After a series of inmate deaths, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the Florida prison system.
With 320 inmate deaths for 2014 as of Dec. 8, the Florida prison system was on track for its deadliest year in history, according to a Dec. 13 article in the Miami Herald.
Florida has the third-largest prison system in the nation, with 101,000 inmates and a $2.1 billion budget.
The rise of prison deaths coincides with an aging prison population and the doubling of incidents involving use of force by officers over the past five years, the Herald reported.
The public outcry by human rights groups and prison reform activists caused state lawmakers to scrutinize the prison system.
In the midst of the uproar, Gov. Rick Scott hired Julie Jones as Department of Corrections secretary, replacing Mike Crews, who retired.
“If nothing else, the corrections officers and the people running the institutions have been put on notice that someone else is watching them, and they are no longer policing themselves,” said David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor in Miami.
In one of many suspicious deaths, Bernadette “Brandi” Gregory, 42, was found hanged in her cell at the Lowell Correctional Institution in 2009.
Her death came four days after she filed a written complaint that a correctional officer captain had beaten her and bashed her over the head with a radio, DOC records show.
“I will not sleep on this. I will follow through to the end and press charges,” Gregory said in her complaint.
Prison authorities said Gregory tied a double knot in a sheet, twisted it several times around her top bunk, looped the other end around her neck and hanged herself – all this in 11 minutes from her wheelchair while handcuffed.
Gregory was getting out in eight months and records show she repeatedly complained that officers were ridiculing her and falsified disciplinary reports to place her in solitary confinement.
Debbie Escoe, a retired Lowell corrections officer who helped cut Gregory down, said, it would have been difficult – but not impossible – for her to tie the ligature in 11 minutes while handcuffed in front of her torso.
Escoe added that she doubts that Gregory’s death was the result of foul play because surveillance cameras would have shown everyone who came and went from her confinement cell.
Linda Thompson, a former Lowell inmate, described to the Herald seeing a group of corrections officers flipping over Gregory’s wheelchair while kicking and beating her the day she died.
A spokesman for the department said Gregory’s death was thoroughly investigated, and two officers were disciplined for failing to follow procedure and failing to protect Gregory.
After the death of Darren Rainey in 2012, former DOC Secretary Crews announced a series of reforms.
Rainey 50, a mentally ill inmate, was allegedly locked in a 180-degree scalding shower by corrections officers at Dade Correctional Institution as punishment for defecating on the floor of his cell and refusing to clean it up.
Crews forced DCI’s warden and deputy warden to step down. Even though he fired more than two dozen officers for excessive force that led to the deaths of inmates, many have gotten their jobs back, the newspaper reported.
The new inmate mortality database, which lists all inmates’ deaths, is one of the reforms initiated by Crews that is receiving criticism.
Families of inmates say the supplementary reports that detail the deaths are so heavily redacted that they are unreadable. The families are forced to hire lawyers and go to court for the un-redacted reports.
The “transparency database,” as Crews called it, only posts inmates deaths that are deemed accidents, homicides or suicides.
“They are getting away with murder, quite frankly,” said Ron McAndrew, a retired Florida warden who is now a prison consultant.
“There are cases that go back decades and not just state correctional institutions, but juvenile institutions as well.” A shake-up in the department is long overdue, McAndrew added.
In the mid-1970s, the federal courts oversaw the Florida prisons for more than two decades to relieve overcrowding and provide adequate medical care.
