FLORIDA PRISONS: CUTS COULD OPEN GATES

The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered California to release 30,000
inmates, ruling that conditions at its overcrowded prisons amounted to
cruel-and-unusual punishment.

Can the same thing happen in Florida? Probably. With 102,000 inmates,
Florida has the third-largest penal system in America.

Florida locks up inmates at a rate of 559 per 100,000 residents.
That's actually higher than California's 457 inmates per 100,000 population.

Gov. Rick Scott and state lawmakers seem to think the solution to
overcrowded prisons is privatization -- one of the largest
prison-privatization programs in U.S. history.

The new budget eliminates more than 1,700 state corrections positions
while counting on private prisons to incarcerate inmates more cheaply
(this after the private prison industry gave nearly $1 million to
Florida campaigns).

Privatization: False Premise

It is unlikely that privatization will either save the state much
money or immunize it from California-style liability.

The problem isn't that the state doesn't have enough prisons, public
or private. The problem is that it locks up too many people because of
unnecessarily draconian sentencing laws.

Even some prominent Republicans are not convinced.

"It's unprecedented in the United States," said state Sen. Mike
Fasano, R-New Port Richey, reported Reuters last month. Fasano is
chair of the Budget Subcommittee on Criminal and Civil Justice
Appropriations.

Fasano tried to block the privatization plan. He said he failed,
Reuters reported, because of strong lobbying efforts by influential
companies such as the GEO Group. The Boca Raton-based is the
second-largest U.S. private prison company

"I'm a conservative Republican that believes in privatizing certain
parts of government services, but we should never privatize public
safety," Fasano said.

Florida officials need to get serious about sentencing reform, just in
case the expected privatization miracle doesn't come to pass.