Florida’s Department of Corrections is proposing a rule that would drastically reduce visitation privileges for inmates.
While the FDC publicly acknowledges the critical role familial contact plays in reducing recidivism and helping keep families together, the new rule would be a disaster. Currently, visits are up to six hours every Saturday and Sunday (from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.), amounting to an opportunity to spend 24 hours with your loved ones every two weeks. The proposed rule change would limit visits to two hours every other week. That would mean a reduction of visitation privileges by 91%. The FDC claims these measures are needed to address staff shortages and combat the introduction of contraband.
This is nonsense. The FDC usually invokes these two problems as a blanket for most of the restrictions it puts in place.
As to being short of staff, I spent almost 29 years in FDC custody, and I have never seen worse management of a workforce. It is impossible to recall how many times I looked out the window while the prison was on lockdown for a “shortage of staff” and saw a gaggle of sergeants and a lieutenant or captain idly congregating under a pavilion or sitting on benches talking about nothing important and being paid to do it. Besides, if the FDC truly recognizes the importance of visits and honestly has a staffing problem, there are many other programs that can be reduced or personnel practices changed that will allow visits to continue. There is an abundance of sergeants (one for every dormitory and various administrative positions) more than capable of flexing a weekday workday off and reporting to the prison on a weekend to assist in the visiting park. Classification officers, all of whom are certified and trained, can structure their workloads to work a weekend helping process visitors.
As to the contraband argument, this is the FDC’s way of diffusing responsibility for its inability to police its own staff. The cellphones and knives are too big and too plentiful to have entered a prison through a visit. There are more staff entering a prison than visitors, and staff are not searched as intently as visitors. The FDC solution should be to increase both the wages and standards of the correctional officers it employs.
Visits are important. Restricting visiting privileges will have a tremendous impact on inmates, their families, and prison staff. Inmates will be under added stress twofold: Inmates want to see their families, and they feel the brunt of the stress their families feel from missing their chance to visit. It will affect prison staff because they will have to deal with a more tense prison population.
The reduced visiting hours could also eliminate some visits altogether. The majority of inmates are from Miami-Dade, Broward, or Palm Beach county. The majority of prison bed space is in North Florida and northwest Florida. As current visiting rules allow, a visitor can travel the long hours, up to 10 hours in some cases, from South Florida on a Friday night, visit Saturday, stay overnight at a hotel, and visit again on Sunday before making the long trip home. While expensive and inconvenient, it is definitely worth the effort when it means spending two days with your loved ones. Under the proposed rule, a visitor would travel those long hours to have just one two-hour visit. 20 hours of driving and countless hours waiting in line to spend two hours with your husband, wife, son, daughter, or sibling.
That is ridiculous.
I looked forward to every visit. Whether it was once a week (during the first 10 years of my prison term), every month (during years 10 to 15), or once a year (from year 15 to 29), I looked forward to every chance to see my family. Knowing they were coming, having that hope that I would see them, was a great feeling. The answer for FDC rule makers is simple. Instead of only saying you recognize the important role visits play in the correctional equation, enact policies reflecting that opinion.
Increasing resources to improve FDC standards and hiring, Gov. Ron DeSantis should direct FDC Secretary Ricky Dickson to suspend these changes.
Robert Lefleur is a former prisoner of the Florida Department of Corrections and a prison consultant.
