LAWS WORSEN PRISON PROBLEMS

Surely no one in Alabama has a better perspective on the states prison
problems than Donal Campbell. As prison commissioner, he has the dual
challenge of addressing short-term issues and looking for long-term
solutions and that makes his observations on Alabamas sentencing
structure worthy of serious attention.

Campbell has been forced into some short-term measures, such as
sending inmates to out-of-state prisons, in order to ease, albeit
temporarily, the severe overcrowding in the system. This has kept
federal court intervention at bay, at least for the moment.

But Campbell acknowledges the harsh reality that the state is really
just spinning its wheels without major reform of sentencing. As long
as we have the laws we have today, its not going to change, he said.

It's not. It can't. Alabama has seen its prison population explode
from about 5,500 inmates 20 years ago to more than 28,000 today.
That's more than twice the number of inmates the facilities of the
Department of Corrections are built to handle.Those inmate numbers
might make sense if there were five times the crime of 20 years ago,
but there isn't. Instead, the overcrowding is largely the result of a
flawed sentencing structure that, simply put, sends too many people to
prison who could and should be sentenced to alternative programs that
are less expensive and more productive.

We've gotten ourselves in this state in a situation that solutions to
our problems are going to be more expensive than they would have been
if we had attacked the problem on the front end, Campbell said.

That is the unfortunate legacy of years of supposedly tough-on-crime
measures that historically have been popular with politicians and with
voters. It leaves Campbell in a tough spot in which the system needs
more prison space for the inmates it has now, but also needs reform of
the sentencing structure to send more inmates into alternative
programs in the future.

Campbell favors community corrections programs as an alternative.
These programs allow nonviolent offenders to remain in or near their
communities while working to pay for the costs of their incarceration
and make restitution to the victims of their crimes. Why put someone
like this in a penitentiary?

Sensible sentencing that realistically assesses the offender and the
offense and reserves prison space for those who genuinely need to be
there is critical to a long-term solution to Alabama's prison
problems. Legislators need to hear that message, not just from
corrections professionals such as Campbell, but from constituents who
understand the serious shortcomings of the methods of the past two
decades.