This has been a problem off and on -- mostly on -- for years. Alabama's prison system now has about 27,000 inmates. Its facilities were designed for about half that number.

This results in dangerous overcrowding in the prisons, which creates enormous danger for inmates, prison personnel and, potentially, the public. But the impact doesn't stop there, as the backlog of state inmates in county jails shows.

A court order allows the state to keep individuals sentenced to the custody of the Department of Corrections in county jails for 30 days before moving them to a state facility. That alone is a considerable burden on counties, given that the state compensates -- hardly the word -- the counties at a ridiculous $1.75 per day per inmate. The problem is only exacerbated when inmates remain in county jails for even longer periods, which is common.

The Associated Press reported this week that there were 1,299 inmates in county jails awaiting transfer to state prisons, more than 800 of whom had been in county jails for more than 30 days.

Baldwin County offers the worst example of the problem, with an inmate backlog of 96 prisoners this month, the AP reported. On Dec. 1 -- just that one day -- these inmates cost the county $2,688. At $1.75 per inmate per day, the state's payment to the county for that day comes to $168. That is indefensible.

At the core of the problem is a sentencing structure that simply sends too many people to prison for offenses that do not warrant incarceration. Brian Corbett, spokesman for the Department of Corrections, told the AP that the prison system took in 660 inmates from county jails between Nov. 10 and Dec. 2. However, the net reduction in the inmate backlog was just 28. No digits are missing; the figure is 28.

Under the current arrangement, the problem is intractable. As long as inmates keep flowing in such numbers into an already hazardously overcrowded system, the backlog in the county jails will persist. Counties will continue getting hit with an unfair financial burden.

At least in theory, the state could build several more prisons and create the space to house all its inmates. That's one way to address the issue, but it surely is not the best way, even if the state could somehow come up with the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to build and staff a string of new prisons.

The far better approach is broad-based sentencing reform that sends to a penitentiary the criminal who needs to be in one, but sends the nonviolent offender to a less costly, community-based alternative to incarceration that allows for meaningful restitution, more effective drug addiction treatment and other beneficial programs that don't work well -- or at all -- in a prison.

That's the wisest longer-term approach, but there is at least one short-term measure that could help alleviate the problem somewhat. For example, not every county jail has a backlog problem as pressing as Baldwin County's. At the start of this month, the AP report noted, seven county jails had no state inmates and several others had only a handful.

Some counties with unused jail space might be willing to hold some state inmates -- if they were reasonably compensated for doing so. Nobody would want to do it at $1.75 a day, but suppose the department could pay something more realistic, something that might actually generate a little net revenue for a county with more jail space than it usually requires. There's certainly precedent for such an arrangement in the department's use of out-of-state private prisons.

The real key, however, lies in sentencing reform. That doesn't mean being soft on crime, but rather smart on crime. Alabama historically has not done that, and our state has paid -- and still pays -- a heavy price for it.

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