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It is no secret that Rick Scott did not make the Florida Department of Corrections or disabled inmates even the slightest of priorities while Governor of the State of Florida.

In 2014, according to the Miami Herald, Rick Scott’s Chief of Staff, Adam Hollingsworth, told then Secretary Mike Crews, that he needed “to take a bullet for the governor.” Since then, Corrections continues to take bullets for the former governor and now U.S. Senator.

Scott slashed DOC’s budget for years, causing critically dangerous low levels of staffing within the prisons and a lack of necessary care for inmates with disabilities. Under Scott, in 2014, inmate deaths reached a record high. When Scott was forced to confront the record number of inmate deaths under his control, his budget did not allocate any new resources to investigate those deaths.

When DOC had a 654 employee shortfall in the prisons, he only offered to give the agency funding to fill half of those vacancies. By not addressing the crisis of empty positions within the agency, Scott’s indifference to DOC caused use of force against inmates to almost double, causing dangerous conditions for inmates and employees.

Rick Scott’s administration knew that it wasn’t treating inmates with HCV despite it being the standard of care to treat HCV with direct acting antivirals since 2014, yet his administration treated less than 20 in those four years, and those were only treated after the agency was sued in a blockbuster class action that ultimately cost the state over $100 million. Arguably, this cost could have been avoided had Scott and his administration been more diligent in treating medical conditions of inmates. While Scott cost Florida taxpayers money by ignoring this crisis within DOC, he profited off of it personally as his trust, which he alleges to have no control or insight into, had invested approximately $1.1 million with Gilead, the company that created the “cure” for HCV and the company that the State of Florida paid $21.7 million to for the HCV cure treatment in 2018.

Scott’s administration also saw the death of two disabled inmates, Darren Rainey and Randall Jordan-Aparo alleged to have occurred at the hands of dirty correctional officers, which cost the State of Florida over $6 million to settle just those two cases. The horrific irony of these settlements and costs is that they would have been exponentially higher if the inmates had lived. Disabled inmates under Scott had it especially rough, and specifically in 2017 when the then prison secretary Julie Jones concluded that there were several shortcomings in mental health services in a South Florida prison.