If you want to understand a system in crisis, watch the person trying to hold it together.

Last month, Florida Corrections Secretary Ricky Dixon stood before state lawmakers and asked for an additional $512 million just to keep the system functioning next year. That request did not include raises for some of the lowest-paid correctional officers in the country.

His voice, somewhere between anger and fear, cracked as he explained why: Ten thousand more inmates since he took the job, no increase in staff, nineteen-year-old rookies with two weeks of training supervising 150 inmates at a time, and an overtime bill spiraling toward $150 million a year.

There was a moment when Dixon paused and said, “If I continue to do this job.” It sounded like a man staring at the abyss.

But this moment is not really about Dixon. It is about a system that has been rotting in plain sight.

Florida imprisons 89,000 people. Most Floridians will never step inside a prison. They will not see cells leaking roofs, medical units overflowing, or exhausted young officers forced to choose between vigilance and survival. They will not hear the clatter of keys that signal a shift change, or the silence that follows when everyone knows there are not enough officers to respond if something goes wrong.

Inside, the numbers have turned deadly. One officer for every 150 inmates. Assaults up 50% on both officers and inmates. Seventy percent of officers have fewer than three years of experience. This is not a workforce. It is a warning siren.

And yet the crisis continues because it has been treated as someone else’s problem.

This is our state leader’s greatest failure. Not because of what they have done, but because of what they have refused to do. Most have visited disaster zones, schools, and stadiums, but never the dorms of the largest state agency. Never stood eye to eye with the terrified teenager responsible for keeping 150 men alive. Never witnessed how razor wire and concrete turn desperation into violence.

Instead, Florida’s prisons have become a political blind spot, a place where the state hides what it does not want to face.

We have been warned before. A previous Secretary of Corrections handed out a book titled The Devil’s Butcher Shop, a chronicle of how New Mexico’s prison system collapsed into bloodshed after decades of neglect. Florida read that book, then ignored every warning. The butcher shop didn’t close. It just moved south.

An independent assessment by KPMG, commissioned by lawmakers, called for $2 billion immediately and up to $12 billion over time to modernize the system. They did nothing. They watched other southern states raise correctional salaries by tens of thousands of dollars to avoid collapse. They did nothing. They saw overtime surge, staffing crumble, and inmate numbers rise. They did nothing.

If the Devil has a butcher shop, Florida’s leaders have been sharpening the cleaver.

We pretend prisons are sealed off from the world. They are not. Most inmates will be released. If the state spends years nurturing fear, trauma, and chaos, that is exactly what will return to our neighborhoods.

The truth is simple. Florida is living one emergency away from collapse. A riot. A hurricane evacuation gone wrong. A mass staffing failure that forces emergency releases because there is no one left to guard the gates. The only thing preventing that nightmare today is the Florida National Guard, which has been used to prop up staffing levels. The Guard is the thin line between order and disaster.

Real leadership means confronting danger before it explodes. Florida has not had that leadership.

Florida must build a different system. And that begins with accountability.

The state must create an Independent Corrections Commission, a permanent oversight body with the power to monitor staffing and safety conditions, consolidate decaying facilities, recommend evidence-based sentencing reform, expand supervised release for those who have aged out of crime, and enforce basic safety and care standards.

Right now, a four-billion-dollar public safety institution operates without independent scrutiny. No major state agency handling this much violence and risk should be allowed to supervise itself.

We can fix this. We must pay officers competitively. We must close the most obsolete facilities and replace them with secure, manageable ones. We must review sentences that no longer protect the public.

But first, we must stop pretending we do not know what is happening. We must walk the dorms. We must look into the eyes of the officers who fear they will not survive their shift. We must acknowledge that Florida’s prison system is no longer a place where justice is served. It is a place where chaos is manufactured.

The most chilling part of Dixon’s testimony was not his plea for money. It was his warning.

“We cannot keep going in the direction we are going in.”

He is right.

The state’s leaders have left the department in solitary confinement for decades, and the madness is showing.

Because we no longer have a Department of Corrections.

We have a Department of Chaos.

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Former state Sen. Jeff Brandes is the founder and president of the Florida Policy Project.