Overall, the prison population has dropped by 848 inmates since the second parole board got to work in December, according to the Department of Corrections.

Although several thousand nonviolent prisoners have been freed through parole over the past year, more drug and property offenders continue to flow into the prisons, many of them serving long sentences under the state's sentencing laws for drug offenders and habitual nonviolent offenders.

Now paroles of people convicted of nonviolent drug and property crimes have dropped off to about 35 a week, down from a weekly average of about 150 when the special hearings began.

"It means we've gone though all the nonviolent cases, and the ones they're looking at are ones that have already been turned down or haven't served much time," said Cynthia Dillard, assistant executive director of the board.

Last week, the board held 158 hearings and granted parole to 20 prisoners, Dillard said. The board has reduced the days it holds hearings from four to three.

Double capacity:

Alabama's prisons still are crowded, though. The prison population in July stood at 26,496, down by 1,640 since July a year ago but higher than it was a few months ago, according to Department of Corrections records.

"We still have pretty much double the design capacity," said Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett.

"At this point, there is no easy solution. We are working on some alternative plans, but we also have to see where the population goes. It's still a wait-and-see thing," he said.

Gov. Bob Riley proposed the second board to head off a federal takeover of state prisons after voters rejected his $1.2 billion tax plan in September.

The Legislature appropriated $7.38 million extra for the parole board's budget, and additional officers were hired to oversee the new releases.

Various state officials estimated that 5,000 to 7,000 prisoners would be released through "special dockets" for nonviolent offenders.

The special dockets began in April 2003, and the second board was appointed in December. About 4,000 inmates have been paroled through that effort in the past 16 months.

"The special docket was never thought to be the solution, the silver bullet," said Riley spokesman Jeff Emerson. "The problems are still there, but we have made some progress. If this had not happened, the population would be more than it is today."

Attorney General Troy King this month began reviewing parole statistics in an effort to determine what types of convicts are getting out of prison.

King said he wants to know the numbers of violent versus nonviolent offenders who have gotten out in recent months and whether the parole board's backlog on hearings for violent offenders has been reduced.

For years, prisoners convicted of violent crimes have had to wait more than a year for a parole hearing because of delays in the process and difficulty finding victims of old crimes, who must be notified under state law.

"There are a lot of things I've called on the board publicly to act more carefully on," King said.

He's especially interested in a report detailing the backgrounds of violent offenders who've been paroled.

Shower discipline:

Hardest hit by the packed prisons are the prisoners themselves.

This summer at Donaldson Correctional Facility in western Jefferson County, inmates were given a strict shower schedule and warned that if they violated it, they would face unspecified disciplinary action. The schedule was developed to avoid overloading the prison's sewer system, according to a memo issued June 28 to inmates.

Donaldson and St. Clair Correctional Facility have been breaking federal clean water laws for several months because their sewer systems are overloaded and periodically dump raw sewage into neighboring creeks.

The prisons house about twice the number of inmates as they were designed for, and the wastewater treatment facilities cannot handle the amount of waste generated by so many extra bodies, prison officials have said.

Donaldson has 1,586 prisoners in space designed for 992.