Yesterday, the Florida Senate averted disaster by voting down (on a 19-21) a proposal to create the largest private prison system in America. The plan would have turned over nearly 30 Florida correctional facilities to private, for-profit companies, which have would run the prisons under contract with the state.

Florida operates the third-largest prison system in the United States, a $2.2 billion-a-year enterprise overseeing nearly 101,000 inmates and another 112,800 on community supervision. The prison population has nearly quadrupled since harsh sentencing laws were passed in the 1980s – Florida incarcerated just 26,471 people in 1980.

Florida’s prison system needs reform, but private prisons aren’t reform – they deform the process by linking corporate profit to incarceration.

Last week I joined a group of national criminal justice experts for a press conference in the Capitol to tell lawmakers that if they want to save money, they should reform mandatory minimum sentencing, invest in re-entry programs and re-visit parole policies that feed the addiction to incarceration. Maybe they heard us.

Privatization schemes, often coupled with inflated claims of cost savings, distract policymakers from an inescapable truth: The best way to reduce prison spending is to reduce the number of people we imprison.

For more on the problematic incentives injected into incarceration by the profit motive, see Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration, the ACLU’s recent, comprehensive report on the private prison industry.

Also check out this opinion piece in the Palm Beach Post by the ACLU National Prison Project’s David Shapiro. David was one of the experts who joined me at last week’s press conference and his article ran yesterday, the day of the successful Senate vote.

A couple of weeks ago at the Sundance Film Festival, the open-collaborative production company hitRECord released a short animated music video on photographers’ First Amendment rights, in collaboration with the ACLU of Florida.

Ironically, while sharing digital information is fast, easy and quickly becoming universal, getting the word out about the right to record and share information is still a challenge. Even though the ACLU has drafted and released written material on the rights of photographers, a written pamphlet about the right to capture and share digital images just wouldn’t do. So we reached out to the directors and artists at htRECord to help spread the word about the right to take pictures in public.

Enlisting the help of The Gregory Brothers (best known for Auto-Tune the News), HitRecord reprised their song “You Can’t Turn the Lights Off Now,” from an earlier animated video about Prop 8 to fit the new message. Then, just six days before Sundance, HitRecord director Joseph Gordon-Levitt, asked artists around the world to help put images to the music for the big show.

In less than a week, more than 163 artists had contributed to the final video. Gordon-Levitt (aka RegularJOE) directed the final production and introduced it Sundance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2eXtCuVyFM

(Please note that by playing this clip You Tube and Google will place a long-term cookie on your computer. Please see You Tube's privacy statement on their website and Google's privacy statement on theirs to learn more. To view the ACLU's privacy statement, click here.)

While the video is fun, the message is serious. Taking photos in public of public actions — especially police — is a protected right.

But that has not stopped police from seizing cameras, destroying pictures or making arrests. We’ve seen it happen in mass protests such as the “Occupy” movements and in a high profile police involved shooting here in Miami Beach last year.

People have a right to monitor their government and share what they learn. That’s why the ACLU will keep fighting for the right to keep government — including the police — open and honest by defending the rights of photographers. Like the song says, “Corruption thrives on secrecy. Transparency is good for you and me.”

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Hello and welcome to the ACLU of Florida Blog of Rights! This blog is a resource for friends of liberty to learn about civil liberties news in Florida and the work that the ACLU is doing to defend the constitutional rights of Floridians.

In case you're not familiar with the ACLU of Florida, we are freedom's watchdog, working daily in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend individual rights and personal freedoms guaranteed by the Florida Constitution, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

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