News Service of Florida has: Five Questions for Julie Jones

By DARA KAM
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA

THE CAPITAL, TALLAHASSEE, February 4, 2015…… Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Julie Jones came out of retirement to take over a troubled agency dealing with reports of cover-ups involving inmate deaths, whistleblower lawsuits and state and federal investigations into prison activities.

Tapped in December by Gov. Rick Scott, Jones is the first woman to lead the agency overseeing more than 100,000 inmates. She retired last spring after a five-year stint as chief of the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Prior to that, Jones served more than two decades at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, where she worked her way up to director of law enforcement before taking the highway-safety position in 2009.

The News Service of Florida has five questions for Julie Jones:

Q: You've taken over an agency that is the subject of lawsuits from workers who say they've been retaliated against for exposing wrongdoing. The department is under state and federal investigation at different prisons for corruption and abuse and is the object of almost daily critical news reports. Do you think you'll be able to turn the agency around and instill public confidence and particularly assure families of inmates that when their loved ones enter institutions they will come out alive?

JONES: I am absolutely confident that we are going to be able to right this ship. I say that based on my confidence in the people that work for this department and the solid reputation that many of our people have in their communities. We're doing a series of surveys right now. We did an online survey. We're also going into every institution. I have a team that's going there for me. The teams that are entering into these institutions are finding people that care. They understand their role. They want to be involved in reentry. They want to be involved in getting that inmate in and out. They are standing up saying that they are not going to let a few people ruin their reputation. That's what's happened. There's been a small number of people that have tarnished the entire system, the entire corrections system. It pains me that it's been so effective. You heard me say in testimony last night (in a Senate committee) that it's a perception. I truly believe, yes, we have pockets of resistance and people that probably should not be corrections officers but they are few and far between. It's my confidence in the existing staff that leads me to believe that we can fix it and that I'm going to be able to be accountable to those families and friends of inmates, and for them to know that they will be safe in our institutions.

Q: Your predecessor, former Secretary Michael Crews, said that there were problems with flooding, leaking roofs, supply shortages and a list of other troubles that went way beyond perception.

JONES: We definitely have an infrastructure problem. Mr. Crews talked about it. I have talked about it. We have approximately $116 million in infrastructure needs. But because that number is so large, it's better for me to break it up in chunks. I asked staff, what can you do this year? And the answer was $15 million for fixed capital outlay, and the governor's put it in the budget. This solves another problem. Because we've been underfunded in that category, to keep the roofs fixed we've been keeping vacancies in our officer positions to fix the roof. That creates an officer safety issue. It creates issues inside the institutions that create tension. If we fix the funding issues associated with this agency, I think it goes a long way to stabilizing the environment. Fully staffed institutions means we now can deliver all those services to those inmates, and get them into the system and get them out of the system, preferably in a better way.

Q: The department is estimated to spend $33 million on overtime this year, largely because of staffing shortages. You asked for $16.5 million to fill vacant positions. That would only fill about 300 more than 2,000 jobs that were cut over the past several years. Can you fill critical staff positions at prisons with the amount of money you requested?

JONES: The staffing level on the books is not the issue. Stopping the use of salary dollars for roofs, for bed linens, for medicine, for all the stuff that we're using it for and using it to staff the institutions is the goal here. I have a list of every institution, and that list gives me current required positions, total facility positions and then staffing. My suggestion was 96 percent. You're never going to have every position filled, just because of churn --- people retiring, quitting, going off to another job. That number, for staffing goal, is 16,283 positions. We have 16,851 authorized positions. That looks like we're overstaffed. In reality we're not. Because there's another issue that's key to staffing a prison and it's relief factor. We want the issue of relief factor to always be considered in a staffing matrix. So you can ask me how many bodies I need. Then I'm going to tell you when someone goes on leave --- they're sick, military leave, maternity leave --- you always need a little fudge factor in there for extra staffing to keep everything filled. That number is a couple of hundred more. So we're very close to being fully staffed. That's why when the governor looked at me and said, "How much money do you need?" we did an analysis of the entire system but also went beyond just the security section, the institutions part. That $16.5 million is for every critical position in reentry, in the institution units and the correction probation, our community corrections people. Because all three have to work seamlessly and integrate with one another in order to help that inmate out of the system. You're going to hear me talk more and more about taking that individual when they enter into a reception center, do every evaluation that we can and then tell that inmate, here is your reentry plan. You may have a two-year sentence. You may have a 10-year sentence. But we're going to immediately begin the process to get you the resources that you need to be safe. You're not going to be happy in a prison. No one's happy in a prison. But to keep you occupied. To get you educational classes, vocational, drug and alcohol rehabilitation --- anything that we have available for you to get into the correct correctional environment to have that corrections piece be real. Right now, because of the staffing and because of some gaps in our budget, I believe we warehouse people. We need to start to be a correctional institution now.

