Attorney tells task force poor conditions for male population invite major U.S. action
 
An attorney whose firm has successfully sued the Alabama prison system told a task force Tuesday conditions are ripe for significant federal lawsuits at most every state prison.

Rhonda Brownstein, legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center whose cases ended prison chain gangs and hitching posts, compared the crowding, heat and violence at Alabama's male prisons with conditions at Tutwiler Prison for Women in 2003. That's when U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson, prompted by a lawsuit, toured the women's lockup, called it a ticking time bomb and ordered improvements. As a result, the Alabama Department of Corrections spends more than $3 million a year housing women in a private prison in Louisiana.

"That lawsuit, in my opinion, can be brought at pretty much any of the major prisons in Alabama," Brownstein told the Prison Overcrowding Task Force, a diverse group of people appointed by Gov. Bob Riley to recommend improvements.

In recent visits to prisons, Brownstein has learned that the level of violence is up - in part because there are not enough officers to thwart problems such as inmate-on-inmate thefts, which spark fights. Hepatitis C, tuberculosis and staph infections have increased. And some of the prisons don't pass fire inspections. "Holman does not have a fire alarm system," she said. "That's another major lawsuit waiting to happen, and tragedy."

Earlier Tuesday, the task force heard from DOC officials who repeated a message they have passed along to lawmakers for several years: Alabama prisons are dilapidated and understaffed. Desperate measures are needed to manage the double-capacity prisons. And legal costs to defend the state against lawsuits over unconstitutional conditions have mounted.

Corrections Commissioner Donal Campbell said he was considering spending $200,000 on an infrastructure study just to get a handle on the roofing, electrical and plumbing problems.

He estimated that it would take $1 billion to build the prisons required to handle the state's prison population by 2012.

When task force members wanted to know the legal costs from prison crowding and other problems, DOC Legal Director Kim Thomas said he could not provide even an accurate estimate Tuesday. "There are so many costs associated with the troubles and problems we are experiencing there's no way you can tabulate the costs," Thomas said.

Alabama currently incarcerates 27,732 people, up from 26,465 a year ago. A second parole board reduced the numbers of non-violent offenders in 2004, but parole rates have since declined.

Further, most of the offenders who were paroled lived in work release centers where they paid 40 percent of their salaries to the state. So rather than save the DOC a lot of money, the paroles have left the agency without $10 million in work-release income, Campbell said.

The dour situation could be addressed if the state would take some risks, as other states have done, Brownstein said. She suggested relaxing the work-release conditions so more inmates would be eligible, filling empty work-release beds, and paroling higher-risk people.

"If you all decide that nobody's willing to do anything but build more prisons, we're going to keep going down the same road," she said.

Alabama spends about $12,000 per inmate per year, an increase over previous years, but still the least of any state. The state also locks up more people per capita than all but five other states.

Brownstein prefaced her comments be saying she was not an expert on the prisons, and some of the DOC officials were. But she is familiar with the 8th Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

In the Tutwiler lawsuit, which was brought by the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, attorneys for the state tried to argue that a lack of funds prevented them from improving conditions, but Judge Thompson ruled that financial considerations are not a defense.

Task Force member Miriam Shehane, a victim's rights advocate, suggested that policy makers could meet resistance if they implement Brownstein's suggestions.

"As far as taking risks, and you mentioned putting more violent offenders on work release, victims will fight that tooth and nail," she said.

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