As in most states, prisons in Florida are not easy to access. They’re not even easy to find. Without exception, the DOC facilities that I visited were situated in remote areas, off backwoods roads, in fenced-off compounds surrounded by woodlands and swamps. You had to drive a good distance to reach their entrances, past the beaches and theme parks, the golf courses and vacation resorts, the palm-lined boulevards and oceanfront condos that drew throngs of tourists and snowbirds to the Sunshine State every year. The closer you got to the gates of a prison, the more the traffic thinned out, and the spottier the cellular coverage generally got. On several occasions, I zoomed past the facility I’d set out for, only to notice later that my GPS had stopped working and that I’d gone too far. Other than marshes and fields and some unwelcoming signs—UNANNOUNCED PERSONS WILL BE PROSECUTED—there was little else around.
Along with their remoteness, the prisons I visited were notable for their drab architectural style: featureless, box-shaped buildings arrayed across sterile compounds that projected a bland orderliness. Squinting at them through rows of security fencing and the harsh glare of the Florida sun, I rarely saw much in the way of human activity: the rec yards were empty, the grounds still. Aside from the occasional squawk of a bird circling overhead or the buzz of a mosquito that landed on my arm, I heard few sounds. Nothing eventful was happening here, the dull facades of the generic-looking buildings suggested, certainly nothing disturbing or violent.
Prisons have always been geographically isolated and visually lackluster, I assumed after these visits, the better to avoid attracting unwanted attention from outsiders. As I subsequently learned, this assumption was wrong. During the Jacksonian era, “Americans took enormous pride in their prisons, were eager to show them off to European visitors, and boasted that the United States had ushered in a new era in the history of crime and punishment,” notes the historian David Rothman. Among the visitors invited to see the early prisons of the new republic was Charles Dickens, who toured the grounds of Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842, chatting freely with convicts as he passed from cell to cell. “Nothing was concealed or hidden from my view,” Dickens wrote in his American Notes, “and every piece of information that I sought, was openly and frankly given.” In both America and England, prisons in the nineteenth century tended to be built in prominent places that were exposed to the public. Some boasted soaring turrets and stone arcades and were likened to palaces.
As the sociologist John Pratt has documented, it was only later that the architectural style grew more spartan and that prisons started to be built on the “unobtrusive margins” of society. Why did this happen? One explanation is that prison administrators learned from experience not to open their doors to observers like Dickens, who praised the officials in charge of the Eastern State Penitentiary for their good intentions but lambasted the system of “Prison Discipline” they had devised, which confined people to total isolation. The regimen of solitude would cultivate introspection and self-discipline, reformers of the Jacksonian era believed. Dickens was unpersuaded, describing solitary confinement as a “dreadful punishment” that was all the more insidious because its ravages were cloaked and camouflaged. “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body … because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh,” Dickens wrote. At the time, America’s penal system was shaped by a belief that prisons could be designed to foster moral uplift and turn chastened offenders into law-abiding citizens. By the 1980s, a more punitive philosophy had taken hold, which made prison administrators and public officials all the more inclined to limit access to their grounds.
But the shift to the margins of society could also be attributed to something else. In Pratt’s view, it reflected the triumph of “civilized punishment”—civilized not in the conventional meaning of the term, but in the sense that Norbert Elias described, whereby distasteful and disturbing events were removed from sight and pushed “behind the scenes of social life.” At first glance, Elias’s work appears to bear little relevance to the study of punishment. His two-volume 1939 work, The Civilizing Process, a study of European manners that traced the evolution of table etiquette and other behavioral norms from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, scarcely mentions the subject. But in recent years, scholars of crime and punishment have drawn on Elias’s insights to explain some of the ironies and contradictions of contemporary penal practices. At the core of the “civilizing process” was the rise of internal inhibitions that led social actors to suppress the more “animal” aspects of human conduct and to hide such behavior from others, Elias argued. Bodily functions (spitting, farting) came to be seen as offensive and to be banished from polite company. “Disturbing events” such as the carving of dead animals—an activity once performed at the table before festive meals—were hidden in deference to the rising “threshold of repugnance” among members of the courtly upper class.
Though Elias did not examine how this shift in sentiments might have altered the landscape of punishment, his argument that concealment was a central part of the civilizing process seemed strikingly relevant to another set of “disturbing events”: the torture and execution of criminal offenders. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, crowds routinely gathered to watch wrongdoers get marched to the gallows, where they were mutilated, burned, and hanged. During the nineteenth century, these so-called spectacles of punishment grew increasingly rare, and many of the practices that had long been theatrically displayed (floggings, beheadings) were outlawed, not least because elites had come to regard them as repellent. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argued that the transition to the more refined technologies of punishment in the modern era—most notably, the prison—was driven by the desire to control and observe the bodies of criminals, rendering them docile and obedient. Criminologists influenced by Elias have emphasized another rationale, arguing that the shift was propelled by a desire to hide these bodies from respectable citizens who no longer wanted to glimpse the sordid business of punishment with their own eyes.
