A nearly two-year investigation into a Panhandle state prison has concluded that overcrowding and understaffing has resulted in a high concentration of complaints by inmates about excessive force and staff misconduct.
The report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) examines Gulf Correctional Institution near Wewahitchka, which houses approximately 1,600 men. Certain staff members contributed, the report says, to what the SPLC labels “the culture of violence” through overly harsh punishments and degradation of people under their supervision.
The specifics include:
- Property restriction, stripping inmates in solitary confinement down to their underwear, taking all their property, and leaving them to sleep on a cold, steel bunk for up to three days.
- Denying meals for innocuous misconduct and delivering “air trays” to people in solitary confinement; for the benefit of the prison cameras, officers deliver a meal tray covered by a lid, with no food under that lid.
- “Standing on the grate,” a practice of forcing people to stand over the storm drains in the yard for hours, sometimes stripped to their underwear or with their arms and legs in uncomfortable positions.
- “Catfishing,” a practice in which officers order barbers to shave off all of someone’s hair and eyebrows.
- Administering chemical agents like pepper spray to various parts of the body, including the mouth, ears, groin, and buttocks.
- Verbal abuse and harassment, including racial slurs and threats of physical and sexual violence.
The SPLC team identified at least 200 incarcerated victims or witnesses and interviewed 95 of them, the report says. They requested and reviewed more than 20,000 pages of prison, health care, and Office of Inspector General reports covering at least 1,100 incidents over the past decade.
The authors added that the FDC resisted their efforts to gather information.
“In response to public records requests, FDC demanded payment of exorbitant fees — often thousands of dollars — before production. After payment, FDC took months to produce records, only then revealing that it had frequently forced the SPLC to pay for duplicates, records that SPLC did not actually request, and unjustified redactions.”
The report adds that, despite those barriers, “for the 27 victims and witnesses at Gulf who had corroborating prison records and were willing to come forward, the team documented their stories in declarations sworn under penalty of perjury.”
Those first-person accounts are included in an appendix to the report.
“Officers respond to small and big provocations with vicious beatings — punching people all over their bodies,” said Kelly Knapp, a senior staff attorney for the SPLC, in a video interview provided in the online summary. “Hitting them with their walkie-talkies. Choking people. Spraying them at close range with pepper spray in their eyes and their mouth and their ears. Sometimes pulling down their pants and spraying pepper spray between their buttocks.”
“I think if one-tenth of that is true, it highlights the fact that we have a department of chaos, and that these institutions that are anemically understaffed are the worst actors, and the places where the state has failed its citizens the most,” former Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes told the Phoenix after reading the report.
Knapp said that with a vacancy rate for officers at around 50%, correction officers at Gulf are “overtaxed and overburdened.”
Staffing shortages
Florida prisons have faced significant staffing shortages throughout the years. They house more than 89,000 inmates, a population that has increased by more than 10,000 since 2021. That is expected to rise by another 4,100 over the next three years.
“We are managing today with relatively the same number of staff we had 10,000 inmates ago, so you can imagine what that’s doing to the staff and inmate ratios,” FCD Secretary Ricky Dixon told lawmakers in October.
The report says that as of September 2023, the operational staff vacancy rate at Gulf Correctional was 58%, tied for third highest in the state, according to consultants hired by FDC.
“The burden of overcrowding and understaffing often results in dangerous consequences for people incarcerated at Gulf,” the report says.
“Without adequate officer and investigator staffing, prison gangs thrive and perpetrate violence at the facility. Nearly every person interviewed reported that gangs essentially run the institution, with some officers afraid to intervene in attacks, indifferent to the violence, or complicit in their actions. For example, interviewees reported that certain officers frequently allowed people to enter through locked doors into dorms or cells without authorization to assault others at the facility or transfer contraband.”
Marc Caruso worked as a Florida corrections officer from 2010 to 2020.
“They need a whole new leadership from the top down,” he says in a video interview provided in the online summary of the report.
“The officers are tired. They’re burnt out. They know that we need new leadership. It’s the only way to make change in the department. You have to start at the top. You have to have a secretary that’s willing to take a bold stance on getting rid of the corruption in the department. And he has to have the backing of the governor. That’s the only way to do it.”
Since leaving the Legislature in 2022, Brandes founded and heads the Florida Policy Project, a think tank that focuses on statewide issues including criminal justice reform. He said the report “highlights how desperate the Department of Corrections is to address staffing and how, frankly, the Legislature has failed to adequately fund both the staffing and the oversight of these chronically understaffed facilities. “
“They’re setting themselves up for massive litigation over inmates being harmed because of the lack of staffing,” he adds. “At some juncture, it becomes unreasonable, and I think the courts would find that as well.”
The report lists three reforms that could reduce the level of violence in Florida prisons:
- Reducing the prison population to “ensure a safe and management staff-to-prisoner ratio;
- Investment in greater oversight of facilities and staff.
- Improved working conditions and training for correctional staff.
The Phoenix reached out to both the governor’s office and the Department of Corrections for comment but did not receive any response.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Contact Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.
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