Children and Incarceration in Florida: A Complete Guide

Florida has a particular version of the anxiety that comes with having a parent in prison. It is not just the distance to a facility, or the cost of the call, or the waiting room with its rules about what you can wear and whether you can bring in a granola bar for the drive home. Florida has hurricane season. From June through November, every family with a parent inside a Florida Department of Corrections facility lives with the additional weight of knowing that a storm can make contact impossible, can move their loved one to a facility nobody told the family about, can create a silence that lasts days or weeks without any explanation the children can hold onto.

I went into the federal system, not the FDC. I went in when my kids were 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, and 20. I know what a communication blackout does to a family, even without a Category 4 making landfall on the Gulf Coast. For Florida families, that experience is not hypothetical. It happens. The children waiting at home during a hurricane are not just worried about the storm. They are worried about where their parent is and whether they are okay, and they have no way to get that information until the system lets communication resume.

This is the Florida version of the story. Before the phone rates and the visiting hours, there is the reality of what it means to parent through this from inside a state that the weather itself can lock down.

The size of what Florida families are navigating

The Florida Department of Corrections is the third-largest state prison system in the country, with roughly 88,000 people in custody across 143 facilities spread across a peninsula that stretches nearly 500 miles from Pensacola in the Panhandle to Key West in the south. Major facilities include Union Correctional Institution and Florida State Prison in Raiford in the north-central part of the state, Avon Park Correctional Institution in Highlands County, Wakulla Correctional Institution near Tallahassee, Belle Glade Correctional Institution in Palm Beach County near Lake Okeechobee, and Charlotte Correctional Institution on the southwest coast.

A family in Miami with a parent at Union CI in Raiford is looking at roughly a 4-hour drive through the center of the state. A family in Orlando with a parent at a Panhandle facility is looking at the same or more. And unlike a state where geography is the primary barrier, Florida adds weather. Facilities in the northern part of the state are vulnerable to Panhandle storms. Facilities in South Florida sit in the most active hurricane corridors in the country.

For children, the size and the weather combine into something specific: their parent is somewhere on a long peninsula, in a facility they may have never seen, and during certain months of the year a storm can make it impossible to know if that parent is safe.

The decision both parents make in a state with this much uncertainty

Uncertainty in Florida's system is not just seasonal. Inmates can be transferred between the 143 facilities without much notice. The Form DC6-111A visitation application has to be requested by the inmate from their Classification Officer, mailed to the visitor, completed, and returned to the facility. If the inmate is transferred to a new facility before the process completes, the family starts over. Contact in Florida's system is harder to establish and easier to lose than in most states.

Into that reality, the most important thing both parents can do is the same thing it is everywhere: protect the children from the adult conflict and refuse to use them as the battlefield for what the two grown-ups are dealing with.

My wife never said a word against me to our six children during 66 months. She had every reason. She had six kids in a situation I had created. She chose to let them love me without paying for it. Every relationship I have with my adult children is the result of that. In Florida, where communication can be interrupted by a storm, where a transfer can reset months of relationship-building with a facility's visiting staff, where a child has already absorbed a particular form of anxiety about whether their parent is safe, the parent inside the fence cannot afford to use the limited contact they get to fight. Neither can the outside parent.

What the ages mean in Florida

My children were 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, and 20 when I went in.

The 9-year-old in Florida whose parent is in a FDC facility is carrying something most children their age are not carrying: background anxiety. Not the foregrounded grief of a recent loss, but the lower-register ongoing concern about safety, about contact, about whether the call is going to come today. A child under 10 is not equipped to process hurricane weather and the silence it produces as a meteorological event that has nothing to do with their relationship with their parent. They experience it as loss of contact, which they may process as something more personal. What the incarcerated parent in Florida can do is build predictability during the periods when contact is available. Call on the same days. Send messages through JPay on a regular schedule. Build a rhythm the child can count on, so that when a disruption happens, the child has a baseline to return to rather than a silence that has always been there.

And as with every state: say it directly and say it often to the youngest children. This is not your fault. You did not do anything to cause this. I love you and I am coming home.

