Hesitant to rely on media accounts, Sheriff Robert Hardwick wanted to see Alligator Alcatraz for himself.
The St. Johns County top cop told WOKV in an interview that he came away from a recent tour of the Everglades detention facility “impressed.”
“The negativity was bothering me,” he said. “Is this truly going on? Well, the only way to do it is to go see it yourself.”
Hardwick, who chairs Florida Model Jail Standards — a board that oversees correctional conditions — and sits on the Florida Foundation for Correctional Excellence, said he found a clean, humane, and orderly facility that ran counter to some prevailing narratives.
“It was totally opposite of what I thought,” he said.
He described the facility as resembling a forward operating base overseas, with many contracted employees and a commander “running a tight ship.”
Hardwick estimated between 1,000 and 2,000 detainees were on site and said he spoke with some of them directly. “They understand that they are going back home,” he said.
He reviewed the food service, which he said provides hot meals in the morning and evening with a cold lunch. The conditions, he said, are actually superior to many domestic prisons he’s encountered.
“I would say they’re probably getting better services there than the majority of the country that we currently live in,” he said.
Housing is arranged in 32-person pods with wire mesh “no-climb” fencing, air conditioning, toilets, sinks, and about three phones available in each pod throughout the day.
“Everybody in that facility had some type of an arrest in the state of Florida or another state,” Hardwick said.
The Everglades detention facility earned its “Alligator Alcatraz” nickname because of its remote location near the swamps of South Florida.
The site, housed in large climate-controlled tent structures with steel or aluminum frames, was rapidly established to hold detainees pending removal from the United States.
Staffed largely by contractors and overseen by an incident commander, it is designed to handle a high volume of detainees on a temporary basis.
