Tampa Rep. Susan Valdés sponsors bill to create Corrections accountabilty position

Florida Rep. Susan Valdés, D-Tampa. Credit: Photo via State of Florida

Saying existing law does not provide adequate and independent oversight of the Florida’s Department of Corrections (FDC), two Florida GOP lawmakers have proposed an Office of Corrections Ombudsman to ensure accountability, monitor conditions of confinement, and investigate complaints.

The measure (SB 1160) is sponsored in the Senate by Ana Maria Rodriguez, who represents Monroe and a part of Miami-Dade County, and in the House (HB 889) by Susan Valdés, R-Tampa. The idea has been pushed for several years by criminal justice reform advocates. The bill says the legislation is necessary “to create an independent entity as a unit of the legislative branch of state government in order to restore public trust in the department.”

The bills come a month after an investigation into a Panhandle state prison by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that overcrowding and overstaffing resulted in a high concentration of complaints by inmates about excessive force and staff misconduct.

And they come more than five years after the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Middle District of Florida issued a report regarding Florida’s Lowell Correctional Institution, the state’s largest and oldest women’s prison. The report found reasonable cause to believe that Lowell failed to protect prisoners from sexual abuse by staff.

Nine states have created corrections ombudsman positions since 2018, while another two have created quasi-oversight bodies, according to Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas, which runs the National Resource Center for Correctional Oversight.

“It’s greater recognition of deaths in custody, of the violence going on inside, of poor conditions,” Deitch said.

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Tampa Rep. Susan Valdés sponsors bill to create Corrections accountabilty position

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