FRESH IDEAS FOR PRISONS

Ed Buss has been on the job for less than two months, but Florida's
new secretary of the Department of Corrections is off to a promising
start. He is not interested in the tough-on-crime platitudes that
have dominated state lawmaking for years. As the former head of the
Indiana prison system, Buss knows that reducing a large prison
population means keeping low-risk offenders out of prison and helping
them to stay out. He would accomplish this by embracing progressive
approaches to corrections reform such as ending some mandatory
minimum sentencing. Whether Buss can get his agenda through the
Legislature and the corrections officers union remains to be seen.
Some of his ideas take the wrong direction, but many are worth pursuing.

As an outsider coming into the insular Department of Corrections,
Buss has the experience and freedom to make needed changes. He
already has fired more than a dozen top administrators from the
ossified corrections hierarchy. He's looking at efficiencies in the
way the department is structured, such as switching corrections
officers from an eight-hour to a 12-hour shift. But his best ideas
are those that would address recidivism by investing in prevention
programs such as literacy, mental health and substance abuse treatment.

Housing inmates is expensive, and Florida has 102,000 of them. The
state has the nation's third-largest penal system, costing more than
$2.4 billion annually -- more than twice what the state spends for
its community college system. But despite the nearly $20,000
taxpayers spend to keep each inmate imprisoned for a year, there is
not nearly enough spent to prepare these men and women to re-enter
society upon release.

Buss wants to end the era of "tough love" for young offenders, which
hasn't reduced crime. He endorses a refreshingly evidence-based
approach with an emphasis on early intervention programs, vocational
and educational training and drug treatment. Inevitably these
investments will lower Florida's recidivism rate, which stands at
about 33 percent over three years.

Buss is an encouraging appointment by Gov. Rick Scott, but where
Scott's corrections program goes awry is in his attempt to wring
millions of dollars from the budget by shifting to private prisons
and probation services. Buss also wants to privatize all prison
health care programs -- something with which the state has had woeful
experience. Injecting a profit motive into the provision of inmate
health care is a recipe for abuse. Research shows private prisons
save little if any money and have a questionable track record.

In other areas, Buss sounds positively progressive, such as his calls
for abolishing certain mandatory minimum sentences and giving judges
more discretion to divert people from prison if they don't belong
there. Florida has clogged its criminal code with mandatory minimum
sentences that cost the state in high incarceration rates as well as
the loss of potentially productive members of society.

Buss had great success in Indiana, bringing efficiencies to that
system and reducing the adult prison population. His attempt to
transfer some of those methods to Florida is encouraging.