The fact that corporal punishment came to be viewed as sordid was, in theory, a sign of progress. Yet as Elias’s disciples have noted, the “civilizing process” he outlined did not suggest that brutal violence would cease, only that it would be relegated to more private spaces. According to the scholar David Garland, who introduced Elias’s work to the sociology of punishment, violence would not offend civilized sensibilities so long as it unfolded behind closed doors or could be sanitized. (The state’s monopolization of violence was a major theme in The Civilizing Process, a development that coincided with an emphasis on self-restraint that deterred ordinary citizens from engaging in unlicensed displays of aggression.) In his book Punishment and Modern Society, Garland presented a genealogy of “civilized sanctions” that bore out this theory. Hanging criminals on the scaffold was uncivilized, everyone in contemporary America agreed. But executing them by lethal injection—a more discreet method of killing—was legal in many states. Flogging prisoners clearly violated the “threshold of repugnance” among modern Americans. But caging them in hidden, segregated “isolation units” did not. The fact that solitary confinement’s “ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye,” as Dickens had observed in 1842, was precisely why so many people failed to find it offensive. “Routine violence and suffering can be tolerated on condition that it is discreet, disguised, or somehow removed from view,” observed Garland. What mattered was not the level of brutality, but its visibility and form. Viewed in this light, the remoteness of Florida’s prisons was not an accident. Throughout the Western world, “the civilized prison became the invisible prison,” Pratt observed, hiding the system’s violence and making it that much easier for “good people” to ignore or forget about what was happening behind the walls.
In fairness, not everyone in Florida put this out of mind. Between visits to penitentiaries, I made my way to a coffee shop one day to meet Judy Thompson. An African American woman from Baymeadows, a suburb of Jacksonville, Thompson was the former coordinator of a leadership academy at the Mayport Naval Station. She was also the founder of an organization that advocated fairer sentencing policies and more humane conditions in Florida’s prisons. Thompson came to our meeting with a stack of letters that had been sent to her by incarcerated people who’d heard about her organization and had written to relay stories about the mistreatment they’d endured. The letters arrived faster than she could open them, she said. The ones she’d brought to show me had all been sent to her in the previous month.
Composed by strangers, the letters touched a nerve in Thompson, who had six sons. In 1999, the second youngest of them, Chris, was arrested for participating in a robbery. No one was hurt during the crime, Thompson told me, and Chris, who was twenty-one, had not been armed. Even so, he was sentenced to thirty years. Until that moment, Thompson hadn’t thought much about the punitive laws that had turned prisons into one of Florida’s largest growth industries. “It just wasn’t part of my world,” she said. Afterward, she started reading about the wave of punitive measures that had caused the prison population to surge both in Florida and in the rest of the country. Among the books she later came across was The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, a law professor who depicted the war on drugs and other supposedly color-blind policies (mandatory minimum sentences, stop-and-frisk programs) as pillars in a racial caste system that was as pervasive and pernicious as the segregation laws to which Blacks had been subjected before the civil rights movement. The New Jim Crow highlighted the devastating costs, becoming a runaway bestseller and reshaping the debate about mass incarceration. Judy Thompson devoured the book, which appeared in 2010. A year later, she launched her organization, which she called the Forgotten Majority, because, she said, “those behind the walls are truly forgotten” and because, in some cities, a majority of young Black men were ensnared in the criminal justice system. In 2019, Blacks made up 17 percent of Florida’s population but nearly half of the state’s prisoners (Latinos comprised an additional 40 percent).
Thompson was under no illusions that changing the system in which her son was penned would be easy. Yet she soon discovered that doubts about mass incarceration were emerging in some surprising places. Not long after she formed the Forgotten Majority, she paid a visit to Greg Evers, who chaired the Criminal Justice Committee in the Florida Senate. Senator Evers was a conservative Republican from the Panhandle with an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association. Thompson went to see him to tell him about a petition she was circulating to make it easier for felons who she felt deserved a second chance to be eligible for parole, which Florida had effectively abolished in 1983 by enacting a truth-in-sentencing law that required all offenders to serve 85 percent of their prison terms. Among the prisoners she believed should be granted relief from this law was her son Chris, who had used his time in prison to become an accomplished jailhouse lawyer, dispensing legal advice to other incarcerated people. (They called him “little Johnnie Cochran,” she told me with pride.)
Senator Evers received Thompson in his office. As she made her pitch, he nodded. Then he told her, “Judy, you’re preaching to the choir. It’s costing us too much money to lock all these people up.” Across the country, conservatives who’d spent decades championing law-and-order policies were coming to a similar realization, unsettled by the fiscal costs of building the world’s largest prison system, if not by the moral costs. A year later, Thompson attended an event at the Governor’s Mansion, in Tallahassee, to honor Black History Month. Before leaving, she spotted Florida’s governor, Rick Scott. She walked up to him, told him about her organization, and said that she found it impossible to enjoy Black History Month when so many Black men were languishing in Florida’s prisons “without hope.” Rather than take offense, Scott, a Republican who in a few years would become a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, invited her to set up a meeting. Afterward, Thompson assumed that she would never hear from him again. Several weeks later, her phone rang. It was an aide to Governor Scott, calling to follow up. On her next trip to the Governor’s Mansion, Thompson hauled along several garbage bags filled with signed petitions calling for a restoration of parole. Changing the law was up to the legislature, Governor Scott told her, but Thompson left the meeting heartened that he’d listened to her.
