Category: Department of Corrections
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Florida’s Longest-Serving Inmates: They Get Older, Sicker and More Well-behaved
By Deirdra Funcheon, for Juvenile Justice Information Exchange MIAMI — An hour south of Miami, down the street from an alligator farm, a security guard buzzes visitors into the Homestead Correctional Institution. Each guest’s bags are run through a rickety metal detector and he or she is issued a panic button — a portable alarm…
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In Florida, where reforms are slow to arrive, cash bail remains the law of the land
By Claire Goforth The widespread practice of requiring bond on the vast majority of cases has led to what many describe as “wealth-based detention” based on means, rather than danger to the community or likelihood of fleeing.
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As Florida jails more kids than any other state, criminal justice reform is again on the table in Tallahassee
By Deirdra Funcheon Thanks to decades of tough-on-crime policies, Florida now has the third-largest prison population in the United States — nearly 100,000 people, including more minors than any other state. Florida requires people to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences and has abolished parole. All this costs taxpayers $2.4 billion per year.
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Is Florida’s prison diet strictly kosher? Who knows? U.S. monitor has backed off
By Noreen Marcus FloridaBulldog.org Court oversight of Florida’s kosher diet program, prison variety, appears to be dissolving like a sugar cube in hot tea.
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Inmates with hepatitis C, and their chief advocate, race against time
By Noreen Marcus FloridaBulldog.org A federal judge ordered Florida to give thousands of prisoners with chronic Hepatitis C virus a standard treatment with a cure rate of 95 percent. A year later, Florida could move faster to save lives.