MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) -- With a court hearing Tuesday in the long-running suit to remove state inmates more promptly from county jails, Alabama's new prisons chief says he can eliminate the backlog by summer's end and, unlike commissioners before him, keep it that way.

After months of missed deadlines and the threat of jail time for the department's head, Richard Allen says he'll be able to beat Circuit Judge William Shashy's Sept. 5 deadline to clear the entire backlog. It has swelled to as high as 2,800 and dipped to zero since the Alabama Association of County Commissions first filed suit in 1992; it was slightly under 600 when Shashy ruled.

"We're moving the prisoners out, we're doing everything we can within our resources and probably ... in August, before the summer's out, I think we'll be down to zero," Allen said. "We did exactly what we said we were going to do."

Allen is scheduled to report progress he's made so far at the Tuesday status hearing before Shashy. The commissioner says the backlog is down to 440, just 40 shy of Shashy's order that it be lowered from 585 to 400 by June 20.

Allen inherited the backlog and a contempt charge when he took over from Donal Campbell on March 1. Like Campbell before him, Allen faces possible jail time for failing to move all state prisoners from county jails within 30 days, a number stipulated in a 1994 court decree.

Shashy had originally set a May 31 deadline for the reduction to 400, but he stayed the order, which also called for the backlog to be reduced to 200 by June 27 and entirely cleared by Sept. 5.

Allen said he'll bring Shashy up to speed on several developments Tuesday, including the finalization of a contract with Emerald Correctional Management of Shreveport, La., to house 600 of Alabama's inmates in that state.

Emerald will house the inmates for $26.75 each per day - $1.25 cheaper than their original bid of $28, Allen said.

Two minimum-security locations, one in Montgomery and the other in Bullock County, have been converted to medium security facilities, creating 530 new medium security beds, Allen said. He said about 65 inmates have already moved into the Montgomery location.

Those developments, plus new sentencing guidelines that will tighten possible sentence ranges for drug crimes and nonviolent offenses, will be key to keeping the backlog at a minimum, Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett said.

"One of the myriad of problems that Commissioner Allen or whoever is in the position has is that we have very little control over those who come to us. The problem is essentially created by sentencing laws which the Department of Corrections has no control over," he said. "DOC is helpless in and of ourselves alone to solve this."

Corbett said the backlog's most recent high was 1,600 in 2003, but it was lowered to zero that year. He said the backlog remained clear for more than a year before it began rising again in 2005, peaking at 825 in December.

Sonny Brasfield, assistant director of the Alabama Association of County Commissions, agrees that prisons are overcrowded, but says it's simply not a problem the already stressed jails should have to deal with.

He said amendments made to the 1994 order over the years have allowed sheriffs to send more inmates to the prisons instead of waiting for them to be picked up, but inmates are sometimes refused at the prisons.

"There's nothing in the law that allows them to do that, to say, 'We're sorry, we're full, there's no room in the inn.' What would happen if the sheriffs were to say, 'We can't arrest anybody this week, my jail is full?'," Brasfield said.

"The counties don't have the ability to stop the flow of inmates and the department has asserted they can do it administratively by backing the prisoners up in the jails."

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