A Florida prison inmate is asking the state’s corrections department for permission to be circumcised.

Pablo Manuel Diaz, 37, of Miami-Dade County, who is serving a life sentence at the Blackwater Correctional Facility in Milton, sent a letter to the Florida Department of Corrections requesting a circumcision to be performed by a mohel in the prison’s infirmary. An earlier request was turned down by the prison’s warden.

Diaz was born in Cuba to a Jewish mother and has been active in Jewish prison ministry. The Miami office of Brit Yosef Yitzchak, an organization that claims to have performed 50,000 circumcisions on men of all ages throughout the world, has offered to do the circumcision at no charge.

Law students Paul Harold and Courtney Quiros, who are representing Diaz through Stanford Law School’s Religious Liberty Clinic in California, requested a response from Florida’s corrections department by mid-June.

“Hopefully they will see he has a right to [circumcision] under federal law,” Harold said. The Clinic will sue the department if Diaz’s latest request is turned down, he said. “We think they will be swayed by a federal judge ordering him to have a bris.”

Harold said he thinks Florida corrections department administrators are “unfamiliar with the bris and its importance” to Jews.

Florida’s DOC has been under fire for refusing to give kosher meals to Jewish inmates who request them for religious reasons.

The department recently lost a case in a federal appeals court when judges sided with an Orthodox Jewish inmate at the Union Correctional Institution in north Florida and ordered the case returned to federal district court.

READ MORE: SUN SENTINEL