When You "De-Floridate" Don't Forget to Return Your License Plate! (Plus, an Extra Plate Full of How Convict Labor Crafted Florida's License Tags)

Keep? Trash? Return? Recycle? Like many things involving Florida, the answer "depends." Photo by Jim Schnur.

According to US Census Bureau estimates, Florida's population grew by nearly five percent between 2020 and 2023. More than 22.6 million people called Florida home in mid-2023. 

Despite this robust growth, another trend has appeared in recent years. The state's unstable and faltering property insurance market, the governor's disregard for the issue, the legislature's failure to address pocketbook issues, and continued resistance by politicians against any serious efforts to address Florida's climate vulnerability have encouraged some people to head for the exits. 

Leaving Florida along Interstate 10, west of Pensacola, at the Perdido River. Photo by Jim Schnur.

For those who chose to de-Floridize, deflower themselves from the "land of flowers," de-Floridate, or simply depart, they have an important task to complete if they had any motor vehicles registered in the state: Don't forget to return any unexpired Florida license plates on your vehicle. 

A License to Fine

While some people keep their former license plates for nostalgia, Florida is one of the states that has, for many years, required vehicle owners to surrender their valid plates if they cancel their insurance, dispose of their vehicle, or move out of state. 

According to Florida Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, "license plates belong to the state." One has a very small window to return the tags before fines accrue and Florida suspends or cancels a driver's license. 

Since most other states require a valid insurance policy issued within their boundaries before an owner can have their vehicle tagged, titled, and licensed, one must act quickly. While those who never plan to return to Florida may not notice any effect, those who have lived in Florida for any length of time know that Florida never forgets. Expect a suspended license, as well as threats of a fine that may reach $150 per vehicle, with other headaches and inconveniences possible!

Anyone who has ever complained of slow service at a Florida tax collector's office should be aware that Florida goes into overdrive when enforcing this policy. Within one day of applying for my New Mexico license and title paperwork, Florida had already cancelled my driver's license before I had even notified my Florida insurance carrier.

Bye-bye and auf weidersehn! Photo by Jim Schnur.

Immediately after obtaining my New Mexico vehicle registration and placing new tags on the car, I placed my Florida plates in a cushy, protective envelope and drove to the local post office. It was worth every penny (more than 1600 of them!) to have tracking and signature confirmation that the tags made it back to Pinellas County. 

Now that we have that off our plate, let's look at a little Florida license plate history.

An Annual Ritual 

In May 1905, Florida Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward signed legislation requiring vehicle registration. Before the end of that year, the state recorded 132 registrations. The first known plate was made from leather in 1906, with others from that era created from wood, porcelain, or metal.

In 1917, Florida became the last of the then-48 states to issue standardized plates. Six years later, the state began to issue vehicle titles. Seventy-five years ago, in 1949, plates began to carry the nickname "Sunshine State." Unlike many other states, Florida required only a single plate on the rear of the vehicle, in most cases.

Gov. Claude Kirk at a state vehicle inspection station in May 1968. Courtesy of Florida Memory.

Old-timers may remember the era when Florida issued a new license plate each year. For approximately forty years beginning in 1938, most Florida vehicles had tags with a county number prefix, the series (vehicle type and weight), and a unique serial number. 

Plates issued in Pinellas County had "4" as their prefix. A small car from Pinellas County may have had a tag like "4D-123" and a weighty station wagon would have carried a tag such as "4WW-321." The earliest personalized plates first appeared in 1972.

The county tag numbers remained fixed through 1976, even though registration and population numbers had changed substantially. Broward County, second largest in population by 1970, carried its tenth-place prefix that represented tag purchase statistics in 1937 throughout this period. 

The last year that Florida plates had a year permanently affixed to them was 1975. Legislators approved alphanumeric plates that first appeared in 1976 and phased out the older tags in 1980.

Lining Up for Their Plates

Long license plate lines are nothing new. A queue in Tallahassee, 1959. Courtesy of Florida Memory.

County tax collectors traditionally saw an uptick in traffic between April 1 and June 30 beginning in 1963, when the state required vehicle owners to purchase tags before the beginning of Florida's fiscal year (July 1). Prior to that, plate purchases coincided with the calendar year. Long lines and high tempers later led lawmakers to tie most tag renewals to the birth month of the vehicle owner.

Specialty tags first made their appearance in January 1987, after the Florida legislature approved a plate to honor the crew of the Challenger. This happened less than a year after that Space Shuttle disintegrated shortly after liftoff. By 2005, Florida issued 103 specialty tags. The number remains above 100 today.

