups.

Back in 1968, when stories were seeping out of the infamous Dozier School for Boys about mysterious deaths and horrible mistreatment, Gov. Claude Kirk made a surprise visit to the state juvenile lock-up in Marianna. He was outraged by what he found. “If one of your kids were kept in such circumstances, you’d be up there with rifles,” Kirk said.

Gov. Scott ought to try an unannounced visit to a Florida prison. He might have a similar revelation.

Instead, it was Senate Criminal Justice Chair Greg Evers who showed up for unexpected visits to two troubled prisons in North Florida, Jefferson Correctional and Suwannee Correctional, where inmates had rioted in 2013 and where an inmate died under suspicious circumstances in 2014.

“I’m sorry to be the only fool who has taken it on himself to check it out, but I don’t like dog-and-pony shows,’’ Evers told my Herald colleague, Mary Ellen Klas.

Evers is another right-wing Republican (and a darling of the NRA), but he managed to guide a progressive bill through the Senate with a 36-1 vote that would establish a nine-member independent oversight commission. His bill would enable prison commission members to make surprise inspections and confidentially interview prisoners or employees. They could investigate allegations of corruption or abuse. A grievance process for the inmates and their families or lawyers would allow for independent medical evaluations. Old or profoundly ill inmates could be released early.

Evers championed a real reform bill. Except the House of Representatives version, still awaiting a final vote, doesn’t do much, with no oversight commission, with no new rules on accountability.

If Rick Scott had a sudden urge to demonstrate leadership, he could convince state representatives to support amendments that would bring Florida urgently needed prison reform. Maybe the governor should make a surprise visit to the House.

  Comments  

Videos

Four members of the Venezuelan military desert their post and flee toward Colombia

Activists remove barricades from a bridge at the Colombian border to Venezuela

View More Video

Trending Stories

Patriots owner Robert Kraft is among the hundreds charged in Florida sex traffic sting

February 22, 2019 12:23 PM

Trump threatens to deport Venezuelan military officials’ families that have fled to Miami

February 22, 2019 07:21 PM

It’s about to get easier for legal immigrants in Miami to get their papers. Faster, too.

February 22, 2019 03:14 PM

Government preparing to be sued in 2023, when the Keys stop issuing building permits

February 23, 2019 07:00 AM

Two dead, 14 injured after Venezuela soldiers fire at civilians near border with Brazil

February 22, 2019 10:13 AM

Read Next

A career chasing disasters, scandals, murders and opening day of turkey season, 1969

Fred Grimm

A career chasing disasters, scandals, murders and opening day of turkey season, 1969

By Fred Grimm

    ORDER REPRINT →

August 25, 2017 08:00 AM

Mostly, I chased calamities. Sometimes (like one frightening night during the 1980 Miami riots) calamities chased me.

KEEP READING

Sign Up and Save

#ReadLocal

Get six months of free digital access to the Miami Herald

SUBSCRIBE WITH GOOGLE

MORE FRED GRIMM

Florida’s lunkhead ‘white supremacists’ ain’t all that supreme

Fred Grimm

Florida’s lunkhead ‘white supremacists’ ain’t all that supreme

August 17, 2017 08:02 PM
New studies and new catastrophes give climate change deniers a lot to deny

Fred Grimm

New studies and new catastrophes give climate change deniers a lot to deny

August 10, 2017 07:01 PM
Floridians oblivious to an epidemic of accidental child shootings

Fred Grimm

Floridians oblivious to an epidemic of accidental child shootings

August 03, 2017 07:14 PM
Doped up greyhounds add to the disgrace dogging parimutuels in Florida

Fred Grimm

Doped up greyhounds add to the disgrace dogging parimutuels in Florida

July 21, 2017 07:00 AM
Oblivious to the irony, Marlins (apologies to the actual fish) sue fans

Fred Grimm

Oblivious to the irony, Marlins (apologies to the actual fish) sue fans

July 13, 2017 06:59 PM
New education law allows anti-science mob to go after evolution and climate change

Fred Grimm

New education law allows anti-science mob to go after evolution and climate change

July 06, 2017 07:30 PM
Take Us With You

Real-time updates and all local stories you want right in the palm of your hand.

Icon for mobile apps

Miami Herald App

View Newsletters

Subscriptions
  • Start a Subscription
  • Customer Service
  • eEdition
  • Vacation Hold
  • Pay Your Bill
  • Rewards
Learn More
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Newsletters
  • News in Education
  • Public Insight Network
  • Reader Panel
Advertising
  • Place a Classified
  • Media Kit
  • Commercial Printing
  • Public Notices
Copyright
Commenting Policy
Privacy Policy
Terms of Service


Back to Story