Campbell has been forced into some short-term measures, such as sending inmates to out-of-state prisons, in order to ease, albeit temporarily, the severe overcrowding in the system. This has kept federal court intervention at bay, at least for the moment.

But Campbell acknowledges the harsh reality that the state is really just spinning its wheels without major reform of sentencing. As long as we have the laws we have today, its not going to change, he said.

It's not. It can't. Alabama has seen its prison population explode from about 5,500 inmates 20 years ago to more than 28,000 today. That's more than twice the number of inmates the facilities of the Department of Corrections are built to handle.Those inmate numbers might make sense if there were five times the crime of 20 years ago, but there isn't. Instead, the overcrowding is largely the result of a flawed sentencing structure that, simply put, sends too many people to prison who could and should be sentenced to alternative programs that are less expensive and more productive.

We've gotten ourselves in this state in a situation that solutions to our problems are going to be more expensive than they would have been if we had attacked the problem on the front end, Campbell said.

That is the unfortunate legacy of years of supposedly tough-on-crime measures that historically have been popular with politicians and with voters. It leaves Campbell in a tough spot in which the system needs more prison space for the inmates it has now, but also needs reform of the sentencing structure to send more inmates into alternative programs in the future.

Campbell favors community corrections programs as an alternative. These programs allow nonviolent offenders to remain in or near their communities while working to pay for the costs of their incarceration and make restitution to the victims of their crimes. Why put someone like this in a penitentiary?

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