A Plate of Painful History

The Florida Department of Corrections traces its origin to 1868, when the state's first prison camp opened at Chattahoochee, in Florida's Panhandle, the area where most of the population was centered. As Reconstruction came to an end, Governor George F. Drew approved a measure in 1877 that permitted convict leasing, the physical transfer of prisoners that allowed private companies to maintain their custody and exploit them in chain-gang conditions.

Convicts leased to private companies to clear forest timber, circa 1910. Courtesy of Florida Memory.

Not coincidentally, the Commissioner of Agriculture assumed supervisory authority for prisoners in 1877, as many of these men toiled in fields, farm work camps, and similar settings. For over 45 years, prisoners held under Florida's violent system of convict leasing cleared the land and built many of the roads, railroads, and much of the other infrastructure that ultimately fueled the land boom of the 1920s. 

Although this practice officially ended in 1923, convict labor has remained an integral part of Florida's underbelly for the subsequent century.

Florida State Prison at Raiford in the mid-1930s. Courtesy of Florida Memory.

The Florida State Prison opened in 1914. Originally given a Raiford address, this sprawling complex once surpassed 18,000 acres in Bradford and Unions counties, a rural area between Gainesville and Jacksonville. In addition to the farm, the prison included a syrup mill, concrete plant, and a tobacco factory (that operated into the 1970s).

Pressing Matters

With the creation of the State Motor Vehicle Commission in 1927, the prison facility at Raiford added a plant to create license plates that same year.

Pressing license plates at Raiford in 1928, a year after the plant opened. Courtesy of Florida Memory.

Similar to Gov. Drew's perverse public-private partnership that allowed for convict leasing, Florida's lawmakers have gained political points by limiting prisoners' gain time and educational or vocational opportunities. Instead of focusing on rehabilitation, they have capitalized on public perceptions of indolent inmates.

Reality differs greatly from this assumption. In 1949, regulations called for prisoners to work up to 60 hours per week, with a maximum of eleven hours each day. At that time, those who completed their sentences received "one good suit of clothes, a hat, one pair of shoes, and $5 to provide the necessities of life" upon release.

The license plate plant at Raiford, September 1949. Courtesy of Florida Memory.

Too Much on Their Plate

The postwar boom brought many newcomers to Florida. By the early 1970s, the prisoners at Raiford found it increasingly difficult to produce the quantity of license plates needed by county tax collectors. 

Traffic jams along Clearwater Beach at Sand Key in 1983. Courtesy of Pinellas Memory.

A July 1972 reorganization divided the Florida State Prison into multiple entities and changed the management structure of the plate-making process. The Raiford side with the plate plant became Union Correctional Institution, while Florida's often-failing electric chair (Old Sparky) and the State Prison moved over to the former East Unit located on the Bradford County side, with a Starke mailing address.

A year later, Gov. Reuben Askew had to postpone license tag enforcement twice due to backlogs at the plant that prevented the plates required by law for vehicles from arriving on time. People in many urban counties waited hours in line without getting their tags, something that left sour memories at a time when many had empty fuel tanks during the gasoline shortages caused by the 1973-74 oil embargo.

Part of the yard at Union Correctional Institution in the early 1970s. Courtesy of Florida Memory.

To meet the demand in the summer of 1974, Florida had to do what would have seemed unthinkable a few years earlier: State officials purchased more than 2.7 million Sunshine State plates from a private firm in Arkansas to ensure a reliable supply.

Fifty years ago, Florida realized that issuing an annual plate became impossible. New regulations put into effect in July 1974 required stickers that prolonged the tag's life for three years (expanded on a few occasions, to the current ten years in 2009), as well as keeping the plates with the owner, rather than the vehicle, during a transfer of title and change in registration.

Adding Some PRIDE to Prisons

Jack Eckerd during his 1970 gubernatorial campaign. Courtesy of Florida Memory.

Jack Eckerd came from a family that operated drugstores in Pennsylvania and Delaware. He purchased three drugstores in the Tampa Bay region in 1952, and soon opened his stores throughout Florida. At its peak, Eckerd Drugs expanded to more than 2,800 locations that covered much of the eastern United States.

Eckerd ran unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for governor in 1970 and 1978. He provided an endowment that encouraged trustees at Florida Presbyterian College in St. Petersburg to rename their liberal arts school "Eckerd College" in 1972. 

Working in partnership with former Governor Bob Graham, Jack Eckerd played an instrumental role in the creation of Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE) in 1981. This non-profit became the first such entity to partner with prisons by offering inmate training opportunities.

Women inmates working in an unair-conditioned PRIDE garment factory at Florida Correctional Institution, Lowell, circa 1990. Courtesy of Florida Memory.

A future post will offer a lengthier treatment of PRIDE. However, one area where this organization has established firm roots since its inception is in the creation of license plates and distribution of them to local tax collector offices. PRIDE presently oversees the production of tags at Union Correctional Institution. 

