Prisons underfunded, understaffed
August 9, 2009
Prisons underfunded, understaffed
By Sebastian Kitchen
Easily outnumbered, the stretched staff at Kilby Correctional Facility in Montgomery County monitors 1,400 of Alabama’s most hardened criminals.
Almost all of the men who are sentenced to time in Alabama’s prison system, except those who are sent straight to death row, are processed at the facility. Among those are men serving life without the possibility of parole for heinous crimes.
Those men might never leave the prison system, but for more than 40 hours a week, the correctional officers and other employees must work in the hot, crowded, musty facilities.
As the sun beat down on a recent summer day, they patrolled the yards where prisoners in white jumpsuits played basketball and volleyball, and some even gardened. They also stood guard in dormitories where whirling fans worked to keep them and 100 prisoners cool. There is no air conditioning.
With other prisoners inside playing chess and dominos, sleeping, reading and watching television, some of the officers must move from one area to another because they are short co-workers.
Shortage of funds, officers
There are not enough officers at Kilby to monitor all of the housing units.
And Kilby is in better shape than some of the other prisons in the state, said Warden John Cummins.
Corrections Commissioner Richard Allen said the system is short 500 to 600 correctional officers.
Cummins, who has been at Kilby for about a year and a half, said that the facility has slots for 153 correctional officers and is short 21. He has been with the prison system for about 30 years.
As he walks between tall, chain-linked fences that separate portions of the yard, Cummins told the Montgomery Advertiser his employees deserve air conditioning and they need some help.
Budget cuts, overcrowding and high turnover have led to tough conditions for employees in the state’s prison system and for managers trying to maintain safe facilities for inmates and staff.
“The ramifications are very long-reaching,” Cummins said at the facility in northeast Montgomery County.
The Alabama Department of Corrections is trying to recruit correctional officers and trying to make due with housing more inmates with fewer resources.
Alabama prisons already have more than twice the number of inmates in the prison system than the prisons were built to hold and one of the worst correctional officers-to-inmates ratios in the country.
Alabama prisons were built to hold about 13,400 inmates, but DOC monthly reports show that by the end of June, the system had 25,410 inmates that it was housing — putting it at nearly 190 percent capacity — with close to another 6,000 currently in the system, but not being housed in state prisons.
And while correctional officers are exempt from the state’s hiring freeze, there is still a severe shortage.
Staying afloat
The fact the prison system is so understaffed is one of the reasons Gov. Bob Riley exempted the position from the hiring freeze he instituted late last year.
Cummins and other wardens are able to get by with overtime.
The overtime, he said, allows the prison to operate with the minimum number of officers.
Cummins said he would like to operate with more than the “bare minimum,” but acknowledged that at least for now, this is the state of the system.
State prison officials were concerned about overcrowding and about budget shortfalls before the recession and the deep cuts ever started.
Despite a projected $10.3 million shortfall for the corrections department, Allen said the system will be able to stay afloat this year because of stimulus funds, grants and emergency cash from the state finance department.
Allen said the biggest portion of the shortfall will come as part of the stimulus in the form of money from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Byrne Formula Grant Program.
He said the governor is allocating the state’s portion of that grant money, about $6.5 million, to corrections.
The funds will be used to avoid layoffs or to continue to hire more correctional officers, Allen said.
Talking about the remaining shortfall of about $4 million, the commissioner said the “finance department will be able to find that money someplace.”
“For this year, I think by the skin of our teeth we will get by one more time,” Allen said.
He said the department will need help from the governor and finance director again next year to offset an estimated $20 million shortfall in the budget for the 2010 fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1.
Growing problem
The inmate population also has continued to grow, even if the budget hasn’t. Allen said about 70 more inmates come in every month than are released.
The prison system, he said, does not have the authority for a major release of inmates.
Inmates can be released when they have served their sentence or if they are approved for release by the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles. Allen said he is working with the parole board to try to free up some beds.
Allen said the department has tried various programs in an attempt to curb the growth in the already overpopulated system.
The department received supplemental funding to allow it to house 250 inmates at a private facility in Perry County, but Allen said that will expire at the end of September.
“They (those 250) will be reabsorbed into the system somehow by then,” he said. “That got us through a crunch in the summer.”
But with the system having almost twice as many inmates as its prisons were meant to hold, it’s not just a crunch in summer.
The Southern Center for Human Rights sued state officials, including Riley and Allen, in February on behalf of several prisoners who claim they were injured as a result of conditions in the facilities. They claim that Donaldson Correctional Facility near Birmingham is dangerous and unconstitutionally crowded, which Allen denies.
Allen believes the department can defend the case successfully.
He said the prisons are not run in an unconstitutional manner.
“They are reasonably safe,” Allen said.
Allen, a lawyer, said the standard for the prisons being unconstitutional is “deliberate indifference.”
“That is not the case in any of our facilities,” he said.
Allen said officials know there are problems and are trying their best with what they have to improve the situation.
Lloyd Wallace, president of the Alabama Correctional Organization, said he does not know where the department would be without the dedicated employees who work overtime. The 24-year-veteran of the department said the facilities are understaffed and overcrowded.
State must decide
The state needs to build more prisons or release some inmates to get the inmate-to-correctional officer ratio where it needs to be, Wallace said. Alabama has one of the highest inmate-to-officer ratios in the nation, with 10 to 1 at the best times and ratios sometimes rising as high as 200 to 1, he said.
“Taxpayers, the Legislature, everyone is going to have to see we cannot keep locking people up at the rate we’re doing it and not have to come up with more money,” Wallace said.
He said he knows lawmakers want to take money back to their districts, but said people have to decide if they want inmates released to live in their neighborhoods.
“We can’t keep going like we’re going and wait for somebody to get killed in one of these prisons before we do something,” Wallace said.
When asked about safety at Kilby with the staffing shortage and the overcrowding, Cummins said, “I think we are safer here than most.”
“The situation is not ideal,” he said and reiterated that the facility is short on officers just for manning necessary positions.
Kilby is housing about twice as many inmates as it was designed to hold. Cummins said there have been some additions, but the facility was originally built to house 440 inmates.
“They are crammed in,” he said.
Wallace said he would hate to see the prison system go back under the control of the federal government, but hopes it does if the current trends continue.
Allen said the employees are performing well.
“This department has been under the gun so many years that I think the people of this department can handle the adversity,” he said.
Staffing
Brian Corbett, spokesman for the corrections department, said while there has been a hiring freeze in other state agencies and many companies are laying off people, the corrections department continues to recruit and hire.
When asked if turnover among correctional workers has slowed due to the economy, Cummins said he has had more turnover since the beginning of the year.
Corbett said the system loses about 20 to 25 officers a month. He said the number reached 27 officers a month several years ago.
Riley included a 10 percent raise for corrections employees in his 2006 re-election platform in hopes the additional cash would help to recruit and retain officers, but Allen said the money is not there for the increase. The commissioner said an increase would improve morale.
Allen attributed about $3 million of the shortfall this year to a decline in income from the work release program, in which inmates work for private employers and corrections receives a portion of the income.
In total, Allen expects about a $20 million shortfall going into the next fiscal year.
“We can control a little bit ourselves,” he said.
The department can save about $3 million through not replacing kitchen and laundry equipment, and vans.
After that, Allen said the department would have to look at other cuts and ways to find additional revenue.
“We have cut just about all we can cut.”
