'Time bomb' ticks in state prisons 

The Montgomery Advertiser
February 8, 2009
 

The president of an organization of state correctional officers warned last week that Alabama's prisons "are an absolute time bomb waiting to explode."

Capt. Lloyd Wallace, president of the Alabama Correctional Organization, said at a press conference that overcrowding and understaffing were placing corrections officers and the public at risk.

Wallace was absolutely correct in his assessment that the state's system has too many prisoners and too few corrections officers. The state's inmate-to-guard ratio is double the national average of 5 to 1.

But those numbers don't begin to give the real picture. All of the inmates are there 24 hour a day, seven days per week, while all corrections officers aren't. Taking into account days off, vacations, sick time, training and so forth, there are times when the ratio of inmates to on-duty officers could be 200 to one in some facilities.

Add to that aging prisons housing twice the number of inmates that they were designed to hold and you have a formula for disaster.

However, while the corrections officers' group is on target with its assessment of the dangers, the implication that this hasn't been a priority of the Riley administration is wide of the mark.

Unlike most former governors, Riley has successfully pushed reforms designed to lower inmate populations and to decrease recidivism. He has sought to increase the state's work release program. He exempted the corrections officer force from the current hiring freeze that affects most state agencies. And one reason that Riley has not declared proration of the state's General Fund budget is that it would require all agencies budgets to be cut by the same amount, and he wanted to avoid a 10 percent cut in the Corrections Department budget.

While Riley has done more than most governors to ease the overcrowding in prisons, the end result is that for the most part he has only managed to keep matters from getting worse. The underlying problems remain.

The state's prison system is suffering from decades of neglect and underfunding, and the blame goes far beyond what Riley or his predecessors can control. There is no real lobbying force for funding prisons, making it difficult for corrections to compete with social services or education for funding in the Legislature.

While the corrections group proposed increasing taxes to generate revenue for prisons, it is highly unlikely that the Legislature would approve such measures in the current economy. Raising taxes for prisons is a hard sell anytime; in this economic climate it becomes almost impossible.

But sooner or later, the state's legislators are going to have to realize that there is a price tag that comes with the desire to lock up more people than most states for longer periods of time. Alabamians should hope it doesn't take a riot to make that happen.