Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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May 30
Sun Sentinel says there have been indefensible cuts to drug treatment programs for prisoners:
Budget binds often squeeze government into questionable choices, but some options would seem to be so absurd as to be unthinkable. Not even a penny-pinching mayor would send firefighters home while a five-alarm blaze is raging. Florida wouldn’t close its emergency operations center in the face of a category four hurricane. Trauma centers are staffed 24 hours, not 18. No governor would shut down effective prison drug treatment programs amid a worsening opioid epidemic.
Sorry, but that last example is real.
Dozens of privately run substance abuse and offender re-entry programs that serve the Florida Department of Corrections have closed or are being shut down this week. Secretary Julie Jones ordered the $28-million budget cut to help fund renewal of the agency’s contested prison health care contract with Centurion LLC. Earlier, she took a fiscal ax to prison libraries and chaplains.
This is indefensible and intolerable.
Reporting on the situation, the Miami Herald-Tampa Bay Times said the cuts are eliminating hundreds of jobs at 33 facilities and sending work release inmates back to conventional prisons to wait for release with little or no preparation.
When they do get out, said a program official at Kissimmee, they’ll “go back on the streets with $50 in their pockets and a bus pass. For an addict, that’s enough to get them back on the streets and into the cycle, and they’ll be back in prison.”
The programs being slashed have been notably successful in reducing recidivism.
“.I would have been lost, and who knows where I would be now,” a former inmate said in an email to the newspapers. “But I know my life would be very different.”
Some 22 percent of new inmates have been sentenced on drug charges, according to the department’s last annual report, but drug dependency motivates many others to commit the robberies, burglaries and thefts listed as their primary offenses. Officials have said that seven in 10 new inmates have substance abuse problems requiring medical attention. Even in prison, drugs are easy to obtain. Underpaid correctional workers are one source.
Professional treatment is a necessity, not a luxury.
“One of the more recent substance abuse problems plaguing Florida institutions is the use of synthetic cannabinoids, cathinones (bath salts) and opiates, also known as KW or Spice and Fentanyl,” said the department’s annual report for the fiscal year 2016-17.
In that light, what’s happening is a monumental disgrace for Gov. Rick Scott, who oversees Jones and the state prisons, as well as for the legislative leaders who could have provided the money.
Florida governors have the means to manage budget emergencies and this is a relatively small instance. Plus, there’s a lot more money coming in, which explains why the $89 billion state budget that starts July 1 is up $6 billion over this year’s budget.
The newspaper report attributed the failure to House leaders as well as to Scott. A spokeswoman for the Senate said its leaders were interested in a solution, but there was no agreement by a deadline that had been set for last Friday.
The report also said the program closures serve a long-term goal of Jones to shut down the nonprofit operations and replace them with programs managed by the department itself, which she said would be more cost-efficient. However, no concrete plans exist. Jones would not comment for the article, but had said earlier she had hoped the cuts would be temporary.
Two years ago, however, she tried to shut down two locations, in Pompano Beach and Bradenton, but relented in response to protests. At the time, she said 60 percent of the department’s in-prison substance treatment budget was spent on inmates least likely to re-offend.
But that begged the question of how much more likely their return to prison would be without the prevention programs. For a state government operated on the principles of common sense, rather than expediency, the answer would be simple: Keep those programs and add more for the inmates at higher risk of recidivism.
This particular instance of false economy is but one aspect of a prison system in a constant state of crisis because of chronic underfunding, overcrowding and neglect. Exhausted guards forced to work overtime with not enough colleagues to watch their back is a formula guaranteed, in the short term, to result in violence and in the long run to disaster.
Scott, whose concept of prison reform seems to be limited to privatization, leaves an enormous problem to the next governor and whoever he or she chooses to succeed Jones. Voters should hold all the candidates accountable for details, not just platitudes, on how to defuse this time bomb.
Online: http://www.sun-sentinel.com
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May 30
Naples Daily News says mixed messages about marijuana are confusing Florida’s children:
The blame game for Florida’s confused state about medical marijuana has continued in recent days as Collier County commissioners voted to ban dispensaries and a Tallahassee judge ruled that patients should be allowed to smoke it as medicine.
Make no mistake, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Current and prior occupants of the White House. Congress. The U.S. attorney general. Federal agencies. The Florida Legislature. State agencies. Other states.
However, let’s be sure not to leave off this list those who crafted the too-vague constitutional amendment that went to Florida voters in 2014 and 2016.
What would be more beneficial than pointing fingers, though, would be for politicians, the adults, to come up with a clear and uniform directive, one way or another.
Why is that important? Any child who is watching this debate unfold is getting mixed messages:
. Marijuana is bad for you except when it’s not.
. Whether it’s bad for you depends on the state you call home.
. Smoking isn’t good for you and can cause cancer but smoking medical marijuana is OK, even if you have cancer.
. The Florida Department of Health is the agency in charge of creating the state’s medical marijuana rules based on the amendment voters approved. The agency has a warning message on its website in bold letters: “Medical marijuana is available in Florida, however, remains illegal under federal law.”
