LITTLE RELIEF

Despite More Paroles, Prison Population Rising

You could look at the size of Alabama's prison system and conclude that a
special, second parole board formed to speed up paroles and lower the prison
population has been a failure.

You would be wrong.

It's true the prison population has declined by only about 850 inmates
since the added parole board began work in December. That's a far cry
from the 5,000 to 7,000 prisoners the state had estimated would be
freed through the work of the extra parole board. But those figures
give only half the story.

The other half is that new inmates continue to enter the prison system
at too fast a pace. So, as large numbers of prisoners are paroled
early, others take their place.

Worse, the pool of nonviolent convicts eligible for parole is drying
up. Already, the number of paroles has slowed from about 150 a week to
about 35. That means the prison population is actually growing.

The state must tighten the spigot on the front end to slow the flow of
new inmates into prison. Alabama locks away too many offenders, and it
has for decades.

Over the past 20 years, the prison population jumped from about 5,500
to more than 28,000 - a gain of more than 1,000 a year. Since July
last year, increased paroles have lowered the number to about 26,500.

Yet despite the paroles, more use of work release and the state
sending some prisoners to out-of-state lockups, prisons are still
housing twice as many inmates as they were designed to hold. Plus, the
state has only about half the number of corrections officers needed to
guard them.

That's a recipe for disaster, something state officials and courts
have noted over and over. Yet, too little is being done to fix it.

Fixing the problem means redirecting nonviolent offenders to
alternatives to prison, such as community corrections programs. It
means sentencing reforms that better match punishment to the crime,
making sentences fairer and more consistent. And it means providing
drug and mental health treatment, which is the most effective way to
reduce the rate of return to prison.

No matter how wide the state opens the spigot going out of the prison
system, it won't make much difference if the spigot into the system
remains wide open.