MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Newly elected Alabama Chief Justice Sarah Stewart hopes to dramatically reduce recidivism in the state during her six-year term, among other goals.
Today, approximately 29% of Alabamians leaving prison will reoffend within three years. While state leaders are currently working on an initiative to cut that rate in half by 2030, Stewart says that the Alabama Supreme Court can be a partner in that effort as well.
“I know that there’s a lot of interest in the Legislature about reducing (recidivism), but we have a role in that too as the judicial branch,” Stewart told Alabama Daily News. “I think we can really make an impact on that, but we’ve got to be a lot more deliberate and thoughtful about putting (treatment) courts in because some of our areas have really great accountability courts.”
As chief justice, Stewart said she plans to create a criminal division at the Alabama Administrative Office of the Courts, the state entity responsible for administering Alabama’s judicial system. The creation of such a division, Stewart said, would help facilitate the expansion of Alabama’s various accountability treatment courts, such as drug or veterans treatment courts.
The new division could also help circuit court judges with their caseloads by having a unified administrative arm of the state’s judicial system, she said.
“Really about 70% of what a trial court judge handles are criminal cases and not civil cases, and we don’t have a criminal division in the administrative office of courts, there’s really no attention paid to how important those issues are that are resonating in criminal law are to all of the trial court systems,” she said.
Better addressing the manner in which juveniles pass through the criminal justice system was another major priority Stewart said she’d like to address.
While the number of children under the care of the Alabama Department of Human Resources has trended downward in recent years, dropping from around 6,400 in 2018 to 5,906 as of July, the state’s child welfare system has struggled to manage child relinquishments, or instances of parents voluntarily giving up their child to the state.
“We have a crisis in juvenile justice; not just juvenile crime, but also juvenile dependency where children are being abused or have neglectful parents,” Stewart said.
To address the matter, Stewart said she will work with lawmakers, industry leaders and stakeholders to develop a detailed plan to better serve juveniles in the state’s criminal justice system, with the goal of reducing return visits.
“I think the piece that we’re missing is a vision or a plan on how it ought to be done,” she said. “We have a lot of people trying to throw some money at it, but unless you have a vision of how it’s going to get accomplished, then throwing all that money at it does nothing. So we’ve really got to have a deliberate and thoughtful plan, and I think that’s something that we as a judicial branch can really work on this next year or so.”
Staffing was also an issue in Alabama’s criminal justice system, Stewart said, an issue she’d also like to address during her first term.
“We need to make sure that we have the right people in place who are trained, who we can retain,” Stewart said.
“The people who work for (an) elected clerk, we pay them a starting salary of $12 an hour, and people can go to McDonald’s and get a job for $15 an hour, so it’s been very hard for our clerks to recruit people, and then once we’ve trained them, they get scooped up. Our turnover is amiss and we just are not able to retain people.”
With the most recent comprehensive manpower study on Alabama’s judicial branch having occurred in 2009, Stewart said new workforce data should first be compiled, and from there, address wages.
“That’s just an area that we’re going to have to address, the pay inequity and how we can better train, retain and recruit these employees,” she said.
Stewart defeated on Tuesday Democrat Greg Griffin, a circuit court judge in Montgomery, with 66% of the vote, per the unofficial election results from the Alabama Secretary of State. Stewart was elected to the Alabama Supreme Court as an associate justice in 2018, and previously presided over Alabama’s 13th Judicial Circuit from 2006 to 2018.