Safe and Strong Communities
One quarter of the entire state budget is going to prison contractors, to building more and more prisons, instead of going to all the other needs of the people of Alabama. Our current legislature is responsible for the mess, and if you haven’t seen the documentary “The Alabama Solution”, you should. You will be as angry as I am about this after you watch it. This must change!
Alabama will spend almost $950 million this year to operate its prisons. That’s about 25% of the entire General Fund. Worse, Alabama expects to spend over $2.5 billion in the next couple of years in capital expenditures. The $1.25 billion that Alabama is going to spend for the new Elmore prison is more than the entire multi-year capital incarceration budgets of Ireland, Norway, Denmark and Finland combined, each of which has about the same population as Alabama. It’s obscene, it’s immoral - and it’s unnecessary.
Rather than spending billions on prisons, we should be taking real steps to reduce our incarceration rate:
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Non-violent offenders, and those who would have completed their sentence by now under current guidelines, should be released if they are not a danger to the community.
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Sick and elderly prisoners are not receiving the basic care they need, and at the same time they are costing the state enormous sums of money while incarcerated. Sick elderly prisoners cost the state up to nine times more to look after in prison than they would if released.
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Alabama imprisons about 50% more people than the average American state: the fifth highest in America, about three times higher than Russia and five times higher than China.
Imagine what this money could do for drug treatment, for youth intervention, for mental health, for local law enforcement. Instead we keep locking up more and more people, and now 25 cents of every tax dollar in the General Fund goes for prisons. This must change. Again, it's not only foolish; it's wasting your tax dollars (often putting them directly into the pockets of corporations) - yet my opponent won't even mention it for fear of upsetting the special interests. Did you know that Alabama gets half a billion dollars of general fund revenue from your insurance premiums? What if we reduced this insane, inefficient prison spending and returned all that money to the taxpayer? Why is no-one talking about that?