For more than two years, members of the Florida National Guard have been dispatched to the chronically understaffed Florida prison system.
The emergency measure was originally meant to be on a “temporary short-term basis,” when Gov. Ron DeSantis issued the original Executive Order in September 2022, has stretched longer than planned, leaving some wondering if there will ever be a draw down.
The governor has extended the “short-term” order four times since then, most recently in December 2024.
“When I was a kid, the line: ‘My God, we’re going to have to call the National Guard in!’ — that meant something was wrong. It was like an exaggeration your grandmother would use,” said Democrat Jason Pizzo, the Florida Senate Minority Leader.
With the presence of the National Guard becoming more of a mainstay in state prisons, Pizzo warned of longstanding issues in the Department of Corrections, an agency that employs about a quarter of all State of Florida employees.
“It’s becoming something that is rather permanent,” Pizzo said about the National Guard presence. “That’s a disaster.”
On top of having to tap the National Guard to staff prisons for regular inmates, a newly passed immigration law is exploring the option of using Florida prisons to detain undocumented immigrants in support of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation agenda, potentially exacerbating the staffing issues.
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Last month, Department of Corrections Secretary Ricky Dixon told a committee in the Florida House that staffing issues are getting better, that there are only about 1,000 staff vacancies in the department, compared to about 6,000 vacancies in 2021. But Dixon said a problem that “keeps [him] up” at night is the fact that the progress on paper is relative, based on an old metric of how much staff is needed to safely run the prison system.
“We have 8,000 more inmates today than we had in January 2021 and we have the same amount of staff supervising them,” said Dixon. In the next three years, the department estimates that it will have about 3,000 more inmates.
“We’re still going to increase and have to accommodate that manpower,” said Dixon.
When the National Guard was first dispatched to help the prison system in 2022, only 300 members were deployed. The Department of Corrections told WLRN that there were about 400 National Guard members deployed in the state prison system in January.
A presentation that the Florida National Guard gave to the Florida Senate in mid-February accounted for 263 soldiers stationed in the prison system, all in facilities in the Florida Panhandle, where state correctional facilities are concentrated, leaving the numbers nearly the same as when the emergency order was first issued.
“Not only is it about the same amount of numbers, they have an increased population of 8,000 inmates than they did two years ago, and growing,” said former Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes, who founded the Florida Policy Project, a non-partisan research institute after leaving office in 2022.
The problem is structural and geographic, argued Brandes.
For years he has argued that the state needs to invest more in the prison system, including for infrastructure upgrades and boosting salaries to better hire and retain workers.
A state report from 2023 estimated that state prisons needed to invest $6 billion in the prison system to keep aging facilities functional at current levels for the next 20 years. Salaries for prison staffers have been increased the last few years, but the report warned that they remain “below” average for comparable work.
“The prisons were created as a rural jobs program as much as a prison system back in the 1970s and early 1980s,” said Brandes. “Most of these small towns can no longer support prisons of this size.”
At least $64 million has been spent since 2022 in dispatching troops into the prisons, according to the Florida National Guard presentation. Gov. DeSantis has asked for $8.2 million to pay for the continued deployment of the Florida National Guard in state prisons at least through June.
“This is a policy failure and this is a leadership failure, and the solution has been to put the National Guard in. That is not a long-term solution.”Former Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes.
Other states have deployed the National Guard into the prison systems and to cover other government staffing emergencies.
West Virginia deployed troops to state prisons for two years to address staff shortages, ending in 2024. They were also deployed for the same reasons in 2018.
Ohio deployed hundreds of National Guard troops into its prison system during severe staff shortages in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, due to too many guards being sick at the same time. South Carolina, Indiana, Idaho and Montana have all deployed troops into prisons at some point or another.
Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul in February deployed the National Guard into state prisons after hundreds of prison workers at 25 facilities went on an unauthorized “wildcat” strike in opposition to staff shortages and in opposition to announced inmate safety reforms. The unauthorized strike, not supported by the workers union, comes as multiple correction officers are expected to face charges for their role in the fatal beating of a handcuffed inmate in December.
In 2021, Massachusetts dispatched the National Guard to drive school buses during a severe bus driver shortage. New Mexico was forced to dispatch the National Guard to serve as substitute teachers in 2022.
“The National Guard is deployed during emergency situations and during policy failures,” said Brandes, speaking of Florida. “This is a policy failure and this is a leadership failure, and the solution has been to put the National Guard in. That is not a long-term solution.”
A WLRN request for comment from the governor's was referred to the Florida Department of Corrections, which did not respond. In his original executive order directing the Guard into the prison system, Gov. DeSantis said the measure was needed to combat the labor shortage: "This shortage threatens the safety of officers, inmates, and the public."
The program has gone on for much longer than inmate advocates hoped, said Denise Rock, the executive director of Florida Cares Charity, an advocacy group.
“We had hoped that they would find ways to decarcerate. We do not need to have such a large amount of people incarcerated,” she told WLRN.
One way to do that would be to restart a parole program in Florida, especially for elderly inmates, said Rock. The state abolished parole — early release under community supervision — in 1983.
Soldiers supervising inmates
There were some initial worries that dispatching soldiers trained in combat into state prisons could lead to an increase in use-of-force incidents. But that has not been the case, said Rock.
“It has not been negative, for the most part I’ve heard those experiences were positive, where the National Guard acknowledged them as human beings and responded respectfully,” said Rock.
The executive orders declare that the Florida National Guard should not engage in “direct supervision of inmates,” but Rock said that does not mean there is zero contact: “I definitely know that they have contact with incarcerated people.”
A bill signed into law in February by Governor DeSantis orders the Florida Department of Corrections to submit a report by March 15 outlining the amount of “vacant” beds that can be leased to the federal government for immigration detention, in support of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation agenda.
A Department of Corrections report from mid-2024 estimated that there were 8,198 “excess” beds in state prisons. More than 10,000 existing beds were “unavailable” because of lack of staffing and maintenance issues, according to the report.
Corrections Secretary Dixon told the Florida Legislature that he hopes that the Florida National Guard will be able to start winding down its operations in the prison system by June.
That is already going to be difficult to do with a growing inmate population and consistent staff hiring and retention issues, said Brandes. If Florida opts to start using the prison system for immigration detention, that would make the objective outright impossible, he added.
“They can’t,” he said. “I don’t see a way that they’re gonna be able to pull the National Guard on their given time frame.”
