Prison problem needs solution

Alabama’s prisons are severely overcrowded due to a number of factors, including a “three strikes” law, harsh penalties for drug crimes, and elected judges and prosecutors who don’t want to be seen as soft on crime.

According to statistics from the state Department of Corrections, Alabama’s 29 state confinement facilities currently house 32,574 inmates. That’s nearly twice what they were designed to hold, with an occupancy rate of 189.3%.

The overcrowding at the state level affects us locally as facilities like the Randolph County Jail must operate above their designed capacity with no place to ship some inmates that should be serving time in state prison.

What all of this means is the likelihood that unless something changes–and rather quickly–we will see the federal government take over yet another function of Alabama government and require remedies that will be more costly than if we had addressed the problem ourselves.

So are more prisons the answer? Not unless we are willing to pay for them. According to the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center, $840 million would be the cost of building enough prison space to end the overcrowding. Add another $186 million as the cost of operating the new prisons each year. At nearly $395 million for FY 2015, the cost of operating our existing inadequate prisons already represents the second largest line item in the General Fund budget.

Since Alabama for several years had the highest growth rate of its prison population in the country, and since we incarcerate people at the fourth highest rate in the nation, slowing down the rate at which we put people in prison would seem to be a logical place to start. This doesn’t mean releasing people or failing to sentence people who genuinely need to be behind bars for the protection of society.

It means looking at the nature of the crime and sentencing appropriately. It means expanding the use of community service programs where appropriate. It means making use of other alternative sentencing options for non-violent offenders, such as work release, house arrest, and rehab for drug offenders. After all, rehabilitation is a part of the mission of corrections programs.

Whatever we do, we need to begin soon.