A legislative budget panel Wednesday approved transferring $8.2 million to pay for the continued deployment of Florida National Guard members at state prisons until June.
The Joint Legislative Budget Commission, which is made up of House and Senate members and can make mid-year budget decisions, approved a request from the Florida Department of Corrections. National Guard members have worked at prisons for more than two years as the correctional system has struggled with high job-vacancy rates and an increase in the number of inmates.
Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order in September 2022 to begin using National Guard members at prisons and has issued a series of extensions. In December, DeSantis issued an order saying another six-month extension was necessary “because ongoing staffing shortages, although much improved, continue to threaten the safety of officers, inmates, and the public.”
Information presented at Wednesday’s meeting said 283 National Guard members are working at prisons. The Department of Corrections’ request for the $8.2 million said activation of National Guard members will expire June 9 and that the latest extension “will provide a phased demobilization effort.” But during Wednesday’s meeting, Senate Minority Leader Jason Pizzo, D-Sunny Isles Beach, questioned the repeated extensions.
“This was a temporary measure that is not so temporary,” Pizzo said.
–News Service of Florida
R.S. says
Perhaps we would be better off if we were to reduce the number of incarcerations by legalizing marijuana to keep people off the track to worse drugs, by upping the minimum wage and increasing welfare payments to keep people away from debilitating poverty, and by turning jails into schools to teach people how to live in our increasingly complex society. Somehow we don’t seem to learn, despite all the obvious evidence and the rate of recidivism, that punitive treatment does not help to improve anyone; in fact, it deminishes and perverts also the punisher.
Laurel says
Maybe DeSantis can get the National Guard to pick beans and work in slaughterhouses, too.
Again, just in case someone thinks I’m serious, try Sarcasm for Dummies.
Skibum says
Florida state government has never learned the important lesson of paying state employees adequately for the jobs they perform for the public, and this is especially true for law enforcement/criminal justice positions. Florida pay scales for jobs already ranks lower than most other states. But when you consider just law enforcement pay, here is what I found: Of 226 law enforcement agencies in this state, the pay for FHP ranks a paltry 174th place, way, way down the ranking. Do people realize how much it costs taxpayers to hire, train and equip every new FHP trooper? The stats show it costs a MINIMUM of $100,000 per trooper!!! The cost per state corrections officer is somewhat less because you don’t have to factor in the cost of vehicles and as long of a training period, but the costs are still significant. New hires know very soon that they are underpaid and that they can make more money by transferring to other higher paid agencies once they are off probation, so it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the state takes on the burden and expense of hiring these employees only to lose them to other agencies after they are trained, resulting in a revolving door of hiring and training new officers over and over again, at a HUGE expense to the state and taxpayers, only to keep losing them to other agencies simply because the state refuses to pay them sufficiently in order to RETAIN them and recoup some of the money spent on hiring them. This has been going on for a very long time, and is a complete waste of taxpayer resources! This is why the idiots in charge of things in Tallahassee are putting state national guard members to work in prison facilities, because the state has traditionally done an extremely poor job of offering correctional officers the pay and benefits package that is on par with other states, or even other local agencies right here in Florida, and the officers have been leaving en mass quantities after their training is completed just to try to keep up with the cost of living! And it is us, the taxpayers, who are getting screwed bigtime by DeSpicable and his GOP minions, who keep hiring and hiring, losing staff and losing staff to nearly every other law enforcement/criminal justice agency who can offer more pay and more benefits. We need to call out DeSpicable and the GOP gerrymandered legislature exactly what they are: DUMB and DUMBER.