According to a 2012 report that focused on major license tag redesigns, the state paid PRIDE $1.72 for each standard plate and $2.82 for each specialty plate at that time. The embossed tags created back then had letters and numbers pressed into the plate, so they would be raised after running through the machine.

The state sought to replace these tags with flat, digital plates easier for toll cameras and other license plate readers to decipher. PRIDE also assumed responsibility for collecting discarded plates from counties and recycling them. 

A License to Work

The "new and improved" license plates PRIDE produced continued to pose problems for camera readers. By the late 2010s, PRIDE offered a partial solution at a few Florida correctional facilities that offered a rare opportunity for a small clique of inmates to earn money for their work behind the fence.

Despite popular misconceptions, most inmates in Florida's sprawling prison industrial complex do not loaf and watch television all day long. According to Chapter 33-601.201, Florida Administrative Code, able-bodied inmates expected to work at least 40 hours per week, but not more than 12 hours per day. 

Legislators frequently refer to work as a way to diminish "inmate idleness," but much of the "Findings of Fact" peppered throughout Florida Statutes focus on the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) "maximizing the use of inmates while incarcerated in its strategic plan."

Florida senators chit-chat while touring the soap factory operated by PRIDE at Apalachee Correctional Institution in the late 1980s. The inmate was most likely told not to make eye contact. Courtesy of Florida Memory.

In some cases, the FDC has statutory authority to require inmates to work up to 72 hours per week. Conditions and job assignments vary. While Florida Statutes mention that those who perform satisfactory work should receive "such compensation as the department shall determine," this usually means they get their gain time, not a penny more.

Since those under FDC's "care, custody, and control" for offenses committed since 1995 must serve 85% of their sentences regardless of their performance in work assignments, some seek one of the only legitimate ways to make any money, even if it is measured in pennies per hour. Others try to survive or thrive in the underground prison economy. 

PRIDE's factory at Apalachee Correctional Institution made mattresses for inmates in the late 1980s. Inmate workers assigned to some prison laundries perform this task today, with only gain time as compensation. Courtesy of Florida Memory.

A New Lease on Inmate Life

Although Florida's notorious convict leasing scheme ended more than a century ago, the current enabling legislation that allows PRIDE to cohabitate with Corrections has some familiar verbiage: "to serve the rehabilitative goals of the state by duplicating, as nearly as possible, the operating activities of a free-enterprise type of profitmaking enterprise."

"PRIDE! Laundry!," announced a voice through the barely functioning speakers in the dorms at Polk Correctional Institution each weekday between 6:45am and 7:05am. 

In the first signficant inmate movement after those confined in each of the facility's seven pods had their chance for a ten-minute breakfast at the chow hall, a handful of men assembled in lines at the fence for their work assignments.

These chosen few either worked for gain time in the Laundry -- a place where hustle was common -- or PRIDE, the only "paying" job offered at Polk C.I. in 2019. Some PRIDE workers earned upwards of 70 cents per hour to make, repair, and upholster furniture that often found its way to government buildings.

Comfortable university seats, many upholstered in a Florida prison. Courtesy of author.

Next time you, as a Florida resident, sit on a chair in a government office or a couch in a Florida university library, you may relax on something that is more "Made in Florida" than your glass of orange juice. These cushions are a true Sunshine State product, similar to your license plate.

Other PRIDE workers could receive somewhere up to 40 cents per hour on their accounts, based on their keyboarding skills and years of experience and incarceration, typing thousands of license plate numbers each day into carefully-monitored computers.

After passing through a metal detector to and from work, these proud PRIDE prisoners sat in front of four rows of hand-me-down computers, rapidly typing the license plate numbers based on images generated by toll cameras that technology could not accurately read. Most corrections officers expected their inmates to average upwards of ten plates keyed in per minute, for shifts that sometimes exceeded eight hours a day.

The building at Polk C.I. where inmates keyed in license plates in 2019. Courtesy of Google Maps.

For good behavior, inmates assigned to the open-air PRIDE building at Polk C.I. could have one cup of coffee per day, two ten-minute breaks (not including lunch), and up to two slices of pizza on two occasions each year. Something never offered on Florida prison menus at the time, pizza provided by PRIDE from the free world was offered only if the carpal-tunnel-prone convicts met their quotas.

Although an outside hacking incident stopped this data entry enterprise briefly in late 2019, it resumed by early 2020, despite media reports to the contrary.

So, Floridians, the next time you're stuck in traffic looking at the Sunshine State license plate in front of you, take pride in knowing that the tag you see is a true home state product, one Florida wants back if you move away. If you try to skip a toll in the state with the most toll roads in America, know that the person paid pennies per hour to document your crime may already be in an unair-conditoned Florida institution doing time!