“Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.” — Hebrews 13:3
I have been a criminal lawyer in South Florida for 35 years.
I was a prosecutor at the Broward State Attorney’s Office from 1991 through 2001, and a criminal defense lawyer from 2002 through 2026. Over the years, I’ve had a good deal of experience with Florida Department of Corrections facilities, traveling throughout the state to visit clients and take depositions.
South Florida prisons are bad, but the network of north Florida prisons known as the “Iron Triangle” are particularly odious, regarding violence by guards and other inmates.
The private prisons run by GEO Corp. are noticeably more humane. Unfortunately, GEO Corp. doesn’t run a women’s prison. If they did, it would be a godsend if they would take over Lowell Correctional Institution near Ocala, where treatment of prisoners is a standing violation of the Geneva Convention.
Gerard S. Williams was a Broward prosecutor from 1991 through 2001 and has been a criminal defense attorney since then. (Courtesy)
I was once reprimanded in court by a judge for stating that Lowell C.I. is a “snake pit.” He considered this an expression of contempt for the criminal court system as a whole — not my intent.
The American criminal justice system works well. It’s an adversarial system: complex, messy and inefficient. Sometimes, it can produce unjust results. But, like democracy itself, it’s better than the alternative. Ask any Cuban dissident.
We need to separate our legal system from our prison system. The Florida prison system is awful. It’s often viewed as a dumping ground for human refuse — out of sight, out of mind — and it is structured to prevent prying eyes. (All necessary for security reasons, of course.)
People don’t care, and their elected officials certainly don’t, either. Nobody cares until their 19-year-old child is sentenced to a 7-year minimum mandatory prison sentence on a drug charge, and shipped north.
You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting a grandstanding politician demonstrating against ICE detention facilities. I say to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (and others): Instead of press conferences at “Alligator Alcatraz,” remove the speck from thine own eye first.
A good place to start would be Lowell C.I. north of Ocala. You can stop by Union C.I., Florida State Prison in Raiford, and Santa Rosa C.I. in the Panhandle while you’re up there.
Lowell was the subject of a 2015 investigation by Miami Herald journalists called “Beyond Punishment.” They documented beatings, sexual abuse and squalid conditions. The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the horrors in a 2020 report.
More than a dozen clients have given me first-hand accounts of life at Lowell. Besides the violence, they describe rats and cockroaches crawling over them while they try to sleep. I’ve heard them say they need to perform oral sex on an officer just to call home.
Are they being honest? They are convicted felons, after all. Some of them are convicted of terrible crimes. But when multiple women (who don’t know each other) tell me the same story, with the same nauseating details, with nothing to gain from it, I (like the DOJ) tend to believe them.
No former Lowell inmate I spoke with has ever deviated from the same awful accounts or the unique and graphic details.
Agitating for prisoners’ rights has never been a vote-getter in Florida. All it takes is a moral compass and a spine.
Gerard S. Williams of Southwest Ranches, a criminal defense lawyer, was a Broward prosecutor from 1991 to 2001.