Word: florida
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...little or no rehabilitation efforts to prevent recidivism. Other suits decry what one calls excessive as well as "malicious and sadistic" use of pepper spray and other chemicals to keep mentally ill prisoners under control. In many cases the sprays have burned off inmates' skin, according to the suit. "Florida prisons still need to end this kind of outrageous conduct," says Randall Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute in Miami, which is participating in a suit filed against the state's current Corrections head, James McDonough, along with other department officials...
...Neither McDonough nor other Florida corrections officials will discuss the suits, since they're still pending. But the state in the past has insisted that pepper spray is one of the more benign means of controlling violent and mentally ill prisoners - and Florida is hardly the only state that uses such chemical agents to handle unruly inmates. But beyond the pepper spray issue, groups like Berg's acknowledge that McDonough, an MIT grad and former Army colonel, has begun long-overdue reforms to tackle corruption and other abuses. "We're changing the culture of the Department," McDonough insists. "There...
...That attitude led to quite a few excesses. Ten years ago, when a malfunctioning electric chair caused a prisoner's leather mask to burst into flames during his execution, Florida's Democratic Attorney General Robert Butterworth joked that the problems with "Old Sparky" - the chair's nickname - were actually a good deterrent to murder. Things didn't improve much after then Governor Jeb Bush and the Republicans took power in Tallahassee in 1999, especially at the Department of Juvenile Justice. In June of 2003, Omar Paisley, 17, an inmate at a juvenile detention center in Miami that was filled...
...successor, McDonough surely knows he has to work overtime to regain credibility for his department. With that in mind, he has made prisoner rehabilitation more of a priority, channeling renewed effort and funding toward prison education, substance abuse counseling, vocational training and daily life-management skills. "I think Florida is actually out in front now compared to a lot of state prison systems," says McDonough, who believes his rehab emphasis will cut the state's recidivism rate by more than 10 percentage points by the start of the next decade...
...That would be welcome in a state whose 92,000 inmates amount to the nation's third largest prison population. Over the past two decades, Florida has in many ways led a national get-tough-on-crime wave that has reduced some crime rates but has also given the U.S. the world's highest incarceration rate. Bush had championed the often rough boot camps for juvenile delinquents; but after Anderson's death, Florida's conservative legislature voted to abolish them. And it's beginning to listen to McDonough's argument that lowering recidivism will save the state the hundreds...