By Mary Ellen Klas

Miami Herald

QUINCY, Fla. — The 284 women housed in C-dorm at Gadsden Correctional Institution lived for months without hot water or heat, faced flooded bathrooms daily and endured water rations when the septic tanks were jammed with food waste.

After state Rep. David Richardson demanded action following a series of surprise visits over the past 18 months, the private prison operator that runs the facility — Management Training Corp. of Centerville, Utah — received approval from the state to repair and replace the water heater, at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $10,000. But Warden Shelly Sonberg never authorized the work.

Gadsden Correctional Institution (Photo/Gadsden Correctional)

Richardson, a Miami Beach Democrat, announced another inspection this month, this time with Chad Poppell, the head of the Department of Management Services, the state agency that oversees private prisons, and two other state legislators.

In the two days before they arrived, four work crews descended on the prison and made many of the repairs. The vice president of the private prison operator, Management Training Corp., also arrived in town to meet with state officials. The state's chief inspector general, Melinda Miguel, dispatched inspectors to assess the safety and welfare of the inmates.

For Richardson, who has been on a one-man mission to force change in Florida's troubled prison system, it's another frustrating example of the failure of the state to monitor and hold accountable its prison operators.

"I'm a policymaker. I'm not a monitor. I'm not their auditor. Why is it that I'm out there fixing water heaters?" he said.

In a letter to Richardson Thursday, Poppell said he has since removed the state-paid official in charge of monitoring conditions at the prison and has also launched his own investigation.

He said the 22-year-old prison, like other private prisons built by the state, are "now beginning to show their age and present problems associated with older buildings." He said he has asked the Legislature to fund a full-time staff person to monitor "evolving infrastructure issues."

A note from an inmate at Gadsden Correctional to Rep. David Richardson, listing the repairs needed in one of the four dorms at the facility.

When Richardson returned Thursday with two investigators from the Florida Department of Corrections as requested by Miguel, other problems emerged at the prison, which houses 1,530 inmates in four dorms. They learned that there are 495 open work orders for repairs. Inmates said they had been pressured not to speak to inspectors and feared retaliation.

Richardson, a retired forensic auditor, has had success in calling attention to the problems he has uncovered at state-run prisons. He has revealed evidence of officer-on-inmate violence at youthful offender facilities, uncovered how gangs evaded officers, caught officers withholding food from inmates, and persuaded the Department of Corrections to close down Lancaster Correctional Institution, a youthful offender prison. He uncovered "horrific" conditions at Columbia Correctional, where toilets wouldn't flush, showers didn't work, a heating system didn't heat and deafening sounds came from an exhaust fan.

He also dug deep into the finances at Lake City Correctional Institution, another one of the state's seven privately operated prisons and discovered Corrections Corporations of America, now known as CoreCivic of Tennessee, had overcharged the state at least $16 million over the past seven years.

Most of his reports have been welcomed by Corrections Secretary Julie Jones but resulted in silence from Republican lawmakers and Gov. Rick Scott, who last year recommended directing more money into improving the facilities at the state-run system for the first time, after years of shifting more state-run prison programs to private operators.

Richardson made his first unannounced trip to Gadsden Correctional on Oct. 7, 2015, he said. Then, he found no teachers in many of the classrooms — and made a mental note to return.

On his next visit, on March 6, 2016, he spent nearly two hours with inmates in the recreation yard and heard then about the problems with the hot water. The warden followed up with him and told him the problem had been addressed.

The Dec. 19, 2017, letter from the Department of Management Services to the warden at Gadsden Correctional authorizing the replacement of the water heater, work that has yet to be completed.

But it hadn't. When Richardson returned on Feb. 9, 2017, he said he "got an earful about hot water,'' how it had been out since before Thanksgiving, how the inmates were given an option to go to a neighboring dorm to take showers — a disruption that forced the inmates in the neighboring dorm to stay on their beds while the visiting inmates were in the open dorms.

He also heard several complaints about the prison refusing to run the heat in