At long last, policy makers were beginning to reckon with the calamitous effects of mass incarceration, it appeared, not only in Florida but across the country, where liberals and conservatives started to forge alliances to promote less punitive sentencing policies that could reduce the prison population. In the years to come, numerous states would curtail or eliminate mandatory minimum statutes and give judges greater discretion over how to sentence convicted felons. In 2016, Florida repealed the “10-20-Life” law, which had imposed draconian sentences on anyone armed with a gun during a crime. But persuading politicians like Rick Scott to put fewer people in prison, which cost between twenty thousand and thirty thousand dollars a year, was one thing. A less punitive approach could save taxpayers money. Making the case that prisoners should be treated more humanely—by hiring better-trained staff, by providing adequate mental health services, by increasing oversight and monitoring, all of which stood to cost money—was another matter entirely. As James Forman, a law professor at Yale, pointed out, critics of mass incarceration often focused on the ravages of the drug war and other policies that drove up the number of nonviolent offenders behind bars. Missing from this indictment was the fact that even if all nonviolent drug offenders were released, America would still have the world’s largest prison system—a system that stood out as much for its brutality as for its size.
When she formed the Forgotten Majority, the brutality of Florida’s prisons was not high on Judy Thompson’s agenda, not least because she had no idea how brutal they were. Then she started receiving letters like the ones that she spread on the table at the coffee shop where we met. In one of them, a prisoner described going to a captain to seek protection from gang members who had threatened him. The captain responded by telling him that if he did not shut up, “he would spray me (pepper spray) and … knock my teeth out,” the prisoner wrote. I’d contacted Thompson because I wanted to know how unusual the abuses at Dade were. Although Dade was an extreme case, physical and verbal abuse was not unusual at all, she told me. Most of the letters she got were from prisons in northern Florida, she said. In Thompson’s view, it was not a coincidence that the farther north one went, the less ethnically diverse the staff became. At a penitentiary near Jacksonville, two COs were convicted of plotting to kill a Black prisoner. The guards were members of the Ku Klux Klan.
For years, the inhumanity of Florida’s prisons attracted little notice. But in the wake of Darren Rainey’s murder and the wretched conditions described in the Herald and other news outlets, a small group of advocates started pushing for change. One of these advocates was George Mallinckrodt, the psychotherapist who had gotten fired after voicing complaints about the abuses at Dade. Another was Thompson, who, in March 2015, attended a legislative hearing in Tallahassee, chaired by Senator Evers, to address the rampant, sometimes-lethal violence in Florida’s prisons and jails. As usual, Thompson came to the hearing with some prisoners’ letters, including one she had received two years earlier from Mark Joiner, a prisoner who had been at Dade and who had contacted her a few months after Darren Rainey died. In his letter, Joiner described the sadistic abuses meted out to patients in the prison’s Transitional Care Unit, including the “scalding hot water” that had been used to torture Rainey and other mentally ill people. When Thompson first read the letter, she didn’t believe it, she told me, because the allegations were “too heinous.” Then Joiner wrote again, repeating the same charges, at which point she realized he was telling the truth. One section of Joiner’s letter had particularly moved Thompson, a passage in which he compared the impunity granted to the guards who killed Rainey to the life sentence he’d received for his crime (Joiner had been convicted of murder). At the hearing in Tallahassee, Thompson decided to read this section aloud. “I’ve come to the conclusion that one is prosecuted for murder depending on who you are,” Joiner wrote. While some murderers were “committed to DOC for life,” the letter continued,
others collect a paycheck from same and go home daily, free to continue the behavior at another time. One day, I wonder if the people of this state and the nation will look back at this time … and say, How could this go on? Law enforcement knew this, representatives in state government were aware of it, yet it just continued on.
After Thompson finished reading, some corrections officers also testified about the untenable conditions in Florida’s prisons—the overcrowding, the understaffing, the low morale. Their words made an impression on some of the lawmakers on hand, among them Senator Evers, who spent the rest of the spring promoting a sweeping prison reform bill. The bill included provisions to bolster staffing at prisons and to increase penalties for officers who engaged in abuse. It also called for establishing an independent oversight commission that would monitor DOC facilities by conducting surprise inspections and identifying problems before they metastasized.
