The Birmingham News
Carla Crowder
January 25, 2006


Gov. Bob Riley's plans to curb prison crowding have been criticized as going too far.

And as not going far enough.

"Maybe they're just right," Rep. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, suggested on the floor of the House of Representatives last week, drawing a parallel to Goldilocks' visit with the Three Bears.

Indeed, of the eight bills that sailed through the House, some make things harder on criminals by tripling fines, others allow low-risk offenders to avoid prison. But nothing in the package is a panacea for the state's packed prisons and budget-strapped Department of Corrections, even if the Riley-resistant Senate is willing to swallow the porridge.

"The (bills) are probably not going to solve prison overcrowding overnight. But the only way you're going to do that is to let a bunch of people go who still have sentences to serve, and that's not going to happen. Or pass a bond issue and build a bunch of new prisons and that's not going to happen, either." said Rep. Dick Brewbaker, R-Montgomery, a member of the House Judiciary Committee. "They're doing all that we're capable of getting agreement on right now."

State prison spending has increased 59 percent in five years, from $197 million in 2002 to $313 million this year. Riley requests $318 million in his 2007 budget. Yet the prisons remain at nearly double capacity, and there's been no money set aside for new lockups.

Sentencing guidelines:

One of the key provisions in the package of prison bills would give judges sentencing guidelines, which would drop prisoner numbers by a few hundred, to 27,427 by December 2009, according to projections done by the Alabama Sentencing Commission, which developed them. Prisons now hold about 27,500 people. Without the standards, however, the commission projects prisons would jump to 30,447.

"When you say in 2009 you're gonna have less people than you have now, that's pretty dramatic," said Sentencing Commission Executive Director Lynda Flynt.

Voluntary for judges, the standards would narrow the range of sentence lengths and bring geographic consistency to penalties for drug, property and violent crimes. Currently, someone in one county could get probation for drug distribution, while a person who commits an identical crime elsewhere might land a 10-year prison term.

"If we don't do anything about sentencing reform, our growth rate continues to skyrocket. What this thing does, it arrests the growth, levels it off. Then slowly over time it begins to decrease. If you arrest the growth and level it off, it gives our other reforms a chance to dramatically reduce the people in the system," said Vernon Barnett, Riley's deputy legal adviser and point person on prisons.

Those reforms include opening a parole transition center for men, similar to LifeTech, a Wetumpka complex where women on parole and probation spend six months in rehabilitation programs before going home. Riley also plans to open a center for parolees who incur "technical violations," such as missing parole officer meetings. Currently, these folks can be sent back to prison for years for violations that are not crimes to anyone else.

But Prison Commissioner Donal Campbell also is continuing his fight for more beds.

"I support those bills, but they will not impact us short term," Campbell told the Legislature's joint committee on prisons last week. He suggested the solution would be to lease more space in private prisons, at a cost of about $27 million.

No one solution:

It's clear there's no one solution to the state's chronic prison crisis. It's taken 30 years for the prison population to balloon, and it will take more than one legislative session to fix it. "You can't simplify something like corrections because there are so many parts to it," said Barnett, in the governor's legal office.

He bristles at the oft-repeated refrain around Montgomery that the state needs more prisons. "That is the kind of shortsighted thinking that's gotten us into this problem," Barnett said.

He says sentencing reform would have an immediate impact because the guidelines give judges and prosecutors options beyond prison. "If you cut the number coming into the system and thousands continue to leave, then yes, you have an immediate impact on the system," he said.

Still, little effort has been expended to divert prisoners on the front-end. Total state community corrections spending is $5.2 million, 1.6 percent of what's going to the DOC.

"More money would help," said Foster Cook, director of UAB Tasc, a community corrections program in Jefferson County. "There seems to be a lot of lip service that's paid to the concept, but a lack of money and a lack of planning and aggressive selling of the community corrections idea to the county commissioners, judges and other people who might be involved in it."

A prison crowding task force convened by Riley recommended expansion of community corrections, in which judges sentence lower risk offenders to drug treatment and community service while they live at home, instead of locking them in an expensive prison bed. Judges in 24 Alabama counties don't have that option because there's no program.

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