CARLA CROWDER
News staff writer
February 5, 2004

The Alabama Department of Corrections will pay a private prison company at least $500,000 for empty prison space in Mississippi.

That's because the state's contract with the Tennessee-based Corrections Corporation of America requires Alabama to pay rent for 1,345 beds through March 11. The state has opted to bring most of the prisoners home early, but still must pay the $27.50 per diem cost.

Alabama prison officials say the unused beds are a necessity, and the result of the state's chronic underfunding and overcrowding of prisons.

Now that bed space has been freed up at state prisons, the department is sending inmates home a few at a time, but the contract requires the state to continue paying for 95 percent of the full occupancy rate.

Corrections employees began returning inmates Jan. 19. By the end of this week, they expect to return 379. Unused beds for that group alone will cost $340,000 for 35 days. More men will be returning every week until March 12, leaving empty beds that will push the total to at least $500,000.

"There's no way you could keep them over there until the last day of the contract and bring them back all at once," said Brian Corbett, spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections. "It's physically impossible to move 1,416 inmates in one day."

State officials signed the emergency contract with CCA last June. Alabama's prison population had hit an all-time high of 28,440, and the Department of Corrections was facing pressure from lawsuits related to prison conditions and the backlog of state inmates in county jails.

"We did what we had to do out of an emergency situation. And yes, unfortunately, it cost money," Corbett said.

"It would be wiser in the long run and cheaper in the long run if you would properly fund corrections up front, as opposed to trying to correct your emergency situations on the back end," Corbett said.

State got bargain:

A spokesman for CCA said Alabama got a bargain in its per diem rate. Elsewhere, private prison companies have charged states more than $50 per inmate per day.

CCA's Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler, Miss., sat empty last summer. The company quickly staffed it for the Alabama contract, and federal law requires CCA to give those employees a 60-day notice before termination, said CCA spokesman Steve Owen.

"There had to be some guarantees for us to hire, ramp up and staff that institution for the duration of that contract," Owen said.

Increased parole and community corrections programs have freed up space in Alabama prisons. The prison population was down to 27,344 in December 2003.

The Department of Corrections is also shifting work release and minimum security inmates, primarily from Montgomery and from the Elmore Correctional Facility, to make room for the men returning from Mississippi. Many minimum security inmates will transfer to vacant work release beds.

980 backlogged:

Prior to sending the prisoners to Mississippi, 980 state inmates were backlogged in county jails for more than 30 days - the crux of a lawsuit against the Department of Corrections. A year later, in part because of the Mississippi contract, no state prisoners have been housed in counties more than 30 days, Corbett said.

The contract possibly saved money by halting additional costly litigation or federal intervention, he said.

"We averted a crisis situation last summer, but by no means are we out of the woods," Corbett said.

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