THE ISSUE: Bringing back inmates from out of state and selling unneeded land may get the Department of Corrections through next year.

But it's no long-term fix for inadequate funding.

Necessity is the mother of invention. And Alabama prison officials are having to become increasingly inventive to make meager ends meet.

The state Department of Corrections now houses more than 29,000 inmates, a record number, despite attempts in recent years to parole more nonviolent criminals. The Legislature, though, doesn't even come close to funding the department adequately.

For 2008, the Legislature budgeted less than $350 million to the prison system. But prisons needed $401.70 million. Even after factoring in money the Department of Corrections earns for itself from programs such as work release, prison officials projected a shortfall of $31 million.

That left prison Commissioner Richard Allen and his staff scrambling for creative ways to plug the funding holes. What they came up with, while not solving the bigger problem of the state chronically underfunding prisons, makes sense.

Under the plan, Corrections will bring back to the state the 1,300 Alabama inmates in private prisons in Louisiana. That would save the prison system nearly $10 million, officials estimate.

To make room for the returning inmates, the prison system would increase the number of inmates in work-release programs, convert a Montgomery pre-release center into a women's lockup, open a pre-release center in Limestone and a new therapeutic education center in Columbiana, and start a supervised re-entry program in Childersburg.

These programs come with the added benefit of helping get inmates better ready for life after prison, which should reduce the number of repeat offenders.

Increasing the number of inmates in work release, from 1,830 to more than 3,300, should earn the prison system an additional $9.2 million a year, officials say. Then there's what Allen calls revenue enhancers - money earned from timber, livestock and equipment sales; increases in what prisons earn from commissaries and vending; and charging agencies that use inmate labor, such as road cleanup crews, for the labor.

All told, the added revenues and savings come to $26.7 million, corrections officials predict.

But those changes are only part of the plan. To pay for the work needed at the facilities to make way for the moves and to make repairs and upgrades at other prison facilities, the prison system plans to sell about 6,000 acres, mostly ranch and farm lands, the system no longer needs. Auctioning off those lands should bring in about $20 million.

The prison system's plans should get it through another year. Long term, Allen hopes the transition programs, recently enacted changes in sentencing laws and more use of community corrections programs will curb and eventually reverse the growth in the state prison population.

Taxpayers should hope he's right.

But the Legislature must do better than hope. It needs to adequately fund the prison system. The $13,500 a year per inmate Alabama spends is only a little more than half the national average. That's not a bargain, that's foolish and dangerous, considering that our prisons house twice as many inmates as they were designed to hold and are short hundreds of corrections officers. The situation puts public safety at risk.