The U.S. District Courthouse in Pensacola. Photo credit: Shannon Nickinson

Beginning this month, federal prisoners seeing their prison sentences shortened are returning to communities — including the Pensacola metro area.

The release is due to reforms in federal sentencing guidelines for drug offenses; as CNN reported this month, it led to the biggest federal inmate release on record on Nov. 1.

Among that group of 6,000 federal prisoners released early through sentencing reform efforts were 46 in the Northern District of Florida, which includes the Pensacola metro area.

“To be honest, the federal system is a little behind the curve” in sentencing reform, said U.S. District Chief Judge Casey Rodgers, “because it is consuming huge portions of the (Bureau of Prisons) budget.

“We say $30,000 a year on average to house one federal inmate,” she says.

U.S. District Chief Judge Casey Rodgers has been honored for her work with the re-entry program in the Pensacola area.

By the numbers, Pensacola received 16 such prisoners; Panama City 18; Tallahassee seven; and Gainesville, five, according to data from the court. It is important to reintegrate these people into the community.

Public safety — as measured by the crime rate — is one of 16 metrics in the Studer Community Institute's Pensacola Metro Dashboard that helps gauge the quality of life in a community. The dashboard, created with the University of West Florida, is a set of educational, economic and social benchmarks to track the well-being of the community. 

Amendment 782 — referred to as “drugs minus 2” — adjusted federal sentencing guidelines on the drug quantity table down two levels.

“This is the third amendment in a line of amendments that has been addressed to the disparity in drug weight,” Rodgers said. “This one applied across the board to all drugs and it changed the calculation for all drugs….The crack cocaine/powder cocaine disparity started all of this.”

The sentencing commission decided a year ago to lower maximum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and to make the change retroactive, with the inmate releases effective Nov. 1, 2015. Sentences were reduced an average of 18 percent, the commission said.

The state expected to receive the largest number of inmates is Texas, with 2,829, followed by by Florida at 1,200 and Iowa at 785.

Rick Dye

Rick Dye, who works with the Re-Entry Alliance of Pensacola, said the community needs to prepare for these former inmates and help them find their place in society.

“These men and women have paid their punishment,” Dye says. “They want to renew the semblance of some life they had and move ahead. To do that, it’s going to take our community to be prepared.

“One of the things employers can do, is to see it’s so much less expensive to give a guy a job instead of giving a guy a jail cell,” Dye says.

Finding help in the community

The explosion in the federal prison population can be traced to the 1980's with the Sentencing Reform Act.

Rodgers says that data shows the federal prison population from 1980 to 2012 increased 800 percent, due in large part to tougher drug sentences linked in that Reform Act.

That increase strained the resources of the Bureau of Prisons, raised concerns about disparity between black and white defendants and ultimately led to the reform effort now under way.

Dye says it is likely that the newly released men and women are likely to be people with community ties that will help them get on their feet again.

“They’ll cut their teeth on a fairly functional group of men,” Dye says. “After that, it probably will get more stressful as it relates to these needs these men will have in terms of resources. (And) there’s going to be a lot more of them over time.”

REAP often steps into that void for recently released inmates who may not have the network of friends and family who can help make the transition back into the real world easier — and for the better.

“When they come out of incarceration, they go down two paths,” Dye says. “One goes back to their family or relatives, where they have a good support mechanism, and they’re able to get back in the community through relationships of family members.

“The other path takes them into the same associations they had before,” Dye said. “We try to intervene before they get out and begin working with them at that point.”

REAP’s client intervention program works to develop a relationship with a soon-to-be-released person before they come out. That includes working on counseling, housing or medical resources as well as getting to work on education or work skills they may need to update.

It is something Dye says has been under way with the Escambia County Jail with an initial class of seven people. “Our last one gets out Dec. 15,” he says.

Rodgers says that the efforts of groups such as REAP are crucial to helping ex-offenders make what can be a difficult return back into society.

“These are people who have enormous challenges and have had their entire lives. Enormous challenges,” she says. “It's our job to address those challenges so that they can be successful because it benefits everyone. To ignore that is not responsible.”