Long-brewing prison crisis in Alabama

With criminal justice in general, and prisons in particular, there are seldom if ever any easy answers.

Public safety must always be the bottom line. Rehabilitation of salvageable lives is the goal and, not infrequently, a reality. But prisons also exist to punish, and protect society from, the worst of humanity’s moral mutations — murderers and other predators who have forfeited any claim to freedom or even mercy, beyond the most basic standards of a civilized society.

The problem in so many places — Georgia and, to an even worse extent, Alabama among them — is that prison crowding has created conditions that fall far short of even those basic standards.

Politics aggravates the problem, and sometimes can help solve it. The former is most obvious, of course, in years of stiff and sometimes draconian mandatory sentencing laws that left courts no room for discretion and packed nonviolent offenders into already crowded lockups with the worst of the worst. The latter has been evident in recent, if terribly belated, efforts to repair systems years in the breaking.

Two Alabama prison uprisings over the past week are an alarming reminder that time is not an ally.

Gov. Robert Bentley on Tuesday traveled to the Holman Correctional Facility at Atmore, site of the violence. “What we have today in Alabama,” he said during the visit — for which a state trooper tactical team was added to the governor’s usual security detail — “makes it dangerous for not only the inmates, it makes it dangerous also for our guards and our wardens and anybody who is involved in the situation.”

Bentley is a relative newcomer to Alabama’s long history of hellhole prisons. The state’s corrections system was under federal court supervision for years; and less than two years ago the Justice Department released a report of horrific conditions at the Julia Tutwiler women’s prison in Wetumpka, where rampant sexual abuse of inmates (by guards as well as other inmates) and reprisals against those who resisted or reported it have defined the prison culture for decades.

Bentley has proposed a bond issue of up to $800 million to build four new prisons, one of which would replace Tutwiler, where the governor said the state needs to “permanently slam the door shut.”

Holman, aside from last week’s outbreaks, is still a powder keg. There are 17 guards for about 900 prisoners in a prison built almost 50 years ago to hold fewer than 600. Statewide, Alabama’s existing prisons were designed to house slightly more than 13,000 inmates; they are now crammed with almost twice that many.

Bentley knows, as do others in Alabama government, that even with a massive construction program the state can’t build its way out of a decades-old prison dysfunction. Fortunately, that’s not the state’s only approach: A New York Times article on the Alabama corrections crisis credits the state with “some of the country’s most ambitious sentencing program overhauls.”

Those changes are coming too late. And they can’t come too soon.

This story was originally published March 18, 2016 at 2:07 PM with the headline "Long-brewing prison crisis in Alabama."