Action Needed

LEGISLATURE CAN SLOW FLOW INTO STATE'S OVERCROWDED PRISONS

If Alabama is ever to get a grip on the state's grave prison
overcrowding problem, state officials must move from talking about
remedies to actually taking action. We know what needs to be done;
what's missing is the will and the means to do it.

Alabamians for years have heard the bad news about their
prisons:

In just two decades, the prison population has jumped from 5,500
inmates to more than 28,000, squeezed into prisons built to hold only
half that number.

The state has only about half the number of correctional officers
needed to guard those prisoners.

Money has been far too scarce for alternatives to incarceration, such
as drug treatment and community corrections, while tough-on-crime laws
are sending more and more people to prison, including nonviolent drug
offenders.

Dangerously crowded conditions in prisons have earned the ire of both
state and federal courts, which have ordered the state to fix them.

For sure, there isn't an easy fix for our troubled prisons. While the
state has made better efforts in recent years to address the crowding
problem, those efforts have been more of the Band-Aid type than a
long-term cure.

To solve overcrowding, the state must build more prison space (it's
mega expensive, but if the state is going to put so many people in
prison, it must have space for them), vastly increase treatment and
community corrections programs, hire more correctional officers (and
pay them more to retain them), and change the way convicts are sentenced.

Most of these fixes require money, and lots of it. But state
government is in a financial crisis, which means it's even more
important for the state to do the things that don't require additional
money.

That starts with changing sentencing laws - diverting nonviolent
offenders into alternative punishment programs to free prison space
for dangerous criminals. Even that won't be easy, though.

In an interview with The Associated Press last week, prison
Commissioner Donal Campbell put sentencing reform at the top of the
list. "As long as we have the laws that we have today, it's not going
to change," Campbell said of the state's growing prison population.

He's right. While the effort under Gov. Bob Riley to speed up parole
of nonviolent offenders helps slow the growth of the prison
population, it alone is a Band-Aid. The best way to relieve crowding
is to stem the flow of new inmates.

Alabama has the fifth-highest incarceration rate in the nation,
meaning our courts are sending too many people to prison. Smarter
sentencing laws can have a big difference.

Change, however, comes hard to Alabama. The Alabama Sentencing
Commission already has spent four years studying sentencing laws and
putting together recommendations for reform. To put those reforms into
play, the Legislature must act. Five bills from the Sentencing
Commission are before the Legislature this session.

The Legislature isn't likely to find the money anytime soon to build
more prisons. The least lawmakers can do is to give the sentencing
bills a fair hearing.