The Tuscaloosa News on prison improvements:

Slowly, bit by bit, Alabama is eliminating some of the more barbaric elements of its system of capital punishment.

Lethal injection has supplanted the electric chair. Inmates with mental retardation are no longer summarily executed. Efforts continue to provide legal representation for condemned individuals throughout their stay in the legal system.

A smaller step toward humane treatment of inmates awaiting execution came recently when the state grudgingly allowed small electric fans in death row cells at Holman Prison.

In the summer, heat and humidity are so severe in unventilated cells that inmates' lives were at risk. Yet until the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit, the state was content to let the inmates bake.

In the wake of the lawsuit, the state has acquired 170 fans to make conditions more bearable.

It had argued that the woefully underfunded prison system could not afford the fans, and it would not allow inmates to buy them. But after Bryan Stevenson, who handles death row cases as director of the Alabama Capital Representation Resource Bureau, agreed to cover the bill for $2,635, the state allowed the fans in the death row cells.

It's a welcome step, even though it was a small one, taken unwillingly.

Many of those on death row committed unspeakably inhumane crimes. Yet treating them in kind as they await their executions is not the mark of a civilized society.

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