Florida Institutional Legal Services, Inc. (FILS) is a nonprofit law office that provides free legal assistance to indigent people incarcerated in Florida. For more than 20 years, FILS has been addressing issues that affect the conditions under which its clients are held. FILS's recent cases have resulted in significant improvement to the barbaric conditions in the solitary confinement units, the correction of illegal sentences of more than 9,000 prisoners, and an end to gender discrimination that deprived female prisoners of the opportunity to enter a boot camp similar to that offered to male prisoners. FILS currently has a brutality project to address the pervasive and inhuman physical abuse of prisoners, particularly with excessive use of chemical agents, through litigation and informal advocacy. Other priorities include the protection of prisoners' religious freedoms, the improvement of mental and physical health services, the plight of women in prison, and monitoring of youthful offender prisons and juvenile detention facilities.

Located in Gainesville, FILS is the only statewide legal services program in Florida dedicated exclusively to advocating on behalf of prisoners and their families. FILS' staff consists of four attorneys and two administrative assistants. Given the high demand for our services, FILS believes that it can best serve Florida prisoners by using its limited resources to advocate for broad improvements in prison conditions that hold the potential for positively affecting large numbers of prisoners. In deciding which cases to accept for representation, FILS considers the importance of the rights or issues involved, the potential impact on the client community, the factual and legal merits of the claim, and the amount of staff time and other program resources required and available for the case.