This op-ed first appeared in Florida Politics

Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 7125 into law. Unfortunately, this long-discussed criminal justice reform legislation falls short of committing to meaningful change.

In passing this bill over more comprehensive proposals, Florida legislators threw away real criminal justice reform and millions of taxpayer money.

When the Florida Legislature convened its 2019 Session in March, the state was plagued by the overuse of mass incarceration and a corrections budget that had ballooned to $2.4 billion.

The Session ended May 4 with just as many people in prison — but now the corrections budget is $2.7 billion.

Many Florida families had pinned their hopes on promises of criminal justice reform. Extremely minor fixes were made around the edges of the profoundly flawed criminal justice industry in Florida. But the principle problem remains: Florida continues to throw away lives and massive amounts of money in ways that do nothing to keep our communities safer.

This is personal for me; I have a son in prison. But my family is only one of thousands suffering from a system that continues to believe in costly punishment rather than smart rehabilitation.

At one crucial juncture in the Session, legislators could have saved Florida taxpayers more than $800 million over the next five years. Currently, all persons convicted of felonies in Florida must serve 85 percent of their sentences. A bill passed by the Senate this year would have allowed nonviolent offenders who had exhibited good behavior and taken advantage of educational opportunities to be released after completing 65 percent of their sentences. Experts estimated that as many as 9,000 people could have gone free in the next several years — saving $20,000 per year per inmate.

But that reform was eventually rejected.

Another proposed cost-saving measure would have taken two reforms that were passed by legislators in recent years, reducing the mandatory sentences for certain crimes — including possession of small amounts of some opioids — and would have made them retroactive. In other words, lawmakers decided certain sentences were too extreme and unfair, but only for those convicted in the future, not those already behind bars. That makes absolutely no sense when it comes to either justice or economics.

In yet another failure, the legislature did not address, in any serious way, the processing of kids in adult courts. Florida sentences more youth to adult prisons than any other state and more than California, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania combined.

The legislature responded by eliminating the mandatory processing of certain juveniles as adults. And, while that change has the potential to impact up to a third of the cases that are affected, many of those minors will almost certainly end up in adult courts anyway after prosecutors make their decisions.

The current law still leaves the decision on “direct file” to the adult system in the hands of prosecutors, not judges. Neither children processed in adult courts nor their families have any way to appeal the decisions of those prosecutors.

In 1986, Florida set the threshold at which a theft became a felony — not a misdemeanor — at $300. This year, after more than three decades of inflation, lawmakers finally raised that amount, but only to $750. Meanwhile, in Georgia and Alabama the amount is $1500 and in Texas, $2500. So, while it is no longer a felony to steal an iPhone 6S, it still is for an iPhone 8.

Florida has another serious problem in the frequency with which it suspends driver’s licenses. In 2017, 280,000 people lost licenses for offenses that had nothing to do with driving. This year, lawmakers removed some misdemeanors from that list of offenses — petty theft, supplying tobacco or alcohol to a minor — but it was a drop in the bucket. Working people are seriously affected when their licenses are suspended. Yet another instance when lawmakers were oblivious to the effects on taxpayers’ wallets.

Along the way, lawmakers failed to address a critical problem that exists throughout Florida’s population whether adult or juvenile: racial bias and the disproportionate percentage of people of color funneled into the criminal justice system. Black people make up 17 percent of Florida’s population, but 47 percent of prison inmates are Black.

The Senate bill, adopted on a bipartisan basis, would have required that any criminal justice bill carry with it an assessment of the racial impact of that new law. It would have cost next to nothing to implement, but it was squashed.

Other Southern states have made much more progress on criminal justice issues, largely because they could no longer bear the cost of mass incarceration. Our lawmakers, meanwhile, have created a reputation for Florida as the most recalcitrant of the former Confederate states, unwilling to shed its Jim Crow past and willing to waste money to boot.

Only a collective group of fools would be professionally and ethically comfortable sustaining a stagnant system of mass incarceration.

Judy Thompson is the director of the Forgotten Majority, a nonprofit that advocates for prisoner’s rights.

I was just 17 years old when I was sent to solitary confinement in “Camp J,” one of the most severe lockdown units at one of America’s most brutal prisons, the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. I languished in solitary for 16 months.

Back then I didn’t know that Louisiana was the solitary confinement capital of the world. All I knew was that I’d been convicted of a crime I didn’t commit, and I had to maintain my humanity in one of the most dehumanizing places on earth.

It’s called “23 and 1” because you spend 23 hours alone in your cell, with one hour to take a shower or make a phone call, if allowed. There are no educational programs.  You are stuck in your cell with just the voices in your own head and the cries of men who have already gone mad. Most of the other people in my unit were suffering from severe mental illness. I remember how they would ram their heads into the bars, play with their own defecation, or throw urine or feces.

The hardest part of living in solitary is trying not to lose hope. Each morning that I woke up in solitary I would quote the same serenity prayer I remember my father reciting when I was young. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The consequences are devastating. It’s been 22 years since my time in solitary and 8 years since my release from prison, but I still have flashbacks and nightmares. Even when I’m with someone else, I find myself secluded in my own mind. I call it being psychologically incarcerated. I’m learning to identify and deal with it, but I am still not normal.

A new report from the ACLU of Louisiana, Solitary Watch and the Jesuit Social Research Institute proves that the degrading conditions I experienced continue to harm other people. The report is based on a survey of more than 700 people held in solitary, and as someone who has experienced solitary first-hand, their stories ring painfully true. “These cells drive men mad,” wrote Carl, one of the report’s survey respondents. “I have personally witnessed one man take his life, another tried to by running the length of the tier and smashing his head into the front bars, sadly for him he still lives, if you can really call it that… Point is the cells are killing men and they know it….”

