TURN EMPTY WAL-MARTS INTO PRISONS

EDITOR'S NOTE: Doug Pearson, editor and publisher of Jasper's Daily
Mountain Eagle, died last week. He was 66. The Tuscaloosa native had
been at the Daily Mountain Eagle since 1980. We offer his last column,
published early last month, in memoriam.

The word is we need to spend $934 million Alabama tax dollars to build
enough space for the current prison population which would probably
translate to $2 billion by the time the final figures were in if we
undertook this massive building project tomorrow.

Why not spend millions less turning empty Wal-Mart stores and empty
textile and industrial plants into prisons?

We're not dealing with hardened killers in most cases. We're dealing
with a bunch of misguided idiots who would rather make and sell
illegal drugs in their kitchens as opposed to working for a living.

Presently we have the fifth-highest incarceration rate in the country
with some 584 out of every 100,000 people serving time. Of this number
probably 450 are serving time for involvement with illegal drugs.

And they are not what you could call "hardened criminals" by any
stretch of the imagination. As an example, just about every family in
Waler County has been touched directly or indirectly by the sale,
manufacturing or possession of illegal drugs. They know that their
son, daughter, brother or sister are not physical threats to society,
just out for an easy buck.

Regardless, that number fills the system to 188 percent of capacity.
Because there is not room for them in our prisons we are now paroling
nonviolent criminals and placing them under the care of parole
officers. This amounts to nothing more than a slap on the wrist for
the lawbreakers, something with which I disagree.

Put them in one of the hundreds of empty buildings we have in Alabama
for the duration of their sentences. Being sentenced to five years in
jail and serving 10 to 12 months in many cases won't teach them that
crime does not pay. Serving the sentence they received in a court of
law might.

Putting them in new prisons that cost $10 million plus makes
absolutely no sense when you think of the needs we have in this state,
which presently ranks in the top 10 in the nation in categories that
are considered negative for the people and the bottom ten in all
positive categories.

In addition to the money we would save think how much easier it would
be on the families of these felons. Like the victims of the makers and
sellers of illegal drugs they, too, are victims.

Reprinted with permission from the Daily Mountain Eagle.