Opinion: A California solution to an Alabama prison problem?

This is a split opinion

For years, Governor Ivey has touted the need for an “Alabama solution” to our “Alabama problem” which has escalated into a now full blown prison crisis. With the federal government hot on our heels and suing Alabama for declaring an entire men’s prison system unconstitutional, it would seem that now would be the time for lawmakers to show serious commitment to addressing the problems that plague our prison system. to tackle. Instead, we legislators spend the week in Montgomery for a special session on prisons designed to do just the opposite. Today our time in Montgomery is largely spent debating whether to do exactly what the California Supreme Court criticized in the early 2000s when they were also sued by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) for an unconstitutional male prison system.

In the early 2000s, California had a prison crisis analogous to what we are experiencing in Alabama. There were serious mental health and medical care deficiencies made worse by overcrowding, understaffing, violence, dysfunction, unsanitary conditions, to name a few. It is uncanny how many parallels exist between the recent reactions of Alabama’s leaders and those of California leaders before the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v. Plata, who ordered the release of 30,000 inmates. Spoiler alert: California, too, once passed a law amid a lawsuit by the DOJ to initiate a massive prison and prison construction project in response to the prison crisis. Even so, the Supreme Court concluded that “there is no realistic way that California could build itself.” [its] Crisis.”

Much like the Alabama Building Act expected to pass this week, California’s “expansion plans” called for cramming more prisoners into existing prisons without actually addressing the problem of overcrowding, understaffing, or inadequate mental and medical care. But how could “enlargement” be called “timpani”?

Easy. In California, as in Alabama, the “expansion plan” did not really address the overpopulation problem at hand. California is trying to add a few more beds to facilities that are already overcrowded, while Alabama plans to simply replace beds already occupied by inmates. Although the scenarios are slightly different, the result remains the same: Neither California nor Alabama have devised a plan to actually address the underlying problem of overcrowding.

To put this in context, imagine a faucet gushing water that you are desperately trying to keep in an old bucket. Instead of just reaching out and turning the faucet – instead of dealing with what causes so much water to overflow the bucket – Alabama lawmakers want to spend more than a billion dollars to buy a shinier bucket.

But guess what, Alabama is not California. Perhaps our blueprint adequately takes these things into account. Let’s check it out. Overcrowding? No, it is not discussed – this blueprint is simply a bed replacement plan. This means that the 8,000 new beds we will gain by building the two new prisons in Phase I will ultimately be lost if we close the five existing prisons in Phase II. Well what about understaffing? In recent years, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) has struggled to maintain even a third of the staff required for prisons. When asked how they intend to address the problem of overstaffing in this new building, ADOC officials have merely claimed that such an issue is “premature”. Interestingly, the California Supreme Court did not agree that the need for the state to have an actual plan to deal with its “chronically understaffed” prisons was too early to ask a question before the state finalized its prison expansion plan. Indeed, the court concluded that the conditions and culture of California’s prisons made working in the prison system unattractive to potential employees; Therefore, even if California had completed its plan to expand the prison, the court was not convinced that it would have been able to recruit the required amount of new staff. While it is questionable whether the Alabama blueprint will actually address the unsanitary conditions in its prison system, what about the corruption and violence that officials inflict on prisoners? What about the influx of drugs introduced into the system by officials and ADOC staff, the misclassification of deaths and other dysfunctions that we have seen under the tenure of ADOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn?

Let’s move away from Alabama’s general failure at ADOC and look at the inadequate medical and psychological treatment of men who are incarcerated. Alabama has been involved in litigation over this problem for years. In fact, a federal judge overseeing the Braggs case has already placed the ADOC under federal oversight for its unconstitutional medical and psychiatric services. While Alabama’s Prison Building Act is said to be the solution to this problem by allegedly creating “space for improved medical, mental and other health care” in the Elmore County facility under construction, the bill being debated in the State House does this does not make it clear how the state can finance such services once this new “space” is built. The building law deals solely with building buildings priced at $ 1.2 billion, but is silent about how much health care and other programs will cost and where the money will come from. Now, remember that the state will use any remaining general fund and any proceeds from COVID-19 aid to Alabama to build these facilities. Where should the funding for everything else come from? Why don’t more legislators ask that?

Well, I think we’re lucky that the court will likely ask this once the DOJ’s lawsuit continues. And in the worst case scenario, the court could hit us with an outcome similar to that in California:

“[W]I have no reason to believe that [California’s] The planned expansion of the prison facilities would significantly reduce overcrowding or improve the medical and mental health care of California inmates…. [W]We are convinced that … the construction of medical facilities or other construction measures offer a meaningful and timely remedy for the constitutional deficiencies in medical and psychiatric care in prisons that are caused by overcrowding. “

From what I see at the State House, the same thing can certainly be said about our current prison blueprint. But let’s leave Alabama state in case of doubt. Let us imagine that the prison blueprint on the table actually achieves its stated goals; What will happen in this case until the completion of the new prisons in June 2025? What is the plan until then? The people currently in Alabama prisons are entitled to have their constitutional rights now respected. Even assuming that one day new prisons will really be an adequate solution to this problem, what is the plan for dealing with the current humanitarian crisis that is taking place in our prisons and that will continue in our prisons for the next four years ? The answer to every question about ADOC’s current mismanagement, overcrowding, corruption, excessive use of force by prison officials, the influx of drugs being introduced by prison officials, and all of our other prison problems cannot be that we are simply building new prisons.

So what’s the point of all of this? Here we are in Alabama following a formula from the early 2000s that we already know will not satisfy the DOJ or the courts in our pending lawsuit.

And why exactly doesn’t it work? Well, the courts already told us in Plata that remedial measures that do not cure the specific constitutional violations are insufficient. Even Judge Alito, in his denial of the Plata court ruling, argued that “a large-scale construction program” is not required to address problems within the California prison system. Instead, like what advocates across the state have touted for months, Judge Alito believed that “[s]Hygiene procedures could be improved; Sufficient supplies of medicines and medical equipment could be acquired; an adequate record management system could be put in place; and the number of posts for medical and other personnel could be increased “to remedy California’s unconstitutional prison system. While I don’t think solving the Alabama prison crisis is that simple, I doubt it makes sense to spend $ 1.2 billion (of which $ 400 million is supposed to help the state move away from the devastation of COVID- 19 to recover) to simply build two new prisons that will ultimately do nothing about the overcrowding, corruption, violence by officials and inmates, and other problems that plague our prison system. As I said earlier, this is simply an expensive plan for packing old problems into new shiny buildings.

Chris England is a state representative in the Alabama Legislature and Chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party

source https://www.bisayanews.com/2021/09/29/opinion-a-california-solution-to-an-alabama-prison-problem/