By Tim Lockette
The Anniston Star
ANNISTON, Ala. — Prison reform was one of the few state functions that got more money in Alabama’s slim 2016 budget, but much of that money will go to programs that keep inmates outside of prison walls.
“It’s like we’re turning a battleship around,” state Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, leader of the Legislature’s Prison Reform Task Force, said Monday. “I believe at the end of five years, we’ll see a real change in the prison population.”
Most state agencies have been tight-lipped about the potential fallout of Alabama’s $1.75 billion budget for the fiscal year that begins Thursday. Lawmakers bit the bullet and passed $60 million in cigarette taxes to fill a hole in the budget, but still had to cut millions from the state’s General Fund spending.
Only two agencies saw truly significant increases: the Department of Corrections and the Board of Pardons and Paroles. With 32,000 people in some form of state custody — including about 24,000 felons housed in state prisons built for 13,000 — lawmakers earlier this year passed a prison-reform bill designed to ease inmate overcrowding. The original price tag for that reform was about $26 million per year. In the final budget bill, lawmakers set aside $16 million for prison reform.
Almost all of that money will go not to building new prison space, but to getting inmates out and keeping them there. Pardons and Paroles, which was criticized sharply in the past year for granting release to too few inmates, will see its budget increase from $27 million to $38 million — money that will go to hiring new parole and probation officers.
The prison system, which got $394 million for the current year, will get $4.5 million more, all of it targeted for prison reform.
“The $4.5 million is for expansion of the community corrections program,” said Bob Horton, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections.
Community corrections is a probation-like option, available to courts in 45 Alabama counties, that allows some non-violent inmates to serve out their sentences in the community. Some live in work-release facilities, others at home, reporting regularly to prison officials.
“I call it ‘faux prison’ sometimes,” said Steve Green, a Mobile County community corrections officer and president of the Alabama Association for Community Corrections. “But it is a prison sentence. They’re considered inmates. If they go missing, it’s considered an escape.”
Horton said the additional Corrections money will likely be used to expand community corrections programs into counties that don’t already have them. He said it’s also possible that the reform bill, when it goes into effect, could increase the workload for existing community corrections programs.
The prison reform bill creates a new, lesser category of felony, Class D, for small-time burglaries and some drug offenses. People convicted of Class D offenses don’t have to be sent to prison, a change from the requirement for most Class C offenders.
Bill Robison, director of Calhoun County’s community corrections program, said it’s still not clear how many new felons that will send his way.
“I don’t think we know yet,” he said. “We know what the ‘D’s are not going to be, and that’s prison-bound. What we don’t know is how many ‘D’s we’ll have.”
Robison said if the number of people in the community corrections system does increase, the Legislature should set aside more money to offset the cost.
That was a concern, early on, for the Association of County Commissions of Alabama, whose leaders fretted about the numbers of inmates who might wind up in county custody. Mary Pons, counsel for the organization, said the association supports community corrections in principle, but doesn’t want to see counties saddled with a duty they can’t pay for.
“We’re opposed to any kind of unfunded mandate,” Pons said.
Ward, the Alabaster lawmaker, said the shortfall in reform funding isn’t quite as large as it seems. The Class D felony doesn’t go into effect until Jan. 31, he said, and many of the other reforms in the bill won’t start in the first quarter of the fiscal year.
“I think we’re on the right path,” he said. “It’s just going to take longer to get there.”
With $4.5 million set aside for reform projects, the prison system has the same $394 million for daily operating costs that it had last year. Due to inflation, most agencies consider a year-to-year freeze to be the equivalent of a slight cut. Still, the in-prison population has begun a slow decline, with 24,435 inmates in prisons in June of this year, while the population regularly topped 25,000 in recent years.
Horton said state officials were still studying the budget to determine its effects on the day-to-day operations of the prison system.