Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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Aug. 23
The Miami Herald on the Department of Children & Families:
Two years ago, Gov. Rick Scott signed into law an all-encompassing, highly praised overhaul of the Department of Children & Families, committed to ensuring that the troubled agency could keep children safe, secure and alive.
Angela Dufrene died anyway. Her mother said so in court. “She is dead,” Marjorie Dufrene said, a stunning admission to which she added that the toddler’s body had been thrown in a dumpster.
The law, enacted after the Miami Herald’s series “Innocents Lost” chronicled, in heartbreaking detail, the preventable deaths of almost 500 children in DCF’s care, made saving children, not family preservation, the priority.
And still Angela died.
Lawmakers gave DCF a $44 million infusion to hire 270 child-protective investigators and ensure that they were well-educated and properly trained.
And still Angela died.
Her tragic case makes clear that the lessons of “Innocents Lost” have been lost themselves. At least five entities, including ChildNet, which provides case management in Broward County, the attorney general’s office and the Broward Sheriff’s Office, knew about the abusive circumstances into which Angela and her twin brother were born. Ms. Dufrene was a violent and abusive parent who herself needed help. She was ill-equipped to deal appropriately with her developmentally disabled son, whom she beat with a belt so severely that he lost sight in one eye, which took surgery to restore. She beat him when he misspelled words; she punched him in the head when he spilled some juice. He was left so bloody that teachers called the state’s abuse hotline, and the child was placed in foster care.
Subsequent calls to the hotline for incidents of domestic abuse between Ms. Dufrene and her husband should have kicked off a seamless intervention on behalf of Angela and her twin brother, who were born while their older brother - and another child, a girl - still were in foster care.
By then, Ms. Dufrene was homeless and had barged in on a friend who had an apartment, refusing to leave. The friend, too, called DCF. But a committee of child-welfare administrators decided that Ms. Dufrene was capable of providing a safe environment for her twins, and she was allowed to leave the hospital after giving birth. There was no followup, no regular home inspections ordered.
The collective lack of common sense is absolutely breathtaking. Instead of considering the breadth of the family’s tortured history, finicky administrators worried that since the twins had never been abused, they could not be removed from the home.
This is putting the safety of children first? In what universe did they expect Ms. Dufrene to become the model mom? This is the lack of critical thinking and skepticism that components of the new law were supposed to address.
It’s infuriating, because we’ve been here before. In 2013, just a year before the sweeping DCF overhaul, the agency instituted something called “the Safety Methodology” to address the inefficient process, fractured work systems and huge level of investigator turnover that, in part, contributed to the death of Nubia Barahona, 10. In 2011, her partially decomposed body was found, wrapped in a plastic garbage bag, in the back of her adoptive father’s pickup truck.
But once more, several agencies banded together to do what’s best for children at risk. They failed miserably, and little Angela Dufrene died.
Online:
https://www.miamiherald.com/
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Aug. 22
The Tampa Bay Times on legislative elections:
When voters approved the Fair Districts constitutional amendments in 2010, the new rules for drawing congressional and legislative districts were expected to create more competitive races. Six years later, it is not turning out that way for most legislative districts, and too many voters have little or no voice in who represents them in Tallahassee. More work has to be done to create a fairer system, including campaign finance reform, eliminating a legal loophole and opening up primary elections to more voters.
The Fair Districts amendments require that districts be drawn without regard to incumbency or political parties. The state House districts have been in place since the 2012 election, but the Senate districts wound up in court fights and have been redrawn again for this year’s election. While Democrats hold a slight lead in voter registration in Florida, Republicans control the House by 81-39 and the Senate by a 26-14 advantage. Yet those gaps are not expected to significantly change after this year’s election.
One reason is that there still are not many competitive races. As Steve Bousquet of the Times/Herald Tallahassee bureau reported, the Aug. 30 primary is expected to effectively decide at least a dozen Senate seats and 34 House seats because the districts are dominated by one political party or only one party has serious candidates. Add to that 42 legislators who already have won because they had no opposition, and more than half of the Legislature’s 160 members already will have been chosen by Labor Day with little input from voters. No wonder lobbyists in Tallahassee have so much power.
Part of the issue is that Democrats in particular have been unable to attract strong candidates even in districts that on paper could be competitive. In Tampa Bay, there will be only one competitive Senate race in November - Republican Rep. Dana Young vs. Democrat Bob Buesing for District 18 in Tampa. All of the other Senate candidates are either unopposed or have token opposition such as write-in candidates. Running for the Legislature is expensive, with credible campaigns easily costing six figures. Until there are campaign finance reforms that the courts will uphold, it will be difficult to recruit candidates beyond those who are wealthy enough to help pay for their own campaigns or poor enough to roll the dice and live on a part-time legislative salary.
