Alabama has 28,296 people in prison.
We can reduce that number.

Imprisonment is a brutal and costly response to crime, which traumatizes incarcerated people and hurts families and communities. It should be the last option, not the first. Yet Alabama has one of the most overcrowded systems in the country, and in April 2019, the Department of Justice released a report calling the conditions in the men’s state prisons to be so bad that it is “likely unconstitutional.”

JUST LOOK AT THE FACTS:

• In Alabama, the incarcerated population has skyrocketed since 1980, growing five-fold as of 2017. This growth is forcing state-run prisons to operate at 164% capacity, which ranks as the most overcrowded prisons in the country.

• Most of the people in Alabama county jails have never been convicted of a crime — more than 70% are awaiting trial.

• In addition to the rate of incarceration, which ranks third nationally in the rate of people imprisoned, Alabama also has around half of people in Alabama’s prisons serving a sentence of 20 years or more.

• One out of every three Black boys born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can one of every six Latino boys, compared to one of every 17 white boys. At the same time, women are the fastest growing incarcerated population in the United States, and Alabama ranks sixth nationally for the rate of women imprisoned.

• Alabama’s prison system costs taxpayers $478 million of its general fund on corrections in 2016, which is a 126% increase since 1985. This money should be spent building up, not further harming our communities. Investment, not incarceration, is how we improve safety.
  Originally published by the ACLU here

As Governor Ivey recently experienced with the fierce opposition to the building of a new Mobile Bay Bridge, that would have placed additional expenses to the daily commuter in the form of tolls, Governor Ivey is advocating the building of 3 huge private prisons to be built and run by companies which will cost tax payers hundreds of millions of dollars per year, but won’t fix the underlying cause of the overcrowding and mass incarceration.

The violence, rape and sexual assault, the lack of medical, mental and dental health care that has been grossly inadequate for decades, the lack of sentencing reform to reduce the overall prison population shows a clear lack of desire or vision and many studies have been presented to the Alabama Department of Corrections and the legislature for years but largely went ignored.

The answer is not to tax the citizens of this state and expand the industrial for profit prison complex when the Federal Government has already stated that Alabama’s prisons violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments.”

We need to speak out loud and clear like the residents of Baldwin and Mobile Counties, so that Governor Ivey understands that we the people want a common sense approach and politics out of the criminal justice system, and we want reform, not more prisons. Simple.