In other Western countries, monitoring prisons in this way was not unusual. In the United Kingdom, for example, there were three separate layers of oversight: the Inspectorate of Prisons, which carried out unannounced inspections of all detention facilities; the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, which investigated complaints; and boards of local citizens that conducted additional reviews. The goal was “not to play gotcha,” said Michele Deitch, an expert on prison management who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, but to detect problems early. “It’s preventive.” Creating strong oversight mechanisms also reflected a belief that the public would be better served if, like other large institutions (banks, nuclear facilities), prisons were subject to independent scrutiny. In the United States, a different view prevailed. Prisons were “the ultimate enclosed institutions, completely lacking in transparency—to the public, to the press, to everyone,” said Deitch. Instead of preventive mechanisms, the model for remedying problems in the United States, historically, was through court-ordered consent decrees, settlements that resulted from class-action lawsuits filed against states whose jails or prisons were plagued with systemic deficiencies. One shortcoming of this approach was that it invariably came after the fact, “once things have already hit rock bottom,” noted Deitch. Another was that the improvements tended to be short-lived. Once officials complied with the court order, attention shifted elsewhere. Then the problems resurfaced, especially in states where prisons were left to monitor themselves.
At the panel hearing chaired by Senator Evers, several officers spoke about why the inspector general’s office—which was part of the Florida Department of Corrections—could not be entrusted with oversight. “We’re no longer to the point where we can police ourselves adequately,” said an officer whose investigations of abuse had been sabotaged. After leaving Tallahassee, Judy Thompson felt optimistic that the question Mark Joiner posed in his letter—how could a civilized country allow such things to go on?—would be answered by affirming that they must not go on. Then Thompson watched the Florida House of Representatives present its own reform bill—a bill that stripped out all of the meaningful provisions in Senator Evers’s version, including the proposal to create an independent oversight commission, on the grounds that this would give the DOC “a bad tag.” In the end, nothing passed, save for a few toothless measures that Governor Scott approved at the last minute through an executive order.
When we met, I asked Thompson how much she thought Florida’s leaders cared about the abuse of prisoners in light of all this. She pointed to the latest pile of letters she’d gotten. “Not enough,” she said with a sigh, “not enough.” Then she added, “If, in fact, Governor Scott feels he doesn’t have to take action on this, he’s probably right about that, because the average person who’s not impacted by incarceration couldn’t care less.”
One reason the average person ought to care about incarceration is that it is a collective undertaking—financed by taxpayers, presided over by legislators and judges, audited by inspectors who work for the state. However inaccessible and hidden from view they are, jails and prisons are public institutions. Yet in Florida, as in many other parts of the country, it isn’t so simple. Before going into politics, Rick Scott had served as the CEO of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain. Along with staff cuts, one of the ways that Scott proposed to lower spending on prisons after he became governor was by contracting out services to the private sector. When Harriet Krzykowski worked at Dade, her employer was not the Florida Department of Corrections. It was Corizon, a company based in Brentwood, Tennessee, and, later, Wexford, which was based in Pittsburgh. For these firms, the sordid business of punishment was just that—a business, and a potentially lucrative one in a state with nearly a hundred thousand people behind bars. In 2012, the same year Darren Rainey was tortured and killed, Wexford and Corizon were awarded five-year contracts worth a combined $1.3 billion to deliver psychiatric and medical care to incarcerated people in Florida.
As I discovered on my visit to Dade, one consequence of privatization was to push what happened inside prisons further behind the scenes, into the hands of companies that felt no obligation to answer for their conduct. I came to the prison at the invitation of the DOC, which after repeated requests finally agreed to let me tour the facility in the company of Glenn Morris, the new assistant warden. When I asked Morris if I could talk to some of the mental health counselors in the TCU, however, he said this decision was not up to him. It was up to Wexford, to which the state had transferred responsibility. From Morris’s office, I called a DOC spokesman in Tallahassee who confirmed that I would have to obtain permission from the company. I proceeded to call Wexford, reaching a media relations officer in Pittsburgh who told me that no one on the Wexford staff was available to talk to me. Because I was already at Dade, I would be happy to wait until someone was available, I told the Wexford spokesman. No interview would be granted, he said.
Wexford declined to answer any questions about the abusive practices that took place at Dade. Corizon was a bit more forthcoming. Dr. Calvin B. Johnson, the company’s chief medical officer, told me that all of the company’s employees went through an orientation that introduced them to a set of “company-wide values” encapsulated by the acronym SMART—Safety, Motivation, Accountability, Respect, and Teamwork. If mental health counselors witnessed unethical conduct, they were given multiple channels to report it, he added, including an anonymous hotline routed to corporate headquarters. This information came as news to Harriet Krzykowski, who told me she had never heard of the motto SMART when she worked at Dade. She was equally unaware of the anonymous hotline. Beyond the warning she received not to antagonize security, she couldn’t recall any directives during or after her orientation about what to do if she witnessed abuse. Her observation was echoed by several of her former peers, including George Mallinckrodt, who said there was “never any guidance, any training, any protocol, zero from Corizon, not only in regard to what abuse was but how to report it.”