A more modest reform that would give voters a greater voice would be to eliminate the write-in candidate scam. Florida requires primary elections to be open to all voters if the primary will decide who takes office, so write-in candidates are recruited for the general election to keep the primaries closed. Six Senate races and 14 House races have write-in candidates that close off the primaries to more than 1.6 million voters (and so does the race for Pinellas County property appraiser, which will be decided only by Republicans). That is fundamentally unfair, and the Florida Constitution should be amended to close this loophole.
A more ambitious change would be to open up the primary elections and let voters choose which primary they want to vote in. That would enable voters registered with no party affiliation, who now are shut out of the primaries, an opportunity to be heard. It also would encourage candidates to take more moderate positions in both political parties rather than take more liberal or conservative views that appeal to the most partisan voters who regularly vote in primary elections. That also would require a constitutional amendment that would have to be placed on the ballot either by a petition drive or the Constitution Revision Commission, which will meet in 2017.
The Fair Districts amendments were a step in the right direction, but there is more work to be done to create more competitive elections where all voters have a voice. The legislative elections this year are falling well short of that goal.
Online:
https://www.tampabay.com/
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Aug. 24
SunSentinel on private prisons:
The U.S. Justice Department has told the Bureau of Prisons to phase out the use of private contractors to run federal prisons. If that sounds like the end of the matter, it isn’t.
Instead, the announcement kicks debate on the issue into a higher gear. It’s a debate that Florida and other states that use private prison companies should be paying very close attention to.
The Justice Department’s action also is sure to kick off an intense lobbying effort by the private prison companies, including Boca Raton-based Geo Group, to reverse the decision.
In a conference call covered by the Sun Sentinel, Geo Chairman and CEO George Zoley said, “There’s been an overreaction” to the federal decision and that, “We think, in time, this will correct itself.”
In fact, the feds have good reason to act. Privately run prisons don’t save money and don’t improve security, said Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, in announcing the decision. To back up its claims, the Justice Department cited a report by the Office of Inspector General.
OIG investigators compared infractions at privately run prisons with infractions at facilities run by the Bureau of Prisons and found that “in a majority of the categories we examined” - such as cellphones, tobacco and other contraband, lockdowns and inmate discipline - “contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable BOP institutions.”
The OIG reported that, “In recent years, disturbances in several federal contract prisons resulted in extensive property damage, bodily injury, and the death of a correctional officer.”
The OIG report also notes that the feds haven’t been particularly good at monitoring performance of the private companies entrusted with supervising inmates and providing for their health care.
In addition to Geo - which operated six of the 14 privately run federal prisons - the companies used by the feds are Corrections Corp. of America and Management and Training Corp. Together, they manage 12 percent of the federal prison population and had contracts worth $639 million in 2014.
According to the state’s Department of Management Services website, Geo runs five Florida correctional facilities, and Corrections Corp. of America and Management and Training Corp. run one each.
No one should be surprised at the deficiencies the OIG report uncovered. Policymakers at the federal and state level have been concerned primarily with reducing costs. Safety and security for the public is a distant second. The welfare of inmates barely registers, much less any serious consideration for rehabilitation.
That has been monumentally short-sighted since the vast majority of inmates eventually are freed. But it reflects a political reality. Nobody particularly likes spending money on inmates. And people feel that incarceration should be punitive. Those attitudes create the conditions for abuse and the circumstances under which officials turn a blind eye to abuse.
And so, reporters investigating privately run prisons at both the federal and state levels have found many examples of abuse ranging from awful living conditions to awful food to awful health care.
Expect private prison companies - whose stock took a hit after the Justice Department’s announcement - to try to pick apart the OIG’s report. Geo, for example, already had complained that the inmate populations in the prisons it runs for the feds were different from the inmate populations in the federally run prisons used for comparison. A higher incidence of gang-affiliated inmates, the official speculates, could have made Geo’s results look worse.
If the private prison companies want to make fact-based arguments, that’s a legitimate source of debate. The danger is that lobbying and campaign contributions will substitute for facts. Of possible interest: The Tampa Bay Times reports that Sen. Marco Rubio has received considerable financial support from Geo. Rubio told the newspaper he hadn’t yet read the critical report.
In any case, political clout shouldn’t be the deciding factor at the federal level or at the state level, where privately run prisons also deserve to be under serious review.
The Florida Department of Corrections told a Sun Sentinel reporter the department will be “thoroughly reviewing” the OIG report. That’s great, but along the way the Florida Legislature also needs to thoroughly review its decisions to use private prisons in this state.
Online:
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/
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