Alabama Judges Take Aim At Overcrowding

Alabama Chief Judge Sue Bell Cobb recently looked at her state's crowded, dead-end prisons -- and decided to do something about the problem.

Alabama's prisons are the most crowded in the U.S. and the state has the nation's sixth highest incarceration rate. Seeing no relief coming from the tough-on-crime legislature, Cobb called all state sentencing judges to a three-day conference in Birmingham last week to explore an expansion of alternates to incarceration in the state. The judges reviewed the success some counties have found with specialized drug courts -- and they visited two crowded prisons to see first-hand the kind of life they were sentencing people to. And it seems the talks opened some eyes.

"I saw 195 men in a dorm that was 96 degrees. They can go to church; they can play basketball or lift weights in their yard, and that's it. They need to be doing something," Madison County Presiding Circuit Judge Karen Hall told The Hunstville Times. "What it has done for me is made me rethink how I will handle those who are considered low-risk, especially young males, young females, and maybe give one more chance before I send them down there."

I admire Cobb and the judges of Alabama for taking matters into their own hands. Politicians simply can't be trusted to address sprawling prison systems -- there's no incentive: building prisons and filling them with poor, invisible city-dwellers is politically painless. Closing prisons is much harder: it costs jobs and angers unions and communities. Cobb seems to recognize that she and her colleagues are on the front lines -- and that even a modest amount of discretion can save money and help turn lives around.

I wrote recently about Indiana, where the prison population shot up by 41 percent in the last decade while lawmakers passed 117 laws lengthening sentences and not a single law shortening them. Judges there could take a page from Cobb's book.

Specialized courts -- like drug courts -- provide an excellent opportunity for judges to bring a little discretion to their jobs. Federal money is flowing to create these courts (there are new drug courts in New Hampshire, Florida and Georgia, for example). Judges are in a unique position to advocate for these innovative solutions. If more judges took responsibility for their role in filling our prisons, we might begin to see some progress.

Hat tip: Sentencing Law & Policy

Image Credit: nola.agent