A worsening of these problems is one of the likely results if the package is not approved by the voters. The implications of this situation alone are something Alabamians need to weigh very seriously as they make this decision.

Alabama's prisons are horrifically overcrowded, with an inmate population of around 28,000 in a system with facilities designed for about half that many. The state faces court orders to deal with overcrowding. That should not surprise anyone; the state is obligated to maintain constitutional conditions in its prisons and has failed to do so.

The courts have been patient, even indulgent, but that will not last forever. If the state cannot achieve and maintain constitutionally acceptable conditions in prisons, at some point it is going to be ordered to release prisoners. Outside of the prisoners themselves, it's hard to believe anybody wants to see that.

There is a tendency among some Alabamians to dismiss prison issues as mere grumbling from convicts who deserve to be where they are. The issues are more complex than that.

This is not about comfort for inmates, not about the "coddling" routinely decried by critics who have never seen the inside of an Alabama prison. At the core, it is a public safety issue. Alabamians should be confident that those who commit crimes that warrant incarceration can in fact remain incarcerated in facilities that meet constitutional standards and that have adequate personnel to supervise inmates.

The looming budget shortfall of $675 million would have enormous consequences for the Department of Corrections. This is an agency that desperately needs to spend more money, not less; that desperately needs to expand facilities, programs and staffing to do its important job.

Even at the current funding level, the department has an alarmingly inadequate number of corrections officers and numerous situations in which one or two officers are asked to supervise several hundred inmates. Even at the current funding level, the system has twice as many inmates as the capacity of its prisons was meant to handle. Even at the current funding level, the department is having to resort to shipping inmates to out-of-state prisons to try to ease the overcrowding and keep close enough to compliance with the court orders to prevent harsher action against it.

A cut in funding, especially a big cut like this one, would make a bad situation dramatically worse.

No one should think the prison situation is curable with more thrift, with just some more belt-tightening. Alabama has the lowest per-inmate cost of any prison system in the country already.

For years, Alabama has tried to be tough on crime without paying for it. That approach is not sustainable. The time has come, indeed is years past, to make some serious investments in the prison system to meet the constitutional and public safety concerns that have reached such grim levels.

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