One danger of relying on the private sector to provide mental health services in prisons is that companies may have an incentive to hide problems that might jeopardize their contracts. Another is that the drive to minimize costs could undermine the quality of care. Not long after Florida privatized medical services in its prisons, Pat Beall, a reporter at The Palm Beach Post, published an investigative story that detailed how the experiment was playing out. Seven months into the trial, Beall found, the number of deaths in custody across the state had soared to 206—a ten-year high. Among the deceased was a female prisoner who had been given Tylenol and warm compresses for lung cancer. Other prisoners complained that their prescription painkillers were suddenly replaced with cheaper substitutes, like ibuprofen. Meanwhile, the number of prisoners with serious illnesses who had been sent to outside hospitals had fallen dramatically, by 47 percent, which lowered costs but endangered lives. “We order surgery and they don’t come in,” a doctor told Beall. “They are dying before they get to surgery.”
What Beall found in Florida echoed what investigations had turned up in other states. In 2012, a court-ordered investigation found “serious problems with the delivery of medical and mental health care” at a prison in Idaho, where patients under Corizon’s care were left in soiled linens, denied access to food and water for days, and given the wrong medications. The report characterized the deficiencies as “frequent, pervasive and longstanding” (Corizon dismissed its findings as “misleading and erroneous”). In Kentucky, the families of several prisoners filed lawsuits after seven people died within a year at a jail where Corizon delivered the care, among them a severe diabetic who developed an infection and was kept at the facility rather than taken to an emergency room.
But privatization didn’t merely imperil the health of incarcerated people. It could also compromise the well-being of the staff delivering the care, forcing them to make decisions based on cost considerations rather than on medical need. In 2014, at a jail in Chatham County, Georgia, a man named Matthew Loflin pleaded to be sent to a hospital after experiencing shortness of breath and passing out in his cell. Dr. Charles Pugh, an on-site Corizon physician, asked one of the company’s regional medical directors for permission to transfer Loflin. The request was denied. In the days that followed, as Loflin’s condition worsened, Dr. Pugh and two Corizon nurses repeatedly asked for permission to send Loflin to the hospital, to no avail. Eventually, Dr. Pugh arranged to have Loflin see a cardiologist, in the hope that he could send Loflin to the emergency room. By the time this happened, Loflin’s blood pressure had plunged, and he lost consciousness again. Shortly after he was finally admitted to a hospital, he died.
Dr. Pugh’s experience was described in “Profits vs. Prisoners,” an investigation of Corizon conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The investigation opened with an account of another case, involving a prisoner in Oregon named Kelly Green who broke his neck during a psychotic episode (Green was schizophrenic). Instead of sending Green to the hospital right away, Corizon staffers released him from jail and then drove him to a hospital so that someone else could admit him. This arrangement, known as a “courtesy drop,” spared the company from having to pay for the hospital stay, at the expense of incarcerated people whose care was delayed. Like Matt Loflin, Green ended up dying, a death his family was convinced could have been avoided if he had been taken to the hospital immediately (the family ended up suing Corizon, which denied any wrongdoing).
The Southern Poverty Law Center report suggested that, thanks to privatization, nurses, doctors, and psychiatrists were routinely thrust into such roles, pressed to do the dirty work of keeping costs down for companies that were paid a flat rate for their services, meaning that “every dime saved on prisoner care is a dime added to the company’s bottom line.” In a declaration submitted in court on behalf of the family of Kelly Green, Dr. Pugh described the pressure this generated as unrelenting. “Once or twice a week, there were telephone conferences I was expected to attend with the Corizon regional medical director regarding who was in the hospital and what was going on with patients in the hospital,” he wrote. “There was a constant demand to monitor all hospitalizations, to avoid hospitalizations, to request prompt hospital discharges and minimize hospital stays.” Some staff members presumably lost little sleep about succumbing to these demands, either because they had become desensitized to the needs of the incarcerated people in their care or because they wanted to avoid antagonizing their superiors. The latter concern was a valid one. After the death of Matt Loflin in Georgia, Dr. Pugh and the two nurses who had requested that he be transferred to a hospital shared their concerns about patient safety with a sheriff. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center investigation, all three were subsequently fired.
“A special burden of accountability accompanies grants of public authority,” observes John Donahue in his authoritative study, The Privatization Decision, which examines the circumstances under which contracting out public services to for-profit companies is warranted. While privatization can make government more efficient, this is not the only criterion by which it should be judged. Equally important is “fidelity to the public’s values,” Donahue maintains, including how well privatization “deters opportunism and irresponsibility and promotes faithful stewardship.”
Judged by this standard, contracting out medical services in Florida’s prisons was a flagrant betrayal of the public’s trust. Yet a case could be made that it was nothing of the sort—that, to the contrary, Wexford and Corizon delivered exactly what the public expected and perhaps secretly desired. Treating prisoners humanely was not what impelled officials in Florida and other states to embrace privatization after all. Saving money was. “It’s a decision that’s best for the taxpayers,” a DOC official stated at the time. The contract Florida awarded to Wexford and Corizon obligated the companies to spend 7 percent less than the state had. How could this obligation be met without endangering lives? Few people bothered to ask. To deter profiteering, John Donahue argues that private companies entrusted to perform public functions should be subject to vigorous oversight, particularly for tasks whose outcomes are hard to measure. Florida adopted a laxer approach. One year before privatizing prison care, it gutted the Correctional Medical Authority, an independent agency created in 1986 to monitor the quality of medical care that prisoners received.
