PRISONER ADVOCATE GETS PROBATION IN DRUG CASE

MONTGOMERY St. Clair Correctional Facility inmate Larry Jackson has been
locked up for 20 years, but when prison reform activist Roberta Franklin
needed help, he responded.

After pleading guilty in April to illegally possessing prescription drugs,
Franklin was facing up to 20 years in the custody of the Department of
Corrections the agency she's blasted on her radio talk show and in rallies
she holds for prison inmates' families.

Jackson wrote court officials on her behalf, saying, "Within the last few
years I have personally witnessed the outstanding work and dedication shown
to every inmate. She is truly a remarkable woman."

Franklin said she has been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support she's
gotten, primarily from convicts.

On Thursday, she was placed on five years' probation after Montgomery
County Circuit Court Judge Truman Hobbs Jr. said her report from a drug
treatment center was "exemplary."

"I don't put sick people in jail," Hobbs told Franklin.

She and Sherry Swiney of Alabaster organized the state's first conference
for families of convicts in April. Franklin regularly blasts state prison
officials on her radio show, alleging everything from providing poor
medical care to inmates to charging them too much to shop in the prison
stores. Neither politicians nor ministers are spared her acid tongue.

"It was no coincidence that I was arrested on election day," she said
Wednesday. She believes her outspokenness got her into hot water with the
wrong people. But she does not plan to change.

"Why should I?" she asks. "I am who I am."

She was her usual controversial self Wednesday, referring on her Montgomery
talk show to black ministers as the tool of white folks and meeting with a
court official wearing a shirt that read, "Alabama Department of Corruption."

Franklin said she's a recovering drug addict and alcoholic but has been
clean for 15 years. She pleaded guilty, she said, to spare her family,
especially her 7-year-old daughter, a long and public trial. But the day
before her sentencing, she was having second thoughts.

"When I pled, I figured there was no point fighting it they think I did it.
I think, deep down, as a recovering addict, you always feel as if you've
got to prove yourself. I just had a defeatist attitude," she said Wednesday.

She remains silent on why prosecutors allege she filled prescriptions for
nearly 20 pain pills a day for more than 30 days.

"If I had taken 20 Loritab a day, I would have been somewhere asleep," she
said. "I wouldn't have been able to function. I know, I've been there."