As recently as a few weeks ago, state prison officials were talking about the need to sell large tracts of public land to make up a $31 million shortfall in the Correction Department's budget for the upcoming fiscal year. The idea of using a one-time sale of land to pay operating costs that continue from year to year was a horrible one, and editorial writers for the Montgomery Advertiser and other newspaper around the state said so.
 
Gov. Bob Riley must read editorials, because prison officials say that he intervened and told them to come up with a new plan that did not require the department to sell as much land as they planned to sell and that did not target land sale revenues for operating expenses.

The Corrections Department went back to the drawing board and came up with an approach to meeting next year's budget that -- if it works -- makes much more sense fiscally. It still would require the sale of significant public lands, much of it in the tri- county area.

For the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, 2007, the Legislature budgeted about $350 million for prisons. But the system estimates its needs at about $402 million. Once revenue the Department of Corrections generates internally is factored in, the expected shortfall would be $31 million.

Richard Allen, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, told the Montgomery Advertiser editorial board: "We started looking at other areas where we might be able to save money, and the thing that sort of jumped out at us was that we are spending a lot of money every year on out-of-state prisoners, and that if we could find a way to get back home, we could save a big chunk of money there."

The centerpiece of the new approach is bringing 1,300 Alabama inmates about 900 men and 400 women -- now housed in private prisons in Louisiana back home. That change would save the prison system about $10 million -- roughly a third of the shortfall. (It also would involve shifting the role of the Montgomery Pre-Release Center to become a women's facility that would house about 300 inmates.)

The department also plans to reinvigorate its work release program in which inmates are allowed to work in the community, generating some income for themselves but also income for the Corrections Department. By increasing the number of inmates on work release to about 3,000, the department hopes to net about another $9.2 million.

The rest of the shortfall would be made up by a combination of cost-cutting and revenue increases from such things as charging other state agencies for the use of prison labor.

The system would still sell about 6,000 acres of unused prison lands, and get out of the money-losing prison farming operations. But most of the income from that sale -- about $20 million -- would go toward reducing the department's huge backlog of deferred maintenance -- currently estimated at about $90 million -- on its aging prisons.

From a fiscal standpoint, these changes make sense because the savings from removing inmates from costly out-of-state prisons and the income from increasing the work release program would not only help next year's budget, but budgets in future years as well.

But most of the changes make sense from a corrections standpoint, too. Work release, if done right, will better help prepare inmates to succeed in the real world, and possibly help to keep them from returning to a life of crime and to prison. Bringing inmates back to Alabama will make it easier for them to maintain contact with their families and to receive other support that could help them once they are released.

While the Corrections Department now has a much better approach to meeting the budget shortfall for next year, no one should kid themselves that the agency's funding problems are going to go away. Alabama dramatically underfunds its prison system; its estimated spending of $13,500 per inmate per year is almost half the national average. It has shoehorned twice the number of inmates into aging prisons than they were designed to hold, and its ratio of corrections officers to inmates is among the lowest in the nation. That is an explosive combination.

Alabama judges, governors and legislators have to realize that they cannot continue forever to embrace locking up a much larger percentage of its population than most states while refusing to adequately fund prisons.