The Anniston Star
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — For years, state Sen. Cam Ward told everyone — reporters, fellow politicians, state agency heads — that Alabama couldn’t build its way out of its prison overcrowding problem.
Ward, a Republican from Alabaster, led his fellow lawmakers last year through a sweeping overhaul of the state’s corrections systems. They reduced penalties for small-time drug offenders; the state committed to hiring more than 100 new parole officers; parole violators would get “quick dips” into county jails rather than a ticket back to state prison.
Lowering the inmate population, Ward said, was the only way to reduce overcrowding in Alabama’s prisons, where more than 24,000 live in prisons built for 13,000 decades ago. There wasn’t time or money, he said, to build the institutions for the extra prisoners.
This week, Ward expects to file a bill that would do just that — clearing the way for $800 million in new prison construction.
“The fact that we spend millions of dollars per year doing repairs to structures that were built in the ’40s and ’50s tells you you’re going to have to do some construction,” Ward said.
Ward’s bill would be the first step toward a prison reform plan Gov. Robert Bentley in this year’s state-of-the-state address. The governor wants to close more than a dozen of the state’s correctional institutions, including the infamous Tutwiler Prison for Women, excoriated by the Justice Department for a history of rape and sexual harassment. In their place, the state would build in their place a new women’s prison and three massive men’s facilities.
They won’t be completed for years. And prison officials acknowledge that the men’s mega-prisons will be overcrowded from the start — each built for 4,000 people, but likely to hold 5,000 inmates initially. But advocates of the plan claim they can complete the project without asking for more money from the already strained state budget.
“I was skeptical at first,” Ward acknowledges. “When they showed it to me, and they showed me the costs, I said yeah, it does work.”
Department of Corrections officials have described the proposed new prisons as “state-of-the-art,” but so far there’s little detail on what each of them would look like. Asked for details on the plan, Ward pulled out a sheet of paper and drew a circle, divided into slices like a pizza, with a fat dot in the center.
Each slice is a medium or maximum security wing, like a small prison unto itself. The dot is an administrative building with a single cafeteria and infirmary, which the inmates can use in shifts.
The prisons wouldn’t really be circular, but it’s the dot at the center that matters. Four dots — four cafeterias and infirmaries and libraries — are cheaper to run than fourteen. Moving unruly inmates from medium to maximum security would mean moving them from one section of the prison to another, rather than driving across the state. In current prisons, Ward said, just moving some inmates to the cafeteria is a complicated and time-consuming task.
“Look at St. Clair,” Ward said, sketching out a maze of buildings and fences representing the prison near Springville. “Here’s the main yard. What they did over time, as they tried to fix it and make it better, they put housing here, housing here, housing here.”
The jumble of buildings, Ward said, makes inmates hard to monitor. State prisons commissioner Jefferson Dunn offers a similar description of the state’s current prisons.
“Most of our facilities are designed on a central corridor with dorms down the middle,” Dunn said. More corridors were added when prisons expanded.
But prisons built to even the most basic modern specifications, Dunn said, would be far better. They’d have cameras that allow guards to monitor more than one area at once. Guards would be able to see all areas of the prison from a few secure areas — without the blind spots and corners that make extra work for anyone charged with watching an inmate.
“If you’re in one of our observation posts, you may not be able to see all the way back,” he said. “If you want to see some areas, you have to get out and patrol.”
Crucially, the new buildings would have secure classroom spaces.
Alabama’s prison system does teach trades such as masonry, plumbing and general construction, classes designed to get inmates ready for a crime-free life after prison.
Still, Dunn said, the state isn’t offering as many classes as it could. Getting teachers into and out of the buildings safely is a major security operation in Alabama’s aging, understaffed prisons.
“Right now, one of the things that keeps us from offering these programs is not necessarily the money to run the programs,” he said. “It’s the space, the capability and the security for those programs.”
Dunn, a former Air Force colonel, toured every prison in the state last year after he was appointed to run the prison system. He found chapels — the one place in any prison that’s set up for a classroom environment — were booked with back-to-back classes.
“We have some facilities in which there is no classroom space, and so the class is offered in the dorm, around folks sitting on their beds,” Dunn said. “It’s not the ideal learning environment.”
New prisons would have the classroom function built in, he said. Prisons would ideally be placed in areas where released inmates could find jobs on release.
“One of our best capabilities for training welders is at a facility in northern Alabama,” he said. “But the vast majority of our welding jobs are in south Alabama, so it’s a little bit of a mismatch.”
That would seem to imply a prison near Mobile and its shipyards, but Dunn said the department is just beginning the process of choosing sites.
Even advocates of a tough-on-crime approach see merits in the closure of the older prisons.
“I’m particularly glad to see them closing Tutwiler, which isn’t a fit place for humans to live,” said Janette Grantham, director of Victims of Crime and Leniency, a victims’ rights group. Still, Grantham has questions.
“Why this year? Why didn’t they try this before?” she asked.
In last year’s budget, the Department of Corrections got roughly the same amount of basic operating money that the Legislature doled out the year before — despite hair-raising stories from prison officials about cells with locks that didn’t work.
Asked about those stories last week, Dunn said prisoners weren’t able to slip out of cells at St. Clair Correctional Facility, the prison with the problem locks. No one got stuck in a cell either. Years of wear and tear, though, put the locks in a danger zone that meant they needed replacing soon. Doing that, he said, meant closing a whole cell block and moving inmates elsewhere temporarily.
It’s what Dunn calls “deferred maintenance”: fix-it costs that a newer prison might not have. Dunn said deferred maintenance costs up to $90 million per year. Debt service on a $800 million bond issue would cost only about $50 million per year, advocates of the prison plan say. In theory, the new prisons would pay for themselves.
But some sheriffs — who’ve complained that their jails are taking on too many state inmates — are skeptical, citing logistical problems with the plan.
“I’d like to know how they’re going to hire the staff they need,” said Calhoun County Sheriff Larry Amerson. Prison work is stressful and generally the pay is low, he said, making positions hard to fill.
Dunn said the new prisons would be located near existing facilities to keep the same staff without forcing them to move or make long commutes. Cameras and better building design, he said, could cut down on the number of guards needed to watch the same population of inmates.
But even a self-funding construction program could be hard to get past legislators. Dunn said he needs $17 million increase this year just to keep up services at the existing prisons. Senate leaders say they expect to begin debate on a General Fund budget as early as this week. Bentley has asked for $1.9 billion to run state agencies; senators say they’ll be lucky to get the same $1.75 million as last year. Budget chairman Sen. Trip Pittman, R-Daphne, last week compared the situation to the ill-fated Apollo 13 moon mission.
Ward believes his bill, a three- or four-page document that will put out a request for construction proposals, can survive the budget battle. It won’t even come with a fiscal note — the cost-benefit analysis that often accompanies a bill — because Corrections is expected to pay off the bond from its own budget.
“You are going to have to build anyway,” he said. “But the overriding question was, ‘how do you pay for it?’”
Copyright 2016 The Anniston Star