Unexplained Deaths in Custody

Deaths in Florida state prisons — including homicides and a spate of suicides — have skyrocketed in recent years, soaring from 191 in 2000 to 356 in 2016.

Among those killed in custody was Darren Rainey, a mentally ill prisoner who was scalded to death at Dade Correctional Institution in 2012 when guards locked him in a hot shower for two hours. The water reached temperatures as high as 180 degrees, according to witnesses, including a nurse on duty that night who said that the heat controls were in a neighboring room controlled by guards.

Following Rainey’s death, a devastating investigation by the Miami Herald detailed more unexplained and brutal deaths, as well as system-wide neglect and abuse and efforts to cover up prison officials’ wrongdoing. Randall Jordan-Aparo, an inmate with disabilities at Franklin Correctional Institution, was killed in 2010 when guards beat him and gassed him with a chemical agent after he begged for medical help for days (prison guards later took to Facebook to mock his death). Another prisoner allegedly hanged herself while her hands were tied.

The corrections department has also been sued over its treatment of prisoners with disabilities and its failure to treat prisoners with hepatitis C, and rights groups have called on the Department of Justice — twice — to open a federal civil rights investigation into the state’s prisons. “These problems are chronic,” Graybill said. “They haven’t been addressed and they’re not going away.”

Like most other states, Florida went on an “incarceration binge” in the 1990s, Graybill said. But unlike most other states — some 36 of which have undertaken some kind of criminal justice reform — the state has consistently refused to reconsider its policies.

“The solution for Florida is clear,” she said. “It needs to improve the conditions of confinement in its facilities, and one way it can afford to do that is by ensuring that it is only incarcerating the people who truly need to be incarcerated.”

“The question becomes, Why has the legislature been so unwilling or unable to do that?”

“This Is Florida … We’ll Beat Your Ass!”

In addition to denouncing brutal conditions of confinement, the prisoners are demanding broader criminal justice reform in Florida — including restored voting rights and a moratorium on executions.

Florida is one of four states in the country — with Kentucky, Iowa, and Virginia — that imposes lifetime disenfranchisement for people convicted of felonies. That means 1.5 million state residents can’t vote because of their criminal history. “People who have already paid their debt to society are essentially prevented from being active citizens,” said Azis, the ACLU lawyer.

A proposed constitutional amendment could change that — if it can garner enough support to get on the ballot — but until that passes, the only potential path to the vote is for each disenfranchised individual to personally appeal to the governor, Rick Scott. Scott grants only 8 percent of those appeals, with little transparency on the decision-making process and a backlog of 10,000 applications awaiting review, the New York Times recently reported. The process leaves restoration of the right to vote dependent on the governor’s personal convictions. In a hearing on the voting rights of a man who had been convicted of manslaughter in a drunken driving incident, for instance, Scott said he would need to think about it — then noted, with his mic accidentally still on, “That’s how my uncle died.”

Scott also wields disproportionate power when it comes to the state’s death penalty. After newly elected prosecutor Aramis Ayala — Florida’s first black state attorney – said she would not seek the death penalty in her district, which includes Orlando, Scott moved 29 potential capital cases to a different jurisdiction. Ayala appealed, but the state’s Supreme Court ruled in the governor’s favor, forcing her to walk back her ban. Last year, Florida moved to tighten its death penalty laws by requiring a unanimous jury verdict after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the previous sentencing protocol was unconstitutional. The move made dozens of people eligible for re-sentencing, but the state limited retroactive application to those sentenced after 2002 — leaving approximately 200 on death row with sentences ineligible for review.

Finally, prisoners planning the strike are joining the local community’s protest against a phosphate mine set to surround the Reception and Medical Center near Lake Butler, where new arrivals and inmates with medical conditions are housed. Residents and prisoners fear the health consequences of water contamination and exposure to potential carcinogens linked to phosphate mining.

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson arrived at the Reception and Medical Center last spring.

Johnson, a well-known prison activist, jailhouse lawyer, and prolific writer and critic of prison abuse, had already been moved from Virginia to Texas under an interstate agreement that allows for the transfer of prisoners — ostensibly for public safety reasons, but often as a punitive measure.

That Johnson would be transferred to Florida “is a piece of evidence of how the Florida prison system is viewed even by the prison industry itself,” said Tsolkas, who has been communicating with him ahead of the upcoming strike. “Appalachia wasn’t bad enough. Texas wasn’t bad enough. Well, you’re going to the swamps.”

At the RMC, Johnson wrote in July, a guard told him that he was “not in Virginia, or wherever else” he might have been previously. “You will answer us only as ‘no sir’ and ‘yessir,’ ‘no ma’am’ and ‘yes ma’am.’ You forget this and we’ll kick your fucking teeth out,” the guard said, according to Johnson. “This is Florida, and we’ll beat your ass! We’ll kill you!”

That didn’t stop Johnson from continuing to expose prison abuse in Florida, or from joining the state prisoners’ organizing efforts, including ahead of Monday’s strike.

“What the prisoners are asking for is not only completely reasonable, but should be the bare minimum of how we treat an individual that the state is in charge of caring for,” said Azis. “I would hope that whatever the DOC’s response is, it is an ethical and responsible way of addressing these real concerns.”