The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Avon Park Correctional Institution

Ten miles east of Avon Park, “on County Road 64. The road ends at the guarded entrance into the Air Force Range and the prison.”[jubilee-1964-prison] The state prison is the oldest continuously running institution on the bombing range, and it grew out of one that was there before it.

The federal camp, 1951–1953

The federal installation on the range was established in late 1951 under Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950 (the Emergency Detention Act, Public Law 81-831).[mccarran-act-1950] It was not an active convict labor camp, but one of six standby detention facilities across the United States designated by Attorney General J. Howard McGrath and Federal Bureau of Prisons Director James V. Bennett for potential mass internments during an internal security emergency.[hcis-hearings-1970]

The Bureau of Prisons leased an 800-acre tract and 18 World War II wooden barracks dormitories on the bombing range from the United States Air Force. Because no internal security emergency was ever proclaimed, the facility housed no detainees. A small caretaker workforce maintained the cantonment on a standby basis until Congress discontinued maintenance appropriations in 1953, at which point active standby operations closed.[hcis-hearings-1970] Warden Dale Landress testified to Congress in 2001 on the range:

In the 1950’s, the Department of Corrections was facing an over-crowding problem. To alleviate this over-crowding, the Department searched the State for possible prison sites, finally selecting the former Federal Bureau of Prison facility located at Avon Park Air Force Base. The Federal prison was active until 1953 when it was closed.[hearing-2001]

The state prison, from April 1957

The institution’s own account, written for Avon Park’s Diamond Jubilee in 1964 and preserved in the Depot Museum:

The prison began operation in April of 1957. The Florida Division of Corrections subleased 800 acres of land from the Federal Bureau of Prisons which had originally leased this same land (the Air Force Bombing Range) from the United States Air Force. This property was originally obtained in order to establish an institution primarily to relieve the over-crowded conditions at the Florida State Prison at Raiford, Florida and was to house minimum and medium custody adult males.[jubilee-1964-prison]

The first superintendent was L. L. Wainwright — Louie L. Wainwright, who went on to run Florida’s whole prison system for a quarter of a century — and the 1964 account records that he “experienced excellent cooperation given by the many progressive civic, educational, and religious leaders of Avon Park.”[jubilee-1964-prison]

The 2001 testimony agrees on the date and the instrument: “Since the Bureau of Prisons still held the lease, the State of Florida subleased the property in 1957 and the Avon Park Correctional Institution began.”[hearing-2001]

By 1959 it was a line in the state budget. The general appropriations act of that year, under the Division of Corrections, funds “Avon Park Prison”: a superintendent at $6,500 a year and ninety-five employees, $336,778 in salaries, about $308,000 in expenses and $167,000 in food in the first year, and, under capital outlay, two dormitory buildings at $30,000 and a laundry building at $15,000.[lof-1959-500]

What it was for twenty years

From 1957 to 1978, Avon Park Correctional Institution housed more than 700 minimum-custody inmates in 18 old dormitories that had served as barracks during World War II.[hearing-2001]

So for its first two decades the prison was the Army airfield’s barracks with a fence round them. A close-custody unit for 542 inmates was built in 1977, and in 1992 “the antiquated 1957-era buildings were torn down and replaced.”[hearing-2001]

The land

The state leased for about fifteen years. Following the formal congressional repeal of the Emergency Detention Act in September 1971,[pl-92-128] the leased land was declared surplus, the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare donated 143 acres to Florida for use as a prison, and the state then bought a further 455 acres from the federal government. In accepting the gift Florida undertook to maintain the water and sewer systems and the road from the main gate through the prison’s property — obligations the Department of Corrections and the Air Force were still negotiating in 2001.[hearing-2001]

The institution’s address today is 8100 Highway 64 East, with a rated capacity of 956 and a satellite Avon Park Work Camp.[fdc-apci] In 2001 its minimum-custody work camp of two to three hundred men went out daily to Department of Transportation road projects and to work on the range itself[hearing-2001] — a continuity of prisoner labor on this ground that runs back through the federal camp to the county road camp on Lake Bonnet.

1951 or 1957

The range’s 2004 natural resources plan states that “the State of Florida Bureau of Prisons opened AvPCI, a minimum-security prison camp, in 1951 on the Main Cantonment area.”[inrmp-2004] This conflates two separate events: 1951 was when the Federal Bureau of Prisons acquired the 800-acre site from the Air Force under Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, whereas April 1957 was when the Florida Division of Corrections subleased that property from the federal government and opened the state institution.[hcis-hearings-1970][jubilee-1964-prison][hearing-2001] (It also coincided with the 1951 legislative creation of the alcoholism rehabilitation center in Avon Park; see Entity: Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center, Avon Park.)

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. United States House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform, Sustaining Critical Military Training Facilities: Avon Park Air Force Range — hearing before the Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs and International Relations of the Committee on Government Reform, House of Representatives, 107th Congress, 4 August 2001, Serial No. 107-106; testimony of Dale Landress, Warden, Avon Park Correctional Institution (2001)
  2. Elaine Levey, Highlands News-Sun, The beginnings of the Avon Park prison — Historically Speaking, by Elaine Levey, reproducing the Avon Park Correctional Institution's own account in the 1964 Avon Park Diamond Jubilee booklet, Avon Park Depot Museum archives (2020)
  3. United States Congress, Internal Security Act of 1950, Title II — Emergency Detention Act of 1950 (Public Law 81-831, 64 Stat. 1019) (1950)
  4. United States House of Representatives, Committee on Internal Security, Hearings on H.R. 13453 and Related Bills, Directing the Repeal of the Emergency Detention Act of 1950, House Committee on Internal Security, 91st Congress, 2d Session (1970)
  5. United States Congress, Public Law 92-128, An Act to Repeal the Emergency Detention Act of 1950 (85 Stat. 347, 18 U.S.C. § 4001) (1971)
  6. Florida Department of Corrections, Avon Park Correctional Institution (2026)
  7. United States Air Force, Final Environmental Assessment: Implementation of the Integrated Natural Resources Management Plan for Avon Park Air Force Range, Florida (2004), DTIC ADA638923 (2004)
  8. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 59-500, Laws of Florida 1959: the general appropriations act, Avon Park Prison items (1959)

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