Web of Scandal Ensnares Florida Prison System

Florida’s Department of Corrections, the nation’s third-largest with 128 prisons and other facilities housing more than 85,000 inmates, is in the throes of a multifaceted scandal that shows no sign of stopping.

A new interim chief appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush has been firing wardens and probing cases of possible corruption and cronyism among prison personnel, while state and federal agents have been investigating reports of a prison-based steroid ring, theft of state property and misuse of inmate labor.

Five veteran Corrections officers have been fired for their part in a drunken brawl that followed a banquet, or for allegedly lying about what happened.

“The absence of integrity, the brutality displayed and unleashed on others, and the dearth of leadership was totally unacceptable,” said interim Corrections Secretary James R. McDonough, a war veteran and former Florida drug czar.

Last month, McDonough fired four wardens, three assistant wardens and two regional directors, saying they did “not have my trust and confidence to lead department personnel in the way they deserve to be led.”

Then, state Atty. Gen. Charlie Crist said that under McDonough’s predecessor, a former minor league baseball player had been placed in a no-show job in a prison library so he could help prison guards win a softball tournament.

“It is disturbing that a state agency would place so much importance on a team sport that it would stoop to committing crimes,” Crist told reporters. The ringer, Mark Guerra, has agreed to reimburse the state $1,400 and complete 50 hours of community service, Crist said.

For Ron McAndrew, a retired warden, the shake-up in the department where he worked for 23 years has come none too soon.

“In the ‘90s, we stood on our head, did everything possible to get rid of our ‘Cool Hand Luke’ image,” McAndrew said. But in recent years, he said, conditions in Florida prisons have often come to resemble a sinister amalgam of the classic Paul Newman movie about the brutal treatment of convicts and the juvenile high jinks of National Lampoon’s “Animal House.”

“Wild and crazy things were happening,” said McAndrew, who keeps informed through e-mail contacts with hundreds of department employees and retirees. “One warden took his prison softball team to Las Vegas, gave them $35,000 and said: ‘Have a good time, boys. You’ve earned it.’ ”

On Feb. 10, Bush forced James V. Crosby Jr. to resign as Corrections secretary. Crosby, a former prison guard who rose through the ranks, had become chief in January 2003. He had helped organize campaign rallies for Bush and was supposed to have settled down a department roiled by the four-year tenure of Michael W. Moore.

Bush, who as recently as last fall had praised Crosby as a “good leader,” didn’t give a reason for forcing the resignation, but the governor said, “As the details come out, it’ll be clear that it was the appropriate thing to do.”

McDonough told state legislators he was examining the propriety of two multimillion-dollar no-bid contracts awarded to a Tallahassee company to provide inmates with prescription drugs. He also said he had frozen more than 50 employee club funds, opened by prison wardens, that weren’t under department oversight. The accounts might hold more than $1.5 million, he said.

Though the funds were intended to pay for morale-boosting events such as family picnics, McDonough said, they were used to pay for employee softball teams, the teams’ hotel bills and other activities “only a few could partake in.”

Under Crosby, a network of “good old boys” from rural northeastern Florida -- where many of the state’s largest prisons are -- came to dominate the department, McAndrew said. “It was run as a fiefdom,” he said.

Sometimes, he said, wardens and other department officials covered up for “goon squads,” groups of prison guards said to have beaten and terrorized inmates to keep them in line.

Harry K. Singletary Jr., state Corrections secretary from 1991 to 1999, said the department had been sullied by “a tragedy of epic proportions.”

“There are so many good Corrections employees and families that deserve better and are now stigmatized by these crooks and rascals,” he said in an e-mail.

Other states would do well to follow Florida’s example and look more closely at what goes on inside their prison systems, said Alexander Busansky, executive director of the privately funded Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons.

To have an effective prison system, Busansky said, “you need to recruit the best people, give them the tools they need and hold them accountable.”

He added: “In Florida, you had a breakdown of all of the elements you need to run any successful business or agency.”

The commission has held hearings in several U.S. cities on violence, rape and other abuse in America’s prisons and jails. Last April, McAndrew told the panel that as outgoing warden at Florida State Prison, he had warned his successor, Crosby, that a goon squad was giving “chronic” beatings to inmates. Instead of disciplining one suspected squad member, McAndrew said, Crosby promoted him.

The guard was later charged and acquitted with two colleagues in the fatal 1999 beating of death row inmate Frank Valdes, who was removed from his cell with 22 broken ribs and other and internal injuries.

Randall Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute, a not-for-profit public interest law firm, said that prison visits, letters from inmates and official records obtained in lawsuits indicated that under Crosby, treatment of inmates in Florida prisons became more brutal. Berg said pepper spray had been used on prisoners confined to their cells.

“It might be purely to punish them for talking to an inmate in an adjoining cell,” he said, “or looking out the window.”