Issue Position: Prisons

Issue Position

Alabama has 180% capacity in its prison system. If we don't take action soon, a federal court may step in and force us to begin releasing prisoners. Already, prisoners are released back into the population after serving only a small portion of their sentence. Unfortunately, Alabama is on a tight budget and does not have the nearly one billion dollars it would take to build four new prisons. I do not support building new prisons, but I do have some creative ideas to solve our prison problem.

1 -- Fund mental health. Many of the prisoners we have today might not have committed a crime at all if their mental conditions had been treated a year ago. I will allocate additional budget dollars to the Alabama Department of Mental Health.

2 -- Support laws to shorten appeal times, similar to the one that passed in the 2017 Legislative Session. I do not support reducing the number of appeals available to inmates on death row, because everyone deserves every chance to prove their innocence. However, there is no reason an appeal should take 5-10 years.

3 -- Teach prisoners a trade. When prisoners are released, those who have a marketable skill are likely to use it. I support trade programs for non-violent offenders so they can reestablish themselves once they have repaid their debt to society. I also think prisoners should be offered a factory-type job while in prison so they can pay for part of their expenses and save some money for when they leave the system. That way they walk out the door with some money and are less likely to commit a crime as they search for employment.

4 -- Allow felonies to drop off a person's record. For non-violent offenders, I support removing the felony from their record after some period of time. If a 19-year-old is caught smoking marijuana, he or she will live with a felony on their record for the rest of his or her life, making honest employment difficult to obtain. It would be to our benefit to allow these rehabilitated people to re-enter the workforce and become productive citizens. I believe this would lower the recidivism rate.

5 -- Open more drug courts. We have reduced our prison population from 27,000 to 24,000 due in large part to drug courts. We can potentially drop to as low as 20,000 by using this idea.

6 -- Rent beds from county jails. For instance, Limestone County has a 230-bed jail but only 115 inmates. The state should contract with these jails and immediately shift prisoners to them. In fact, 1500 beds are being offered at $30/day by partially empty jails statewide. It costs Alabama $48/day per prisoner.

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