To be sure, the Wexford and Corizon contract did not explicitly state that profiteering at the expense of vulnerable patients would be tolerated. But as Everett Hughes noted in his essay on dirty work, when it came to the treatment of certain “out-groups,” spelling such things out wasn’t necessary, particularly when distance and social isolation could achieve the same result. “The greater their social distance from us,” Hughes observed of these out-groups, “the more we leave in the hands of others a sort of mandate by default to deal with them on our behalf.” The mandate by default given to Wexford and Corizon was to provide grossly substandard care at minimum cost. For the companies’ CEOs and shareholders, this arrangement had its advantages, boosting earnings and revenue. For the on-site staff left to do the dirty work of arranging “courtesy drops” for people like Kelly Green, it was another matter.
As it happens, neither Wexford nor Corizon ended up doing this work in Florida for long. Pat Beall’s exposé in The Palm Beach Post finally prompted some lawmakers to call for greater oversight. In 2015, after state inspectors issued a scathing report about the quality of care delivered by Corizon at a women’s prison in Ocala, where patients were cut off from psychiatric medications and improperly placed in isolation cells, Corizon opted not to renew its contract with the state. Two years later, after investigators found “life threatening” deficiencies at another prison where Wexford was in charge, the DOC announced that it was ending its contract with the firm. The glaring deficiencies had persuaded officials in Florida to adopt a new approach, it appeared. But the new approach turned out to be a familiar one—a no-bid contract that was soon awarded to another private company, Centurion of Florida, that was viewed more charitably in Tallahassee, perhaps because of the charity it disbursed to state lawmakers. Before receiving the contract, Centurion gave $765,000 to the Florida Republican Party and another $160,000 to “Let’s Get to Work,” the political committee of Rick Scott, who, in 2018, ran for Senate and won.
There were, of course, other ways that Florida could have lowered health expenditures in its prisons, most notably by reducing the number of mentally ill people entering them in the first place. Back in 2008, a special task force convened by a group of advocates and judges issued a report concluding that jails and prisons had become “the unfortunate and undeserving safety nets” for a vast pool of mentally ill people who shuffled back and forth between the correctional system and the streets. Every year, the task force found, “as many as 125,000 people with mental illnesses requiring immediate treatment are arrested and booked into Florida’s jails. The vast majority of these individuals are charged with minor misdemeanor and low-level felony offenses that are a direct result of their psychiatric illnesses.”
According to the task force, this was not only inhumane, causing “homelessness, increased police injuries, increased police shootings of people with mental illnesses.” It was also expensive, with money wasted on costly “back-end” services—overburdened courts, overcrowded prisons—that might have been saved if fewer people fell through the cracks of the state’s patchwork mental health system. Florida spent a quarter-billion dollars annually to restore mentally ill people to competency simply so they could stand trial, for example. Meanwhile, half of all adults and one-third of all children with serious mental illnesses had “no access” to psychiatric care in the community.
The chair of the task force that published these findings was Judge Steve Leifman of Florida’s Eleventh Judicial Circuit, which spanned Miami-Dade County. When Leifman was seventeen, he interned for a Florida politician who received a letter about a teenager languishing at a state psychiatric hospital. Leifman decided to visit the hospital, where he found the teenager shackled to a bed. Before leaving, he saw naked men hosed down by a guard as though they were zoo animals. Decades later, people with severe mental illnesses were spared such indignities. They were showing up in Leifman’s courtroom instead, where they faced the grim prospect of either going to jail or returning to the streets. Dismayed by these bleak alternatives, Leifman pressed local officials to launch a project that would divert mentally ill people who posed no threat to public safety into treatment instead. It took him six years to secure funding for the program, which was soon hailed as a success, boasting a recidivism rate of just 6 percent for individuals who completed it. Over the course of a decade, several thousand people in Miami-Dade County were diverted out of the criminal justice system. Leifman launched another program to train police officers to respond more appropriately to people in psychiatric crises.
Similar reforms have been adopted in other cities, among them San Antonio, where, in 2008, a mental health crisis center founded by a group of local judges and police officers began diverting mentally ill people out of the criminal justice system. Within a decade, it had treated fifty thousand people and saved taxpayers an estimated fifty million dollars. But as admirable as these efforts were, their reach was limited in a society that chose to allow so many people with severe mental illnesses to go without care, a problem that had grown only more severe over time. After the 2008 financial crisis, states slashed five billion dollars in mental health services from their budgets, noted a report in USA Today, leaving vast numbers of poor mentally ill people with “nowhere to go.” Where many eventually did go was onto the caseloads of people like James Fisher, an assistant public defender I met one day in Orlando. Every day, Fisher told me, he watched mentally ill people arrested for “quality of life” offenses cycle through a system that was woefully ill-equipped to deal with them. Nearly all of the offenders came from poor neighborhoods where affordable mental health services did not exist. “The population we deal with doesn’t have resources to call on anyone but the police,” he said.
