https://reason.com/2023/12/23/jeff-brandes-on-criminal-justice-reform/ Reason interviews a less "law and order" Floridian Republican politician.

He says things like this:

"I sat on the criminal justice committee back in 2014 and recognized pretty quickly that there was no real leadership on that issue statewide and that the prison system in Florida was circling the drain. I began to tour prisons, and the more I toured, the less I liked. I was often going to prisons that had 1,500 inmates and zero education opportunities, realizing that a vast majority of our prisons were understaffed. We had really created a Department of Warehousing and not a Department of Corrections. We weren't correcting behavior. We weren't getting better outcomes. So I started to work to fix that."

Might be an interesting read.