Jeb's Faith-Based Prisons

Jeb Bush’s Cure for Shawshank: Redemption

Betsy Woodruff

Jeb Bush touts his record as a prison reformer because of the success of his faith-based prison program, but does that really make him a reformer?

On July 24, 2004, then-governor Jeb Bush received a frantic email from Joy Buchholz about the conditions in her daughter’s prison.

Buchholz explained her daughter wanted to be in one of the faith-based prisons Bush helped establish because she expected the conditions to be better than they would have been otherwise.

But that wasn’t the case.

“It has turned out to be a work camp, they work them constantly even on weekends & it was 8PM & they were still outside, laying sod & moving 300lb slabs of concrete,” Buchholz wrote. “One was so tired she dropped it on her foot another 63 yr old woman who bunks w/Dawn (her daughter) moans all night in pain & can hardly move in the AM.”

“i will look into the situation,” Bush replied. “The faith based prison should be no more or less difficult/easy than other like kind prisons.”

The email is one of thousands from Jeb Bush’s governorship and provides a window into not only how his fledging program was received, but also how he and his administration dealt with the concerns surrounding an increasingly over-crowded prison population in Florida.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/24/jeb-s-cure-for-shawshank-redemption.html