The Gainesville Sun Editorial Board
People who have been incarcerated face challenges to reentering society. Having a criminal record can be a barrier to employment, housing and general acceptance. Difficulties in getting a job and having stability only make recidivism more likely.
“What ends up happening is that every sentence becomes a life sentence,” said Lindsay Kallman, executive director of the Gainesville nonprofit Community Spring.
Community Spring hires people who are experiencing poverty as “fellows” who develop ways to address factors contributing to poverty in their communities. Its 2020-2021 class of fellows has focused on helping former prisoners after their release.
The Gainesville Sun Editorial Board
More than three years after a report showed the depths of Alachua County’s problem with racial disparities, progress in reducing these disparities is still painfully slow.
The Understanding Racial Inequity in Alachua County report detailed the wide gap between Black and white residents in such areas as educational outcomes, housing conditions and poverty rates. These disparities were long known to be a problem locally, but the report showed that they were even worse here than in most communities across the state and country.
The report, conducted by University of Florida researchers and sponsored by UF and other leading institutions, should have been a call to action. Yet while racial equity has become a greater focus of these institutions, Alachua County still lacks a coordinated effort with clear goals that can be measured to determine whether efforts to eliminate disparities are effective.
The Gainesville Sun Editorial Board
East Gainesville has long experienced a lack of access to health care and economic opportunities as compared to the west side of our community. Then the COVID-19 pandemic came along.
The pandemic has shown how long-standing racial and socioeconomic disparities affect the lives as well as livelihoods of too many Gainesville residents. Black residents in particular face higher rates of hospitalization and death from COVID-19, a problem worsened in east Gainesville by barriers to getting health care.
City Commissioner Gigi Simmons is serving her first term representing District 1, which includes east Gainesville, downtown and the Porters neighborhood where she grew up. Even before she was elected to the job, she was a community advocate who worked on such efforts as bringing GED classes, voter registration drives and an expanded crime watch program to the neighborhood.
Following abuses, it s clear: Florida s prisons need better oversight
The Gainesville Sun Editorial Board
The Florida Department of Corrections has long been shown that it needs independent oversight, with two recent examples further making the case.
A federal report released in December found that prison officials failed to protect inmates at Florida’s largest women’s prison from sexual abuse by the staff there for more than a decade. Instead of acknowledging the need to do more to stop abuse at Lowell Correctional Institution near Ocala, The Department of Corrections has pushed back against the report’s findings.
The investigation also revealed a pattern in which prisoners who reported abuse faced retaliation. The same pattern has been shown in a continuing legal battle over the excessive use of solitary confinement in Florida prisons.