The Alabama Sentencing Commission went to the heart of the state's prison crisis with this sentence in its report to the Legislature: "In a prison system defined by limited resources, the question of who occupies a prison bed becomes critical."

Alabama's prison facilities are bursting at the seams. Maximum security prisons house 175 percent of the prisoners they were designed to house, and the medium security prisons are at 210 percent of design capacity. That crowding, coupled with far too few corrections officers, is a formula for disaster.

Even if Alabama wanted to keep shoehorning inmates into space not designed for them, the courts won't allow it.

One way to help address this crowding is to make certain that every prisoner using prison bed space needs to be there. That means prioritizing which convicted offenders go to prison, and developing alternative punishments for the others.

The Sentencing Commission defined a violent offender as someone convicted of a violent or sex crime, as well as burglary and drug trafficking. Also placed in the violent category were inmates whose current crime was nonviolent but who had committed an earlier violent or sex crime.

Using that definition, the commission identified 39 percent of the current prison population as nonviolent.

The commission also identified a recent trend toward placing more nonviolent inmates into traditional prisons. "Just four years ago 56 percent of our admissions to prisons were nonviolent offenders, compared to 67 percent today," the report said.

The commission found that about 5 percent of the state's inmate population in traditional prison settings could be diverted to other programs immediately -- if those programs exist.

The commission defined "immediately divertible" as nonviolent inmates classified as minimum or medium risk, with a three-year sentence or less, who have no history of escape attempts or discipline problems, and who are not already in a work release program.

But identifying divertible inmates is the easy part. The tougher issue is where they would be diverted to.

Currently only 21 of Alabama's 67 counties have active community corrections programs. (Montgomery is the only one in south central Alabama.) And only 16 counties have drug court programs that provide oversight of alternative sentences for drug offenders.

If the state is going to be smarter in how it spends its limited funds to warehouse prisoners, judges must have more alternatives than they currently have for punishing nonviolent offenders.

Yesterday: The extent of the problem.

Tomorrow: The Sentencing Commission offers two short-term and two long-term solutions to the problem of prison overcrowding.

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