03/15/04

KYLE WINGFIELD
The Associated Press

ELMORE - Last summer, Lyndahl Sale was one 1,423 male inmates shipped from overcrowded Alabama prisons to a private lockup in Mississippi.

While the inmates were gone, Alabama officials worked to fix the overcrowding problem. They increased paroles for nonviolent offenders. They moved low-security prisoners to work-release centers and transferred work-release prisoners to community corrections centers. They found alternative sentences for 1,700 inmates otherwise headed for prison.

The result?

"It hasn't changed at all," said Sale, an inmate at Elmore Correctional Facility.

"Just like (before), I can lay in my bed, and without getting up, without stretching very far, I can reach over and touch the man in the bed next to me," said Sale, 38, who's served almost 15 years of a life sentence for murder. "If you stand up to open your locker box that's under your bed, you have to be careful, or you're practically sitting on a man if he happens to be in the bed next to you."

Alabama's prison system didn't become crowded overnight, and Prison Commissioner Donal Campbell knows better than to expect the problems to disappear so quickly.

"There's not a whole lot I can do to reduce the population," Campbell said. "We may find other beds. Hopefully, at some point, I'll be able to work with the counties and have funding appropriated to rent beds from the counties. But that's not going to be significant."

The only significant solution would be a financial windfall: A pipe dream in a state struggling with revenue shortfalls in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

With that in mind, Campbell, the inmates and the head of a prison advocacy group offered less costly suggestions. Among them:

Parole violations. Change the punishment for technical parole violators. Increased paroles are under way, and with them a likely spike in parole violators. Dealing with re-offenders is one downside of stepping up paroles, but officials could ease the problem by coming up with a new way to deal with parolees who violate a condition of parole but do not commit a new crime.

Such violations include breaking curfew or crossing state lines without permission.

Campbell said the state needs a program for technical parole violators "where we would develop criteria for a certain violator, they would be required to go through a program, whether it be six months or seven months or four months or what have you, and then they would be re-paroled by the board ... rather than bringing them back into the system, taking up an expensive bed that we so desperately need for violent offenders."

The parole board is open to some changes, provided they don't threaten public safety, said Cynthia Dillard, assistant director of Pardons and Paroles. Technical violations often are precursors to repeat offenses, she said.

Closer looks. Let the parole board get to know inmates better. When 46-year-old Sylvester Turner is up for parole in July, the only people who will meet with the parole board are his family, friends and anyone who wants to protest his release.

"I think that one of the things that the parole board probably needs to (do) ... is come to the institution and set up a conference with the inmate that's coming up for parole," said Turner, midway through a 20-year sentence for manslaughter and attempted murder.

"But also have the officer there he works up under, that sees him every day, for really what he does every day, and get a report from him."

Simply arranging for prisoners and parole members to be in the same room is the biggest obstacle to accomplishing those changes, Dillard said. The board has heard 7,564 cases since April 6, 2003, when Gov. Bob Riley gave the board the funding to quicken its pace.

As for bringing parole board members to the prisons, Dillard said, "We hold so many hearings, there's no way the board could visit all the institutions and hold the hearings they do."

Community time. Expand community corrections. Campbell already has moved about 2,000 inmates to community-based programs where they work jobs and in many cases even live at home.

Shifting more inmates from state prisons to community corrections could save the state space and money in some less obvious ways, said Lucia Penland, director of the Alabama Prison Project.

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