By Tom Flanigan
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Tallahassee, FL – For more than a generation, Florida lawmakers have been steadily ramping up penalties for drug-related offenses. But, as Tom Flanigan reports, this could be the year that pendulum starts moving the other way, driven mostly by cost considerations .
Domenic Calabro, head of Florida TaxWatch, says the numbers are simply too big to ignore any longer.
"Almost 60% of all arrests in Florida are for crimes committed either under the influence of drugs and alcohol, or committed to acquire drugs and alcohol. While nearly 27% of those entering Florida's prisons last year were sentenced for drug crimes, over half of them needed substance abuse treatment and many are not getting it."
Which means, Calabro says, these prisoners leave prison after their long terms just as addicted as when they went in. That greatly increases the likelihood they'll reoffend and return to prison. Calabro says, besides being a big public safety problem, it's an incredible waste of scarce public dollars.
"Cutting the return of prisoners saves hundreds of millions of dollars each year. This will take some time to begin to save this significant amount of money. Each prison costs $100 million to construct, not including any bonding costs - interest cost on issuance of bonds - and they cost approximately $35 to $40 million a year to operate."
All this was bad enough when Florida's primary Illegal drugs of choice were marijuana and cocaine. But Republican State Senator Ellyn Bogdanoff of Fort Lauderdale says things have gotten much worse in recent years with the rise of prescription drug abuse, fueled in many cases by the state's infamous "pill mills"
"And what we've done is we've got trafficking laws where very often the people that are caught with trafficking because there's no distinction between, say oxycontin or roxies' or whatever these guys are running around with, and cocaine or heroin, that addicts are being picked up for trafficking when very often it's their own stash."
So Bogdanoff has introduced a bill in her chamber that she says would go far to mitigate what is clearly a multi-faceted problem.
"(With) minimum mandatory sentences we capture a lot of people that are not necessarily criminals but addicts and that it's important for us to consider that if we have a system that believes in punishment and rehabilitation, that we need to focus our efforts on rehabilitation for those people that are not necessarily suffering from a life of crime but a life of addiction."
Bogdanoff's bill would remove minimum mandatory sentences for drug offenses. In their place would be alternatives to incarceration for non-violent drug offenders. It would give judges more discretion in deciding drug-related cases on a case-by-case basis. The companion bill in the house is sponsored by Democrat Ari Porth of Coral Springs. Just a few years ago, a bi-partisan bill dialing back drug penalties would have been unthinkable in the Florida Legislature. But Representative Porth says these are very different times.
"It's all going to come down to how much are the taxpayers paying to house someone in a correctional institution for a mandatory minimum period of time, versus a much shorter prison sentence or possibly probation and treatment. And the price tag to Floridians is a great degree less when it comes to eliminating mandatory minimums than if we just put somebody away for a designated number of years."
According to a legislative staff analysis, the cost differential can be huge. For instance, the cost for locking someone up in Wakulla Correctional Institution, one of the state's least expensive facilities, is around fifty-five dollars a day. The cost of probation and outpatient drug treatment is around fifteen dollars a day. But besides the cold, hard savings, Senator Bogdanoff says it's just an idea whose time has come
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"I mean, society evolves and therefore the opinions of lawmakers need to evolve. And I think that what they say - one of the senators said it on the floor today with respect to a bill about education - (is) that some of the greatest things in this nation happened during the Depression because people were forced to be creative and to use their resources to figure out new and better ways to do things with a whole lot less and I think we're very much in that same position today."
Only time will tell if other Florida lawmakers can be persuaded that the times have changed when it comes to the state's minimum mandatory drug sentences.