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Prison Reform: A Course Correction
With prisons full and a tight state budget, Florida business leaders are pushing reform as a matter of efficiency -- and public safety.
“ ‘Do the crime, do the time,’ is fine,” says Steve Seibert, vice president and director of policy at the Collins Center for Public Policy, which is leading reform efforts and plans a major statewide summit on criminal justice in November. “But we have forgotten that other precept that you actually can ‘pay your debt to society.’ Ex-offenders do, and then continue paying for the rest of their lives — the punishment never seems to end.”
Safety: Warden Melody Flores at Baker Correctional Institution thinks it’s essential to reduce the likelihood that former inmates will commit new crimes: The public is safer if inmates get help with job training and substance abuse counseling before they leave prison. [Photo: John M. Fletcher] |
Most important, they say, is reducing the likelihood that former inmates will commit new crimes. At Baker Correctional Institution in rural Sanderson west of Jacksonville, Warden Melody Flores puts it bluntly. Which stranger would you rather have sitting in the same movie theater as your daughter, she asks: The recently released inmate with a drug-abuse problem, no education and no job, turned loose with nothing but $100 and a bus ticket? Or, the former inmate who’d earned a GED, got help for his drug problem and came home to start working?
$100 million - Cost of a new prison $55.09 a day - Cost to house an inmate at a major publicly run prison $40.92 - for operations $13.02 - for health services $1.15 - for education services |
Under the new policy, Baker gets inmates who are within 18 months of release and will be returning to homes in northeast Florida. The prison’s proximity to Jacksonville, which sees nearly 1,900 ex-offenders a year return to its neighborhoods, makes Baker an ideal place to show how a focus on re-entry can impact crime.
88% of Florida’s inmates will be released at some point.
The state’s inmate population has increased by almost 20% since 2004. The population grew by 5.8% in 2008 alone and passed the 100,000 mark in December. |
In addition to substance-abuse treatment, reading instruction and GED courses, the Baker prison’s inmates will have access to job-training and certificate-granting programs in bricklaying, cabinetmaking, electrical work and plumbing. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office hopes to employ a full-time resource specialist at the prison to begin working with offenders a year before they’re freed. When they leave prison, rather than being dumped at the bus station, they’ll be driven to a Jacksonville re-entry portal staffed by the Sheriff’s Office, where they’ll check in with the police and meet with probation officers, drug counselors, religious volunteers who can help with clothes and housing and potential employers. “This is beyond anything anybody’s ever done in corrections in this state,” says DOC administrator Eberlein.