EXPORTING PRISONERS

State May Have No Choice To Ship Out Some Inmates

In trying to solve dangerous overcrowding at its only prison for women,
Gov. Bob Riley can't afford not to look at every possible option including
sending some inmates to prisons outside Alabama.

As required, on Friday the Riley administration filed a plan in federal
court to correct conditions at Tutwiler Prison for Women that a federal
judge ruled unconstitutional. To cut Tutwiler's population from about 1,000
down to 750 and keep it there, the plan included stepped-up paroles and at
least on a temporary basis paying a private prison, most likely in
Louisiana, to house as many as 290 women inmates from Alabama. Those going
out of state will be women now held in county jails awaiting transfer to
Tutwiler, officials said. Newly convicted women inmates will also be sent
to an out-of-state prison in order to keep Tutwiler's population from growing.

That Alabama is to the point where it is about to export inmates shows how
dire the prison problem has become. Riley and prison officials must take
action now to disarm what U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson correctly
calls a "ticking time bomb."

Just two years ago, former Gov. Don Siegelman looked into the costs of
contracting with out-of-state prisons and said the option was too
expensive. It's an expense, though, the state now has no choice but to pay.

Sending our inmates out of state isn't ideal by any stretch. By increasing
the distance between inmates and their families, it could exacerbate family
dislocations even further and likely will be just as expensive, or more, as
keeping them here. But something has to give.

It's disappointing that the head of the state employees union has come out
against such a move. You would think that the employees group, which
represents prison guards, would be more concerned with reducing the
overcrowding in prisons, which puts the guards at greater risk.

Other parts of Riley's plan aren't as controversial. They include hiring 28
more parole officers at a cost of $1 million to supervise hundreds more men
and women who could be released early on parole. Among those would be 250
women at Tutwiler convicted of nonviolent crimes.

The plan also includes increasing the number of women in community work
programs, which also should free prisons of dozens of nonviolent criminals.

The latter two ideas are just plain smart, and are things the state should
have been doing all along. More than half of the 28,000-plus inmates in the
state prison system are there for nonviolent crimes, mostly theft and drug
offenses.

Paying to lock up so many nonviolent offenders is plain foolish, especially
with prisons dangerously overcrowded. The state badly needs to make use of
more alternatives to prison incarceration such as parole, community work,
work release, and drug and mental health treatment programs.

For a long time, it's been clear that corrections were a pay-now or
pay-more-later proposition for the state. State officials, including
governors and legislators, and for all the wrong reasons, chose the latter.
Well, it's time to pay up.