Deirdra FuncheonBRADENTON, Fla. —While most Florida Commission on Offender Review decisions are made during hearings without the inmate present, parolees whose supervision terms are being reviewed sometimes do show up in person. Five of the 33 cases being...
BRADENTON, Fla. —Criminal justice reformers say that letting very sick inmates out of prison early would be a sensible way to relieve pressure on Florida’s overburdened corrections system, and on taxpayers, who will pony up nearly half a billion...
BRADENTON, Fla. — Inside a carpeted room at the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office, an audience of about 75 settled into rows of banquet chairs. In the center of the room was a table, topped with microphones and a box of tissues that would be plucked...
MIAMI — An hour south of Miami, down the street from an alligator farm, a security guard buzzes visitors into the Homestead Correctional Institution. Each guest’s bags are run through a rickety metal detector and he or she is issued a panic button —...
Claire GoforthJACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Ten years ago, Rosemary McCoy never would have imagined that today she’d be in a Jacksonville library, tears streaming down her face, as she tells a stranger how it feels to be disenfranchised. Then she was a real estate...
The move from Ohio to Florida was supposed to be a new beginning. On June 29, 2018, Timothy Sexton wrote on Facebook that he was nervous and excited to start his new job in Jacksonville. Though he’d miss his girlfriend and young son, who planned to...
Last November, Florida voters passed an amendment to the state constitution that automatically restores the right to vote to people convicted of felonies (except murderers and sex offenders) who have completed all terms of their sentence, including...
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Two grey-haired men listened silently in Courtroom 505 of the Duval County Courthouse on March 28 as Judge Angela M. Cox uttered the words that they’d waited the better part of 50 years to hear: “The indictments against you have...
Michael Mills had run-ins with the law in his younger, wilder days. Now he is 43, an automotive repairman and father of four who lives in Baldwin, Fla., a quasi-independent municipality in Jacksonville. He thought that was all far behind him until...
By Deirdra Funcheon Thanks to decades of tough-on-crime policies, Florida now has the third-largest prison population in the United States — nearly 100,000 people, including more minors than any other state. Florida requires people to serve at...