Some members of this population avoided jail by sleeping on the streets. Others wound up in places like the Lowell Correctional Institution, a prison in central Florida where, on August 21, 2019, a bipolar woman named Cheryl Weimar complained that she was in too much pain to bend down and clean toilets during a work-duty shift because of a hip injury. A group of guards dragged her outside, to an area without security cameras, and beat her so severely that some witnesses thought they were whacking a dead body. Though Weimar survived, the assault left her paralyzed, and showed how little had changed in Florida’s prisons since the abuses at Dade had made headlines. In the seven years since Darren Rainey’s death, the system remained chronically underfunded, and use-of-force incidents had risen more than 50 percent.
In some other states, the situation was less dire, thanks to advocates who had succeeded in pushing reforms—less reliance on solitary confinement, more independent oversight—to improve conditions in prisons. Yet in the view of Steve J. Martin, a federal monitor who had spent decades investigating the use of force in prisons for various government agencies, Florida was not an anomaly. In America’s prisons, “institutional brutality is deeply ingrained and persistent,” wrote Martin in July 2020, a few weeks after the asphyxiation of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests against racism and police brutality. The violence in prisons was more hidden, Martin noted, not least because most correctional systems did not gather or publish data on it, but his experience had led him to believe that the victims looked a lot like the people who were disproportionately subjected to excessive force by the police. In the cases that Martin had investigated, “the prisoners who died were disproportionately black,” he wrote. “Many also had mental impairments.”
In our last face-to-face conversation, at a café not far from her home, Harriet Krzykowski told me that since she’d stopped working at Dade, she’d done a lot of reading about solitary confinement and the forces that had turned jails and prisons into America’s largest mental health institutions. The reading had helped her put her experience in context. She now understood that the abuses she’d witnessed were part of a much bigger story, she said, in a society that treated the mentally ill as “throwaway people.” Knowing this alleviated some of the guilt she felt about what had happened to Darren Rainey.
Before we parted ways, I mentioned that on my next visit to Florida, I was planning to reach out to Rainey’s family. Was there anything she wanted me to tell them? I asked her. She fell silent.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally, her eyes brimming with tears. “It should never have happened. The conditions that allowed that to happen should never have been in place, ever, for anybody.”
Some time later, I pulled up to a one-story brick bungalow on West La Salle Street, in downtown Tampa. The house had metal bars on the windows and a moldering gray facade. It sat at the end of a narrow block lined with row houses, in one of Tampa’s poorest neighborhoods. Waiting by the entrance was its owner, Andre Chapman, who directed me into a small living room dominated by a large couch.
Andre Chapman was Darren Rainey’s brother. He was in his mid-fifties, a tall, barrel-chested man with gentle brown eyes and an air of quiet forbearance. He’d agreed to meet me after I had called him on the phone and told him that I wanted to know more about his brother’s life. After welcoming me inside, Andre started filling in the details, beginning with their childhood, when the members of his family used to fill the pews of the Baptist church across the street on Sundays. Often, he and Darren would be flanking their father, Grady, who was originally from Georgia and had moved to Tampa to be closer to his mother. At the time, the neighborhood was home to a mix of working-class and professional Black families, Andre said. It had since grown more run-down, with an outsize number of vagrants and mentally disturbed people roaming some of the seedier blocks. “I’m talking about some serious mental people,” Andre said.
Nothing in Darren’s childhood marked him as destined for such a fate, Andre told me. To the contrary, his brother was an honors student who breezed through grammar school and later, under the tutelage of an uncle named Bo, became one of the neighborhood’s more proficient checkers players and gamblers. “Oh, he whupped everybody on the street,” Andre recalled with a smile. Handsome and outgoing, Darren was also a “ladies’ man” who rarely lacked for female company, Andre said, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. In Andre’s view, the turning point in his brother’s life came in his early twenties, when he fell in love with a woman who was in the military. One night, after they’d been drinking, she pulled out a gun and fired it at Darren’s chest. The bullet pierced a lung, but the woman pleaded with Darren not to press charges and he agreed, thinking it would prove his devotion and consummate their love. Soon thereafter, she disappeared from his life.
“That was his downfall,” Andre said. “I think it just shook his world a little bit.” Yet if being shot in the chest by his lover shook Darren, it did not rob him of his decency, Andre maintained. To give me a sense of his brother’s character, Andre invited a neighbor to join us, an elderly woman who rented out the back unit of the gray house. Darren used to come by her place to rake the leaves and do other odd jobs, she said after taking a seat on the couch. In exchange, she would pay him a modest sum or fix him something to eat—cabbage, corn bread, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, for which he had a particular fondness. “We just ended up getting close,” she said, to the point that she considered Darren family, part of a close-knit circle she called “the La Salle Street posse.” In recent years, the posse’s ranks had thinned as older friends of hers had begun passing away, which made her miss his presence all the more. “Darren was my handyman,” she said. “Darren came to see me every day. I don’t care where I was, when I got off of work Darren be sitting on the porch.”
