“I’m stuck in Folsom Prison, and time keeps draggin’ on.” – Johnny Cash

It’s tough to spend taxpayer money on prisons. Politically, it’s a thankless task.

People from one end of the political spectrum believe we should not have prisons at all. People on the other end believe making the prison experience as miserable as possible serves as a deterrent against committing crimes in the future.

But the truth is we need prisons, and they need to be functional in order not to serve as a vehicle for continuing criminal activity in a confined setting.

So I think it is commendable Gov. Kay Ivey has taken steps to put our failing state corrections system on a more stable course.

In reality she had little choice after a 2017 federal court order required the state to hire more correctional officers, and a 2020 U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit alleged the state’s prison conditions were not protecting prisoners against cruel and unusual punishment.

Without action Alabama’s corrections system was at risk of falling under federal oversight with the costs to fix the problems coming at state taxpayer expense.

However, the pathway to stability has taken more twists and turns than fusilli pasta.

On the adequate staffing issue, the 2017 court order stated Alabama needed to hire an additional 2,000 correctional officers by 2022, nearly doubling the number employed at the time. The court later extended the deadline to 2025.

Yet, Alabama Daily News reporter Alexander Willis found in July 2023 the number of correctional officers had actually dropped from 2,146 in 2017 to 1,744.

The number of officers, thankfully, has grown since then due to pay increases and recruitment programs, but it was only this summer that the workforce caught back up to the 2017 level.

How the court views the recent gains versus the lack of overall progress remains to be seen.

When it comes to the prison facilities themselves, Ivey convened a special session of the Alabama Legislature in the fall of 2021 to focus on prison construction and criminal justice reform.

The legislation that was passed has since proven woefully inadequate. The Legislature approved a $1.3 billion plan to build two huge prisons to replace some of the outdated and crumbling prisons currently in use. This plan included building a 4,000-bed men’s prison in both Elmore County and Escambia County.

Not only has neither prison been completed but construction on the Escambia County prison has not even begun. The latest reporting by Mary Sell, of the Alabama Daily News, states the Elmore County site’s most recent delay places expected completion for October 2026 while the Escambia County site is still in the project design phase.

What’s more is the costs for the projects have exploded from the parameters set in 2021. The Elmore County site itself will cost $1.23 billion, consuming almost the entirety of the $1.3 billion original budget.

The $1.23 billion figure comes despite the state committee overseeing the financing of the prisons setting an updated “final guaranteed maximum price” of $1.082 billion back in 2023, according to reporting at the time by the Alabama Reflector’s Brian Lyman.

Moreover, the costs for the Escambia County prison have not been finalized, but who would even trust a cost estimate given our history thus far? No clear explanation has been offered as to why the costs have risen way beyond what was originally anticipated.

Back in 2021, plans also included the eventual replacement of the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, but who knows the status of those plans now.

In the meantime prison violence continues while, embarrassingly, HBO Max recently released a documentary on Alabama prisons using footage shot with contraband cell phone cameras possessed by inmates.

In short, beloved reader, the whole prison reformation effort has been a boondoggle. I hope our missteps represent the growing pains associated with finally tackling a long-festering problem.

However, without better transparency from the state, hope is all I have. We could still be wallowing in mismanagement and dysfunction for all I know.

That is a shame because it makes the public more skeptical – and rightfully so – about paying for any new major construction projects and especially wary about paying for any further improvements for the Alabama Department of Corrections to implement.

Yet, inaction will only perpetuate the conditions the Justice Department found in its investigation of Alabama prisons – “an environment rife with violence, extortion, drugs and weapons.”

Then Alabama prison reform becomes the federal government’s thankless task, but the feds don’t have to worry about the political consequences with spending the state’s money to fix the problem.