The 11 and 12-year-old in Florida is navigating middle school in a state with dramatic inequality between its communities. A child in Liberty County near the Georgia border, one of the poorest counties in Florida, navigating middle school with a parent at a Panhandle facility, is living a different experience from a child in Broward County with a parent at a South Florida facility. Both are in middle school, the hardest years. Both need the same thing from the incarcerated parent: active tracking of their specific life. Ask what happened this week. Remember what they said. Ask about it next time. A parent who does this from inside a Florida cell, even in the middle of hurricane season, even across a transfer to a new facility, is maintaining a presence that the system is designed to eliminate.

The 15-year-old has likely lived with this situation for years by the time they reach adolescence. They have watched the outside parent manage it. They have seen whether the incarcerated parent showed up or checked out. A teenager in Florida does not need to be told by the incarcerated parent to make good choices. They need the incarcerated parent to demonstrate that they are capable of making them. Call to listen. Ask about their life. Take the answer seriously. The 15-year-old who still answers the phone by the end of the sentence is the one who believed the parent was real, not performing.

The 18 and 20-year-old is an adult who has their own accounting of what happened and what it cost. Respect that accounting. Do not argue with it. Show up as someone worth keeping in relationship with and let the adult child decide.

What the outside parent carries in Florida

The outside parent in Florida is managing everything the outside parent anywhere manages, plus the specific logistics of a state where the visiting process is more complex than most. The Form DC6-111A has to come from the inmate's Classification Officer, which means the outside parent cannot even start the process until the inmate initiates it. If the inmate is in a reception center waiting for permanent assignment, the process cannot even begin. The outside parent who wants to bring the children for a visit is waiting on a bureaucratic sequence that the incarcerated parent has to set in motion.

Once approved, they will likely wait outside in Florida heat for 30 to 60 minutes before being allowed to enter the facility. They cannot bring in a water bottle. On the morning of any visit, they need to call the facility to confirm there is not a lockdown, because lockdowns happen without public announcement.

All of that is before they are in the visiting room.

What the outside parent needs from the incarcerated parent is not direction. It is acknowledgment. One JPay message, one line in a call, that names what the outside parent is doing and says thank you, is worth more than any instruction delivered from inside. My wife deserved to hear that every day. I gave it as often as the access allowed.

For the outside parent in Florida: the children will carry what you say about the incarcerated parent through the years of silence and the years of contact both. What you say during a hurricane blackout, when the children are anxious about where their parent is and whether they are safe, shapes how the children understand the situation for the rest of their lives. Protect them from the worst of your own fear during those moments. Give them something steady to hold onto.

How communication works in the Florida system

The FDC contracts with Securus Technologies for phone services. The current rate is $0.14 per minute for both prepaid and collect calls; connection fees have been eliminated. Set up a prepaid account through Securus before the first call. JPay, which is owned by Securus, handles electronic messaging, money transfers, and tablets at FDC facilities.

For visitation, the process begins with the inmate requesting Form DC6-111A from their Classification Officer. The inmate mails it to the prospective visitor. The visitor completes it and returns it to the Classification Department at the inmate's current facility. Do not mail it back to the inmate. If the inmate is at a reception center awaiting permanent assignment, wait until permanent placement before starting. Visitors with felony convictions cannot be approved for in-person visits. Children 16 and under must be accompanied by a legal guardian. Call the facility on the morning of a planned visit to confirm no lockdown is in place.

Physical mail is accepted at FDC facilities and inspected before delivery. Electronic messages, photos, and account management for the JPay platform are available at jpay.com. FDC main line: (850) 488-5021. FDC inmate search: fdc.myflorida.com.

Federal inmates in Florida are held in federal facilities under BOP jurisdiction. Communication uses TRULINCS for email via CORRLINKS and TRUFONE for phone. FCC rate caps apply; First Step Act programming offers 300 free minutes per month.

Where this leaves you

Florida adds something to the experience of incarceration that most other states do not: the knowledge that the weather can take the contact away without warning and without a timeline for when it comes back. A child in Florida learning to live with a parent's incarceration is also learning to live with the uncertainty that the system itself can be disrupted by forces neither parent controls.

What both parents can control is the quality of the contact when it is available. The incarcerated parent who calls and writes and messages as if every contact might be interrupted by a storm, because in Florida it might be, is a parent who treats the contact with the urgency it deserves. The outside parent who protects the children from the worst of their own anxiety during the silences, who gives the children something steady to hold onto when the communication goes dark, is doing the most important parenting available. Both choices are available from inside and outside any Florida facility. Make them.