Q: There's been some criticism, including from senators, about your interpretation of the use-of-force statistics. There was an increase of 1,017 incidents of use of force, an 18 percent rise. But you explained that numbers weren't really going up because the number of incidents that could have resulted in use of force but did not went up by more than 2,000. Can you explain your interpretation of the use-of-force data?

JONES: It's very important when you talk about use of force to understand it's a negative term but it's not necessarily a negative act. I was trying to say that use of force is anything from holding someone's arm and escorting them into a room all the way to doing a cell extraction. Those cell extractions, by the way, are planned. They're safe. And they're always videotaped. That goes to some of the questions on how do you know when force is used. We know because we try to video any encounters, if not at the beginning of the encounter, at the end of the encounter. The three biggest areas of increase last year were in self-defense, use of force to quell a disturbance or use of force for physical resistance to a lawful act. I also said yesterday that the number of times we had to react to those issues were up 894 but the precipitating act associated with that 800-plus increase were actually 2,812. What I was trying to say was yes, we had an increase of laying hands on an inmate for a legitimate purpose and it was because we had almost double an increase of times where those officers had to react. So yes, it went up, but so did the precipitating acts. The point that I think was lost in the discussion was use of force is 99 percent of the time legitimate. It's necessary. We use use of force to quell riots, disturbances between inmates, when we have inmates with weapons, when we have possession of stimulants. We dispense a lot of pills in our corrections institutes. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether they swallow the pill or not. They go back in and it becomes contraband. Someone else is taking medication that they shouldn't. Aggravated battery on an inmate or on an officer. We have assaults not only on inmates but on officers. And we have unauthorized possession of contraband, which is usually cell phones. And then gang-related activity. We actually had an increase from 187 incidents to 244 with gang-related activity. These are the kinds of things our officers are encountering. So it sounds terrible. It's increased by almost 900 incidents of use of force when in actuality, because we're training officers with critical incident techniques to lower the temperature when they encounter many of these situations, the number of misuse where you violated policy in your use of force and were subsequently disciplined --- remember an increase of almost 900 incidents --- the misuse, the illegal use of force by a corrections officer went down from 40 to 27 incidents. So these numbers are big. But you have to understand what the numbers represent. And the key number for me is violations of policy are down. I believe it's down because we've done a lot of training in the last six months and it's proving to be very, very valuable. In 2010, when we closed 23 institutions, we put almost 12,000 inmates into already-occupied dorm space. So we put more people together. Close confinement of 12,000 more people into the same or similar institution I think has created tension. We have these chronic vacancies. So just the fact that we don't have fully staffed institutions where we can keep an eye on every inmate at every corner means that sometimes we have an inmate that walks up to the control room with an injury that we didn't observe. Someone else did that to them. Staff assaults have gone up 12 percent. That's the other piece that I think is missed in this. The correlation between staffing and use of force indicates that the officers are doing something wrong. The number's going up so they must be at fault. And they're not. The question that very few people ask me is, is there a correlation with staffing and assaults on officers and injuries to officers, and indeed there is. Officers are quelling more disturbances and doing it correctly and getting injured more often. That's the story. That last piece is very rarely spoken about.

Q: One of the first things you did after taking over was to look at the health-care contracts and say they needed to be reworked. Senate Criminal Justice Chairman Greg Evers ordered you this week to renegotiate the contracts immediately. Has the time come for the state to rethink the privatization of health care for inmates?

JONES: Let me talk about the accountability measures. We need liquidated damages. We need penalties. And we need to totally rethink the behavioral sciences piece that's associated with mental-health care in these contracts. These contracts were done under a request-for-proposal standard. I think they need to be rebid under an invitation to negotiate so we can really sit down with vendors and talk about where their skills are, what they have to offer and set mutually agreed-upon goals about what is success and what is staffing. I intend to look at this very hard in the next two weeks. I know Sen. Evers said rebid today. But frankly I have to take a seamless approach to how we do these contracts because I need a continuum of service. These two companies that have these contracts can give me 120-day notice and walk away. I don't want that to happen. I want us to come to an agreement where we mutually agree that we need to redo how we're operating under these contracts and then rebid. I do not believe that privatization of health care was a failure. I believe that if we had done it correctly with the right procurement instrument we would have been much more successful. But I want the ability to look at all angles. I believe that if we went back to state employees it would be much more expensive than the current contract. But rebidding the contracts as they exist today would be more expensive. So we're going to have to look at it from all angles. Do we continue with privatization or do we partially privatize? All of these options will be on the table. Going back to fully-staffed (full-time employees) with state employees I do not believe is an option.