South Florida Sun Sentinel. January 28, 2022.
Editorial: Despite many opportunities, Legislature is failing to pass criminal justice reforms
Ugly facts contradict Gov. Ron DeSantis’ boast to the Legislature that we live in “America’s liberty outpost, the free state of Florida.”
The Gulag State would be more fitting. Florida incarcerates its citizens at a higher rate than 40 other U.S. states and every other nation worldwide. Of every 100,000 of our people, 444 are in state prisons and 330 are in local jails. The prisoners are disproportionately Black, imprisoned at a rate more than four times higher than whites. Florida prosecutes more children as felons than any other state, and that’s more than three times as likely to happen to Black kids as to whites.
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The perpetually crisis-ridden prisons, now under their seventh leader since 2008, have nearly 5,800 officers too few to safely supervise some 84,000 inmates, with nearly 2,000 more waiting in local jails and a sentencing surge expected from trials delayed by COVID-19. Four of every 10 new underpaid correctional officers quit within their first year and 60% are gone by their second anniversary.
The governor’s harsh politics demand more of the same, rejecting the sensible, cost-effective reforms that most legislators understand but dare not say endorse. The bootlickers are afraid to defy what the governor declared in his State of the State address Jan. 11.
“We will not allow law enforcement to be…
