Florida Senate kisses an emotional goodbye to prison privatization

February 14, 2012
By: Michael Abrams
Tallahassee

Backers of efforts to privatize Florida prisons found love fleeting on St. Valentine’s Day as Florida’s Senate brushed aside efforts to hand 28 state-run jails and work camps to private corporations.

The saint, himself, not unfamiliar with jails, spent time in prison before he was beheaded by the Romans, legend says.

The privatization move was said to imperil up to 4,000 jobs in the prison system.

The close vote followed three hours of emotional debate.

Opponents of the plan have charged it would hurt the economies of small communities dependent upon employment at the institutions. There was no guarantee that the change of direction would actually save money. They said that, in fact, severance pay for fired employees during the first year would exceed the $16 million predicted savings.

The vote crossed party boundaries as 12 Democrats were joined by 9 Republicans in opposition to the bill. The legislation was strongly favored by the Senate leadership and by Gov. Rick Scott, who saw it as a move to save more money in a tight state budget.

He had fired Department of Corrections Secretary Ed Buss along the way.

Buss complained that he had been asked to support and budget an earlier privatization plan without adequate notice. It had been pushed through the legislature quietly, as a committee bill, at the last moment.

A Leon County judge overturned that earlier attempt, agreeing with opponents that such a move needed a separate bill requiring votes of all legislators.

In addition, Senate President Mike Haridopolos, a supporter of privatization, recently removed Sen. Mike Fasano, R- New Port Richey, who opposed such a measure, from a budget committee chairmanship.

Among prisons slated to be privatized was one in Jefferson County, east of Tallahassee, where residents mounted a public relations campaign to win back the hearts of legislators with the story of how the prison was already operating at high efficiency, and how much the prison meant to the community.

Additionally, the effort was blunted by charges that some of the backers of the bill and lobbyists might profit from relationships with the companies that were likely to win contracts to run the prisons. Currently, seven Florida prisons are run by two corporations, and privatization in Florida first started more than 15 years ago.

Florida, with the third largest prison system in the nation, spends about $2 billion dollars a year through its Department of Corrections to run 61 major prisons and many smaller facilities, keeping slightly more than 100,000 persons incarcerated at any given time.

The prison system is operating on schedule.

The vote came a day before the planned execution of a twice-convicted murderer in the rape and murder of a St. Petersburg woman. Robert Waterhouse, 65, had earlier spent 8 years in prison in the murder of a 77-year-old woman in a burglary in New York, but had been paroled.

He is listed to be executed Wednesday at Florida State Prison near Starke. He’s waited more than 31 years on death row, a state record, as appeals cycled through the legal system.

There are 395 people on death row, some having been there longer than Waterhouse, according to officials.