In the period before he was arrested and sent to Dade, Andre told me that Darren had been living with him in the same house we were sitting in. The arrest was for cocaine possession. Yet Andre insisted that although Darren smoked cigarettes, he was not doing coke at the time—or, for that matter, at any time. “He ain’t ever do no cocaine, no weed, nothing like that,” he said. Andre was even more emphatic about another point, which is that his brother was not schizophrenic, as had been reported in the Miami Herald. “That was a label that they put on Darren when he went to prison,” he said.
I heard a different view from Peter Sleasman, an attorney with Disability Rights Florida, the organization that sued the Florida DOC for subjecting mentally ill incarcerated people at Dade to systemic abuse. While nothing in Darren’s records indicated he had ever committed a violent crime, he had numerous convictions for drug offenses, Sleasman told me. The files also contained evidence of persistent mental health problems. “There were a significant number of cases where he was found incompetent to stand trial and was sent to a state hospital for long durations,” he said. In Sleasman’s view, the records only underscored why prison was “the last place Mr. Rainey belonged.” Like so many mentally ill Floridians, he said, Darren would have been far better off getting “drug treatment or community mental health treatment.”
In addition to learning more about Darren, I wanted to know how his family found out about what happened at Dade and whom they held responsible. When Darren died, Andre told me, a prison chaplain called him to express his condolences but made no mention of abuse. Andre also spoke to a detective who was no more forthcoming. “I thought he just collapsed in the shower,” Andre said. “I’m thinking he had a heart attack.” No one from the Miami-Dade County medical examiner’s office bothered to send the family Darren’s autopsy photos, Andre said. No one from Corizon reached out. Because he suspected no wrongdoing, Andre agreed to have Darren cremated without going to Miami to examine his body beforehand. A few months later, he got a call from Peter Sleasman, who told him that his agency suspected his brother had been scalded to death. Andre was stunned. A soft-spoken man with a calm bearing, he was not given to indignation or sweeping judgments. Yet as he recounted how little he’d been told, he could not disguise his rage. “Y’all took him like some type of rat to be experimented on, and you didn’t have the heart to tell me how he died—what really happened?” he said, shaking his head. The autopsy leaked to the press, which described the death as an accident, “was a slap in the face,” he added.
The fact that no one was held accountable compounded the insult. “They did the crime; they need to do the time,” Andre said. Did “they” include the mental health staff at Dade? I asked him. Andre paused. Then he shook his head. The counselors were just earning a paycheck to support their families, he said. He didn’t blame them. He was less forgiving of the guards directly involved, and of other, more powerful actors. After consulting a lawyer, Andre and his family filed a civil rights lawsuit against Florida, Corizon, and some of the guards and prison officials who had worked at Dade. The suit eventually led to a settlement, in which the defendants agreed to pay $4.5 million in damages. The agreement was not exactly an admission of responsibility. To the contrary, Martha Harbin, director of external relations for Corizon, cited it as proof of her company’s generosity and blamelessness, telling the Miami Herald, “Although every defense lawyer in the case knew Corizon had no liability for Mr. Rainey’s death, Corizon contributed $100,000 to the settlement in order to bring the case to a conclusion.” Even so, for the Rainey family, the settlement offered a measure of closure—those members of the family who were still around, that is. Andre had since moved to South Carolina. He’d come to Tampa to visit his oldest daughter, Lekesia, who was living in the gray house on West La Salle Street with her young daughter. Returning to the neighborhood brought back “a lot of memories,” he said. Among them was a conversation he’d had with his father, Grady, shortly before he passed away, in 2007. Grady’s death had devastated Darren, who was extremely close to their father. “That was his backbone,” Andre said. Before he died, Andre told me, his father pulled him aside and asked him to look after Darren. “My dad’s words were to take care of him, watch out for him,” he recalled.
Before I left, Andre reached into a closet and pulled out a shoebox filled with family photographs. He reached into the pile of photos, fished one out, and smiled. It was a picture of his father in a white T-shirt and denim overalls, his usual attire, marking him as a transplant from rural Georgia (“Georgia boy” was his nickname, Andre said). Andre pulled out another photo, a framed portrait of a handsome young man with a stylish Afro and a winsome smile. He was standing next to an attractive woman in a strapless blouse. It was a picture of Darren and his ex-wife, Andre said. The woman in the picture was also the mother of Darren’s daughter, he told me, a daughter who was no longer alive. She died of a heart attack at the age of sixteen, not long after learning the news about her father, the last in a string of deaths in the family that had begun with Grady’s.
Andre didn’t tell me much about Darren’s relationship with his daughter. He did say that they were now together, after he had arranged to have Darren’s cremated remains placed inside the casket in which she was buried. Andre stared at the picture for a while. “I’ve been trying to”—his voice caught—“just come to grips.” Then he put the picture down, rubbed his reddened eyes, and walked me to my car outside.