Audit: ‘Urgent need’ to improve state prison system – will FL state budget reflect that?
Credit: Florida Department of Corrections
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Concerned about dilapidated buildings in Florida’s statewide prison system, the state Senate has set aside $100 million a year for 30 years to address repairs and new construction, a total of $3 billion. But the state House hasn’t following suit.
That sets up a fiscal clash as House and Senate lawmakers craft Florida’s 2024-25 budget.
And it’s getting down to the wire: The Florida Legislature is set to end its regular legislative session in just two weeks. The state budget is a document of hundreds of pages and billions of dollars, and both chambers have to negotiate and join together to build the final budget.
One of the major discrepancies between the two chambers is funds for repairing deteriorated prison facilities and building new sites.
“I would hope we would get closer to the Senate’s side because we have to do something with these dilapidated buildings,” says Hillsborough County Rep. Susan Valdés, the Democratic ranking member of the House Justice Appropriations Subcommittee.
The Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) has accumulated around $2.2 billion in immediate needs and $6 billion in total capital costs to address the issues with the state prison system over the next 20 years, according to a report published in late December by the global consulting firm KPMG.
Auditors with KPMG addressed the Senate Appropriations Committee on Criminal and Civil Justice last fall, where lawmakers first learned about the strategic options that the auditors had laid out in their report.
It said that the state is heading towards a potential crisis if nothing is done soon to address the conflicting situation that a number of the Department of Corrections’ facilities are in “poor” or “critical” condition, while the state’s prison population is expected to expand in the coming decades — from around 85,000 prisoners currently to anywhere between 107,000 to 123,000 by 2042.
The report itself says: “[T]he forecasted inmate population is projected to potentially surpass the total capacity over the next two fiscal years if no action is taken. If accurate, this growth, driven by the population recovering to pre-pandemic numbers and increasing further, highlights the urgent need for expansion and strategic planning.”
“The simple truth is the long-term projection is that they’re going to have to spend billions of dollars in the prison system,” says former St. Petersburg-based Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes, who left the Legislature due to term limits two years ago. “It’s been an area where they’ve had almost ‘epic’ deferred maintenance, and you have a lot of antiquated facilities. They list a number of their facilities in poor or fair condition. They have some that are in critical condition as far facility maintenance goes. And so there is just an incredible amount of need in the Department of Corrections right now for simple maintenance.”
Northeast Republican Sen. Jennifer Bradley, the chair of the Senate Committee Appropriations Committee on Criminal and Civil Justice, says that the Senate is responding to the situation by setting aside $100 million a year for 30 years in the current budget to deal with aging prison infrastructure.
“The first year of funding would provide funds to complete the Lake Mental Health facility, and funding for four new dorms at existing prisons,” she said in a press release issued when the Senate unveiled their proposed budget late last month.
Not included in that initial year is any funding for the construction of a new prison. The KPMG report says the state will need to build three new prisons over the next two decades to accommodate the anticipated growth of the inmate population.
There also is no immediate funding listed for air-conditioning.
Included in the KPMG report under the heading of “Infrastructure Innovations” is a plan to install air-conditioning systems in all 515 of the Department of Corrections facilities. The cost? $582 million.
When the auditors presented that finding to the Senate Appropriations Committee on Criminal and Civil Justice last year, they received pushback from Fort Myers-based GOP state Sen. Jonathan Martin, who questioned that investment “if there’s literally been zero injuries, zero deaths in Florida, due to the lack of air conditioning?”
But former Sen. Brandes, who championed criminal justice and prison reform during his tenure in the Legislature, says that lawmakers need to understand that having a functioning air-conditioning system in the state’s prison facilities isn’t just for the inmates.
“It’s for the corrections officers and staff that work there, too,” he says. “And one of the major challenges that the Department of Corrections has is in retaining staff. Because who wants to work in the middle of July in a very hot location where you have no access to cell service and often times are under the concern of physical force or physical threat by inmates? That’s a reason why we have such a high amount of turnover in the Department of Corrections.”
Corrections Secretary Ricky Dixon said in October at a committee meeting that he was not opposed to air-conditioning prison facilities “but doing so is extremely expensive.”
Rep. Valdés, referring to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ announcement on Friday that he would send additional members of the Florida Highway Patrol and National Guard to help patrol the Texas-Mexico border, said, “We have our priorities twisted, for lack of a better word.”
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