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 $900 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: 

 

• 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. 

 

• 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. 

 

• 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, even 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.