ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Hurricane Michael devastated parts of the Florida Panhandle, causing billions of dollars in damage when it made landfall in October of 2018. Most of the city of Mexico Beach is still completely gone months later, but officials are still just beginning to understand the extent of how much all this damage is going to cost our state.
Florida’s Department of Corrections sustained an estimated $50 million in damage to the state’s prisons, many of which are located in the Panhandle area.
“The initial estimates were right around $50 million, but what we know is it’s caused some of our facilities to essentially cease operation. We’ve had to move the inmates to other facilities which has created a stress on the overall system,” said state Sen. Jeff Brandes.
For instance, Gulf Correctional Institution in Wewahitchka suffered so much damage it had to be closed. The state is working to repair the facility, but in the meantime, the Department of Corrections had to find beds for the close to 1,500 inmates being housed there.
“We’ve had to move literally thousands of prisoners around the state and we’ve reached capacity at some of our facilities because we’ve had to make some of these choices,” said Brandes, who chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Criminal and Civil Justice, which funds the state’s Department of Corrections.
“It highlights the stress that we’re putting on the overall system in the Department of Corrections. The Department of Corrections is, in many ways, in crisis today. We don’t have enough staffing, staffing is predominantly the No. 1 issue that we’re hearing about, but our physical facilities are still under stress as well. I mean, we have facilities that were built in 1918 that are still in operation in Florida. Most of our facilities are not air-conditioned, we have extreme challenges in just physical facilities as well as transportation facilities, but our main challenge right now is staffing.”
While Brandes says he’s confident the federal government will reimburse the state for most of the costs to repair the storm damage on prisons, that money won’t help with the funding and staffing problems that already existed before the storm.
“We’re about 20 percent understaffed at some facilities,” he added. “We see people getting called back in on their days off and if they refuse to work their days off we’re writing up the guard for not working their days off because it’s gotten under that much pressure – and the situation in the panhandle only made it more profound, only made it more acute, the staffing challenges that we’re seeing across the state.”
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