MONTGOMERY, Ala. – A recently filed bill in the Alabama Legislature would create additional oversight for the state’s prison system.
Senate Bill 361, introduced by Sen. Larry Stutts, R-Tuscumbia, would establish a prison oversight coordinator as a full-time employee within the Alabama Department of Examiners of Public Accounts. This individual would be tasked with investigating systemic issues present in the Alabama Department of Corrections as well as monitoring corrections officers and other staff.
Stutts said he introduced the bill to increase accountability within the prison system, repeatedly referencing “The Alabama Solution,” a 2025 documentary chronicling poor prison conditions and violence allegedly committed by corrections officers.
“We’re responsible,” Stutts told ADN on Monday. “When you incarcerate somebody, it doesn’t give you a free ride to mistreat them. We owe them humane care, sanitary care.”
The bill, filed last week, is assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee, on. which Stutts serves. It is not on this week’s meeting agenda and chairman Sen. Will Barfoot said members may need more time to review the 18-page bill.
Stutts said the systemic issues exposed in the documentary need to be addressed before the opening of the new Gov. Kay Ivey Correctional Complex in Elmore County.
“As we’re looking in a year to move into a new prison, we need to fix the culture and everything related to the Department of Corrections…” Stutts said. “My bill is designed to try to get a measure on exactly what is wrong because we don’t need to take any of this culture with us to the new facility.”
One particular concern is violence within correctional facilities, he said.
“There are so many things we do that foster the violence,” Stutts said, referencing that Alabama has the highest inmate mortality rate in the U.S.
“Inmate on inmate violence, corrections officers exerting violence on the inmates, it’s just across the board,” he said.
He also mentioned delayed medical care, overcrowding, understaffing, contraband and subpar food as ongoing issues that need to be addressed.
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure, so this level of accountability with somebody from the Examiner of Public Accounts looking at it is going to give us the data,” Stutts said. “We intuitively know where some of the problems are, but it’s going to give us objective data of exactly where they are.”
A spokesperson for the ADOC said the agency does not comment on pending legislation.
The new oversight coordinator would report to a new Corrections Oversight Board, a board made up of lawmakers, advocates, medical and mental health professionals, family members and spouses of current inmates and formerly incarcerated people.
The bill mandates that appointing authorities coordinate their picks “to assure the oversight board’s membership is inclusive and reflects the racial, gender, geographic, urban, rural, and economic diversity of the state.”
The new board and oversight coordinator would work alongside the existing Joint Prison Oversight Committee, a panel of lawmakers.
Stutts said the bill is an “Alabama solution,” referencing Gov. Kay Ivey’s 2019 declaration that issues within Alabama’s corrections system should be addressed at the state level after the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state for conditions within its prisons.
The bill was introduced with bipartisan support. Senators Vivian Figures, D-Mobile; William Beasley, D-Clayton; Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham; Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro; Matt Woods, R-Jasper; Wes Kitchens, R-Arab; and Linda Coleman-Madison, D-Birmingham.
Stutts is also sponsoring this year a bill to give the Alabama Department of Public Health more authority over conditions in prison kitchens. It’s been approved in the Senate and awaits a House committee vote.