Peter Schorsch
Mike Crews, former secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections, is coming out with allegations Gov. Rick Scott and his administration was more concerned about optics and less worried over allegations his agency involved in the death of a mentally ill inmate from a blistering shower at Dade Correctional Institution.
In an interview with the Miami Herald, Crews, a longtime law enforcement officer, said the governor’s office continually asked him to defer for a number of actions, all with increasing urgency as the 2014 re-election drew near.
Among the requests: fire people Crews didn’t think should be fired, fired; write press releases for things he didn’t say, and hold press conferences to distract from the real problems facing the DoC – that Florida’s prisons have become dangerous from slashed budgets, neglect and staffing cuts.
Adam Hollingsworth, Scott’s then-chief of staff, told Crews, “we need you to take a bullet for the governor,” he recalled to Herald writers Julie Brown and Mary Ellen Klas.
“I guess you can say they were more concerned with the crafting and writing of news releases,” Crews said. “That had little to do with the reality of what needed to be done to keep the institutions safe and secure.”
During his tenure, Crews saw a consistent pattern of cuts in the prison system staff, resulting in overtime for corrections officers reaching $2.9 million a month. Staffing levels were at a point that many could not keep an accurate count of inmates. Facilities had regular failures of electrical, plumbing and security systems.
Agency trucks, buses and vans were in such a state of disrepair, that there were fears they would break down, allowing inmates to escape. Smuggling was both lucrative and widespread, Brown and Klas write that some guards made more selling packs of cigarettes at $200 than they would earn from promotions.
To Crews, rising rates of inmate deaths came as little surprise, because of the alarming increase of attacks on corrections officers and a twofold jump in incidents requiring force.
Things began to get worse in May, when the Herald and others began uncovering a number of unexplained and suspicious prisoner deaths, starting with Darren Rainey.
Rainey, a 50-year-old inmate with mental illness, died in an 180-degree shower used specifically as punishment by Dade Correctional corrections officers. Both Miami-Dade police and DoC inspectors failed to investigate Rainey’s death for negligence, hinting at a possible cover-up.
Later, four DOC inspector general’s office investigators with filed a whistleblower lawsuit, accusing Jeffery Beasley, their supervisor, of forcing them to cover up the circumstances surrounding the death of Randall Jordan-Aparo, an inmate who died in 2010 after he was sprayed with chemicals at Franklin Correctional Institution.
With each successive revelation, Crews told the Herald, the governor’s office grew more frantic.
Afterwards, Scott staffers ordered Crews not to report details of any subsequent inmate death in writing, to communicate a death – from any cause — only on the phone, leading to waves of phone calls day and night.
In the interview, Crews said it was increasingly apparent that those in the administration, with Scott in particular, was less concerned about the safety of the state’s prison system, and properly spending the agency’s $2.2 billion annual budget.
Upon taking office, Crews, Scott’s third corrections secretary in three years, knew conditions were worsening at Florida’s prisons after both the governor and Legislature decimated the DOC budget and cut staff.
Crews told a Senate committee Sept. 2013 that the DOC budget was $500 million below 2007 funding levels, even though the system had 9,000 more inmates.
In three years with the agency, Crews said met Scott once, he said – the day he was interviewed.
“You would think that as the head of the largest agency in Florida, the governor, would once in a while want to get a pulse on what was going on,’’ Crews told the Herald. “He called me every now and then to see how things were doing, but that’s about it.
“I never saw him.’’
