By Aaron Deslatte
Orlando Sentinel
TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Rick Scott told voters three years ago that as part of his plan to jump-start the economy, he would cut $1 billion in spending on prisons — in part by handing some of them over to private companies.
Thanks to court fights and opposition in the state Legislature, that hasn’t happened. And although the governor and lawmakers have reduced the agency’s budget by $244 million, taxpayers are still footing the bill for the privatization push.
Florida’s prison system, the third-largest in the country, is projected to run a $45 million deficit this year. And a chunk of that is specifically because of the stalled effort to privatize health-care services and 29 South Florida prisons.
“The governor and legislative leaders didn’t and couldn’t make a legitimate case that it would save money,” said former Sen. Paula Dockery, a Lakeland Republican who fought the privatization push. “And it certainly wouldn’t have resulted in greater security or quality of care.”
The prison system’s deficit is also partly a product of rising incarceration rates. After dipping below 100,000 in 2011, the inmate population is projected to rise to 103,000 next year. Lawmakers had set the agency’s budget based on projections of a 2.3 percent decline last year.
Scott’s office referred requests for comment to Department of Corrections spokeswoman Jessica Cary, who said in an email that the deficit was because of “an increase in prison population above estimated totals, delays in implementing policy initiatives due to bid protests and legal proceedings, and delays in closing and consolidating prisons.”
Despite the increasing prison population, the DOC budget has been cut by $244 million — to just over $2 billion in 2013 — and its workforce has dropped by more than 6,000 full-time employees, to 23,268 this year, which Scott’s office cites as proof of success.
That’s a far cry from the governor’s campaign promise — part of his “7-7-7" jobs-creation plan — to take a $1 billion bite out of the prisons budget. One idea he espoused was to pay corrections employees less. Another was to have prisoners grow their own food, and to find cheaper ways to contract out health-care services.
That last piece has been the biggest achievement so far, although it was held up until recently in a court fight between the state and a public-employees union.
This summer, an appeals court cleared the way for the department to complete the nation’s largest privatization of health care in the prison system, an effort that is shaving some 2,300 prison employees from the state workforce and is projected to save taxpayers $14 million a year.
But Scott’s larger goal of privatizing prisons has not been achieved.
And in terms of economic stimulus, University of Central Florida economist Sean Snaith said it is safe to assume that the private sector would be more efficient than the government.
“But where does that money go? Does it go back to consumers, or could it be used to invest in our ports or invest in infrastructure? It kind of depends on where it goes and how that savings is reallocated. I don’t know that it’s a game-changer either way,” Snaith said.
Lawmakers last spring agreed to help the Department of Corrections close its prior-year $95.2 million budget gap.
Senators will get a presentation today on the shortfall. The department has repeatedly declined to discuss those details, although public records suggest increasing inmate health-care costs are the largest culprit — more than $13 million of this year’s projected deficit.
“The budget was basically a fake document the last couple of years,” said Sen. Darren Soto, D-Orlando, a member of the panel overseeing the prisons budget.
Senate Civil and Criminal Justice budget chief Rob Bradley, R-Orange Park, said the deficit was “not surprising” but lawmakers were unlikely to revisit privatization as a solution.
“I don’t see a lot of other efforts toward privatization being considered this year,” he said.