. State after state is authorizing marijuana as medicine but the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) continues to classify it as a Schedule I drug. “Schedule I drugs have a high potential for abuse and the potential to create severe psychological and/or physical dependence,” the DEA says. Marijuana is listed alongside heroin, LSD, ecstasy and methaqualone.
Sure, medical marijuana is controversial. But debate over removing it as a Schedule I drug goes back to 1972 (Shafer Commission). Those who graduated from high school that year are now around retirement age.
The first state passed a medical marijuana law in 1996. A child born that year by now has made it through high school and potentially even just graduated with a four-year college degree.
Yet this is still an unresolved debate in legislative halls and the courts?
Florida’s battle
We support last week’s Collier commission decision not to allow medical marijuana dispensaries anywhere a pharmacy can go. How many pharmacies are genuinely just pharmacies rather than general retail establishments or grocers where you can get a prescription filled?
We believe approved medical marijuana delivery services, with dispensaries already based in Collier’s neighboring counties, and an authorized production site near Immokalee can fulfill the need of Collier’s patients. We applaud Collier Commissioner Burt Saunders for requesting a review of the decision later this year to be sure patients’ needs are being met.
Meanwhile, the court battle will continue over whether smoking medical marijuana is appropriate following last week’s ruling that the Legislature’s decision to prohibit it was unconstitutional. Even those who had a role in crafting the ballot language, who could have made their intentions clear, are pointing fingers.
Some 25 states had adopted laws or approved ballot measures before Florida voters did in November 2016. Some allowed patients to grow and possess a certain number of plants while others authorized set amounts of leafy material. That could, and should, have been crafted as part of the amendment proposal. Instead, voters gave discretion to the Legislature and health department to decide what Florida would offer patients.
Collier commissioners are hoping lawmakers modify the legislation they passed.
For kids’ sake, clarity on the entire issue would seem in order.
Online: https://www.naplesnews.com
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May 30
Orlando Sentinel says citizens shouldn’t be punished for exercising their constitutional right to open government:
In Florida, citizens have a constitutional right to get copies of government records. State voters enshrined access to public records as a right in the Florida Constitution with an amendment they approved by an 81-19 margin in 1992.
But what good is that right if a citizen risks getting ensnared by the government in a ruinously expensive legal battle for exercising it?
As John Kennedy reported recently in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, “a growing number of cities, school boards and other government agencies across the nation are suing people seeking documents - forcing them to decide whether it’s worth fighting for their request in court - at their own expense.” Until now the practice has been infrequent in Florida, but its mere possibility already may be having a chilling effect on efforts by citizens to monitor their own government, according to some open-government advocates.
In a case that highlights the risks, a nonprofit environmental law firm that requested records from a closed-door meeting of the South Florida Water Management District was sued by the district. The meeting at issue led to an $18 million taxpayer-funded settlement for a mining company from the district and the Martin County Commission. “All we did was ask for records,” Lisa Interlandi, a lawyer with the Everglades Law Center, told Kennedy. District lawyers also threatened to subpoena other citizens who requested records. A judge ruled in favor of the district’s refusal to turn over records from the meeting. The case is now on appeal.
District lawyers contended the records request was a ploy to force the district to pay legal fees if the documents were not released promptly - a provision in the state’s open-records law to deter governments from denying citizens access to public records. In fact, there have been a few notorious cases of unscrupulous law firms flooding small government agencies with frivolous records requests they can’t possibly fulfill on time, and then filing suit to collect legal fees. But this case doesn’t fit that pattern. Regardless, Florida judges have the authority, and have exercised it in other cases, to bar plaintiffs who abuse the law from recovering their fees.
Some Florida legislators, to their credit, have taken a stand for their constituents’ constitutional right to know. During this year’s legislative session, a bill sponsored by Republican Rep. Ray Rodrigues of Estero would have barred government agencies from suing anyone requesting public records. It passed the House 108-0, but its Senate counterpart, sponsored by Republican Keith Perry of Gainesville, died in that chamber’s Judiciary Committee after the Florida League of Cities raised objections.
A league lobbyist, Casey Cook, argued to Kennedy that there are cases where the intervention of a judge is needed to determine whether a record can be released to the public or should be withheld under an exemption in the state’s public records law or other privacy laws. Frank LoMonte, director of the University of Florida’s Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, countered that agencies and their lawyers generally know what records can be released, and what must be withheld. And if an agency decides not to disclose records, the citizens who made the request can file their own lawsuit to challenge the refusal and seek a judge’s ruling to resolve the matter.
But when the agencies file suit, they are turning the tables on citizens; the agencies are actually pre-empting citizens from being in a position to collect the legal fees to which they might be entitled if they had initiated and won a lawsuit. Ultimately, LoMonte considers the agency lawsuits a vengeful legal strategy to discourage citizens from requesting public records.
Again, citizens have a constitutional right to public records. If legislators believe in that right, and if their first loyalty is to citizens rather than government agencies, they won’t miss another chance to pass a bill to protect it.
Online: http://www.orlandosentinel.com
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