By Mike Cason
al.com
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said Thursday the state is making progress toward fixing a long-time severe shortage of security staff.
Hamm said the ADOC had 473 graduates from the correctional officer training academy in 2025, a record high number.
Hamm said the ADOC has a security staff of about 2,300 employees. He said staffing has improved since substantial pay raises in 2023. The raises boosted starting pay to more than $50,000, with the potential to earn $15,000 to $20,000 more within a couple of years.
Hamm, speaking to legislators, showed photos of Gov. Kay Ivey posing with several classes of correctional officer graduates at the governor’s mansion.
“I think that is a significant indicator for support for the Department of Corrections and these men and women that do the job every day,” Hamm said. “We set a record in 2025. We’ve graduated more correctional officers from the corrections academy than any time in history.”
The shortage of correctional officers has been documented for years.
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ordered the ADOC to increase staffing as part of a lawsuit over mental health and medical care for inmates. The case, filed in 2014, is ongoing.
Hamm said the ADOC still needs to add about 1,800 officers to meet the court order.
“When we came in, staffing was the number one issue,” said Hamm, appointed commissioner by Gov. Kay Ivey four years ago. “It’s still an issue that we work on every day.”
Thompson cited a shortage of correctional officers as an underlying cause when the judge ruled in 2017 that the prison system failed to provide adequate care for inmates with serious mental illnesses.
The Department of Justice also cited the shortage of officers in its December 2020 lawsuit that said Alabama fails to protect inmates from violence and sexual abuse and fails to provide safe and sanitary conditions.
Lawmakers, who are holding hearings to prepare to pass budgets for next year, asked Hamm whether the state’s new 4,000-bed prison under construction in Elmore County, the Governor Kay Ivey Correctional Complex , would allow ADOC to monitor inmates with fewer officers because of technology.
It will be the first prison Alabama has built since the mid-1990s.
“We look at technology all the time to help us be more efficient and do our jobs a little bit more efficiently,” Hamm said. “But the courts are not going to look at just technology in supervising inmates. It’s not going to totally take the place of the human body having interaction with an inmate.”
The new prison, expected to cost about $1.25 billion, is scheduled for completion in October.
It will include facilities for medical and mental health care and for vocational education.
Hamm said about 80% of the housing in the prison will be cells, rather than the dormitory-style layout of Alabama’s older prisons, which can hundreds of inmates in a single, large room.
A documentary released last year, “The Alabama Solution,” brought new attention to the problems in Alabama prisons.
Much of the documentary, which has been nominated for an Academy Award, was gathered from inmates and videos they recorded on contraband cellphones.
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