The private prisons run by GEO Corp. are noticeably more humane. Unfortunately, GEO Corp. doesn\u2019t run a women\u2019s prison. If they did, it would be a godsend if they would take over Lowell Correctional Institution<\/a> near Ocala, where treatment of prisoners is a standing violation of the Geneva Convention.<\/p>\n I was once reprimanded in court by a judge for stating that Lowell C.I. is a \u201csnake pit.\u201d He considered this an expression of contempt for the criminal court system as a whole \u2014 not my intent.<\/p>\n The American criminal justice system works well. It\u2019s an adversarial system: complex, messy and inefficient. Sometimes, it can produce unjust results. But, like democracy itself, it\u2019s better than the alternative. Ask any Cuban dissident.<\/p>\n We need to separate our legal system from our prison system. The Florida prison system is awful. It\u2019s often viewed as a dumping ground for human refuse \u2014 out of sight, out of mind \u2014 and it is structured to prevent prying eyes. (All necessary for security reasons, of course.)<\/p>\n People don\u2019t care, and their elected officials certainly don\u2019t, 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.<\/p>\n You can\u2019t 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 \u201cAlligator Alcatraz,\u201d<\/a> remove the speck from thine own eye first.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re up there.<\/p>\n Lowell was the subject of a 2015 investigation by Miami Herald journalists called \u201cBeyond Punishment<\/a>.\u201d They documented beatings, sexual abuse and squalid conditions. The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the horrors<\/a> in a 2020 report.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ve heard them say they need to perform oral sex on an officer just to call home.<\/p>\n Are they being honest? They are convicted felons, after all. Some of them are convicted of terrible crimes. But when multiple women (who don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n No former Lowell inmate I spoke with has ever deviated from the same awful accounts or the unique and graphic details.<\/p>\n Agitating for prisoners\u2019 rights has never been a vote-getter in Florida. All it takes is a moral compass and a spine.<\/p>\n Gerard S. Williams of Southwest Ranches, a criminal defense lawyer, was a Broward prosecutor from 1991 to 2001.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cRemember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[29,115,139,141,140],"class_list":["post-315209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-florida-news","tag-news","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Gerard](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/tfl-l-gerald-williams-0116-01.jpg\")
Gerard S. Williams was a Broward prosecutor from 1991 through 2001 and has been a criminal defense attorney since then. (Courtesy)<\/p>\n