I hope that the information in this report will help prove to corrections officials that more changes are needed throughout the system, not just for the benefit of people living in solitary – but also for their families and communities.

The report contains specific, immediate recommendations for reducing the Louisiana Department of Corrections’ extreme dependence on prolonged isolation and moving quickly toward more safe, effective, and humane alternatives.

The need for reform is urgent. Because putting people in dehumanizing situations pushes them to do dehumanizing things. If your life is destruction, the only thing you can give out is destruction.

That’s why the United Nations has said that extended solitary confinement can rise to the level of torture, and called on countries around the world to ban the practice beyond 15 days.

Solitary confinement is an experience I will never forget. Just the other morning, my wife told me I was screaming during the night – and I knew it was a nightmare about my time in solitary.

But I’m strong, and through my work with Voice of the Experienced, a grassroots organization founded and run by formerly incarcerated people, I’m blessed to be able to use my experiences to press for reforms to combat mass incarceration and restore the civil rights of those most impacted by the criminal legal system.

For too long, the voices from Louisiana’s solitary cells were silenced. Through this report and the courageous advocacy of other survivors, we can help make sure they are finally heard.

Words by Kiana Calloway

This month marks a year since the Supreme Court issued its landmark privacy decision in Carpenter v. United States, ruling that the government must get a warrant before accessing a person’s sensitive cellphone location data.

Carpenter, which the ACLU argued before the Supreme Court, concerned information revealing where Timothy Carpenter had traveled with his phone. The police, searching for evidence to connect Carpenter to the scenes of various robberies, obtained months’ worth of Carpenter’s detailed location data from his cellphone company without a warrant. That data exposed Carpenter’s daily routines, including where he slept and attended church.

The court held that government access to such detailed location data provides a method of “near-perfect surveillance,” and recognized that the Fourth Amendment must protect such sensitive information. It added that old-world legal rules don’t automatically apply in the digital age.

The Supreme Court’s decision stands as one of the most consequential rulings regarding privacy in the digital age, providing a roadmap for lower courts to protect many other kinds of sensitive data from warrantless government intrusion. One year in, we’re working to ensure that lower courts heed the high court’s call and extend the lessons of Carpenter to other contexts.

For instance, we were in the Georgia Supreme Court last week arguing that Carpenter made clear  courts cannot “mechanically apply” older legal doctrines that allow warrantless searches to new, complex digital-age contexts. Instead, courts should carefully assess what protections are necessary in light of rapidly advancing technology and increasingly accessible data.

In that case, the state of Georgia is arguing that a legal doctrine dating back to the early 20^th century should give police the authority to obtain — without a warrant — the vast and detailed data modern cars collect on us. This data can include everything from our car’s speed and braking data, to call record and text history, to music preferences and GPS coordinates. Under the dated doctrine, known as the “vehicle exemption,” police do not need a warrant to search a car for physical items due to the “ready mobility of vehicles,” which might drive away before a warrant is obtained. But, as we argued in court last week, that old rule shouldn’t be extended to override people’s unprecedented privacy interest in new kinds of sensitive digital data.

Similarly, in our lawsuit challenging the government’s warrantless searches of electronic devices at the U.S. border, the federal government has been invoking a centuries-old rule allowing border agents to search travelers’ physical luggage without individualized suspicion or a warrant for contraband or import violations. We argue that old-world rules can’t be twisted into unfettered authority to search the incredible volumes of data on people’s phones and laptops when they return from a trip abroad.

In both cases, Carpenter (and a predecessor Supreme Court case, Riley v. California) provide a powerful rebuke to the government’s arguments. The quantities and types of information that might be discovered by a manual search of a car’s trunk and glove compartment — or a traveler’s luggage — pale in comparison to the kinds of comprehensive data stored on our electronic devices today. This requires greater protections under the Fourth Amendment.

Carpenter also holds that, in the digital age, our sensitive information does not lose Fourth Amendment protections merely because we store that information on a “third party” server, such as with Google or DropBox. This is a game-changer.

In the digital age, it is virtually impossible to avoid leaving a trail of highly sensitive data. Our information is saved not only on our personal laptops and phones, but also on the servers of the companies with which we interact. As we argued in a case now before the First Circuit Court of Appeals, the government can no longer get away with warrantless searches of our personal information by relying on the “third party” doctrine.

That case concerns the Drug Enforcement Administration’s efforts to access — without a warrant — people’s prescription records stored in the New Hampshire Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, a secure state-run database set up for public health purposes. The DEA is arguing that when people reveal their symptoms to their doctor and bring the doctor’s prescription to their pharmacist, they have given up their Fourth Amendment privacy rights in that sensitive health information. That can’t be right when the result is unfettered police access to deeply private information about our health and medical history.

In other cases, we have similarly argued that people’s location history stored in gargantuan automated license plate reader databases should be protected by a warrant requirement because of the intense privacy interest in digitized location data recognized in Carpenter.

The Supreme Court rightfully understood in Carpenter that courts have an essential role in ensuring that privacy protections remain vital in the digital age. While the government advocates for unfettered access to the personal information companies are sweeping up on us, it’s crucial the courts make clear, as Carpenter does, that we do not forfeit our Fourth Amendment rights simply for owning a laptop, driving a car, or having a cellphone.

Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project