Photos by ALEXANDER WILLIS
ELMORE, Ala. — Off Highway 143 in rural Elmore County, the Alabama Department of Corrections is building a small town.
On 300 acres behind a tall chain-link fence, some of the more than four dozen, two-story buildings that will make up the 4,000-bed, $1.08 billion prison are starting to take shape. A one million-gallon water tank is up near what will be the main entrance.
Water and sewer lines have been buried; hundreds of miles of electrical conduit are being run to housing units where 256 men will live in two-person cells. Eventually, the electrical lines will power in each unit a central monitoring station where officers will have direct lines of sight down four corridors on inmates. There will be video cameras and electronically locking cell doors that officials promise will make this site much safer and more manageable than the state’s existing major prisons.
Within many units will be educational space, and separate vocational training facilities are planned.
On any given weekday now, around 500 construction workers are there. This summer, there will be more.
In one corner on a recent Thursday, several workers were casting the concrete cells. Dozens of them were stacked and waiting to be trucked and placed by cranes into their slots in the housing units currently cropping up from the dusty soil that a few years ago was woods and farmland.
When operational, the new prison will have a larger population than about 75% of Alabama communities, according to census data compiled by the Alabama League of Municipalities. It will be about the size of Geneva in Dale County or Haleyville in Winston County or Citronelle in Mobile County.
The new prison will be the state’s hub for inmate mental health and medical care. There will be GED education, workforce skills training, substance abuse and faith-based programs.
About 800 of the beds will be in the medical and mental health units. Another 600 to 700 will be for minimum security inmates, many of whom will work within the prison washing the hundreds of pounds of dirty laundry generated each day, or preparing 12,000 meals daily. The rest of the cells will be medium and maximum security.
It will be the intake center from which ADOC will ship prisoners to other, older facilities.
For the $1 billion investment, ADOC is getting a modern facility that will be 75% cells and 25% barracks-style dorms. Right now, nearly 80% of the state’s prisons are the dorms, where hundreds of inmates are watched by just a few officers.
“That means with the correctional staff we have, we can better manage that population,” ADOC Commissioner John Hamm told Alabama Daily News on a recent tour of the prison site, now about 25% complete. Alabama Daily News requested the visit.
Prison staff, of which there aren’t enough, are getting a safer work environment and inmates are getting better care and educational opportunities, and that’s better for the public, Hamm said.
Because many of the inmates will eventually leave this town-sized prison, and the goal is that they never come back, said Hamm. He was the second in command at the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency in 2021 when Gov. Kay Ivey appointed him head of ADOC.
“It’s going to improve the opportunities for the inmates that are getting out,” Hamm said about the new prison. “And improve the opportunities for those staying in, just so they have some hope. Because when they start losing hope, that’s when we start having problems.”
‘More than a prison’
After several years of failed attempts, including a lease-to-own option, in 2021 Alabama lawmakers and Ivey passed legislation and a $1.2 billion spending plan for this and another 4,000-bed prison in Escambia County. The original estimate on the Elmore site was $623 million, though Hamm said that was based on earlier concepts when the state considered leasing rather than building.
“There were court-ordered items that weren’t in that price,” he said. “Not all of (the increase) was inflation, but a lot of it was. And the available workforce was low, so that drove the price up.”
The $1.08 billion comes from a combination of state funding, including a $400 million chunk of the state’s American Rescue Plan Act allocation, and loans. The price is eye-popping, but not unheard of these days.
In 2022, Utah opened a 3,600-bed prison that cost just over $1 billion. Indiana broke ground last fall on what is expected to be a $1.2 billion, 4,200-bed prison.
“It is more than a prison; it’s a mental health facility and it’s a medical facility and a prison,” said Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville. He’s chairman of the Legislative Prison Oversight Committee. The new prison is in his district. “And not just a hospital, but a hospital where every room is secure.”
In 2017, a federal judge ruled that Alabama’s “horrendously inadequate” care of mentally ill inmates violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The Southern Poverty Law Center in 2014 sued ADOC over the conditions within the prisons and lack of medical and mental health care. U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson has ordered and then extended the order that ADOC increase its staffing. Despite increases in salary, that remains a struggle.
As of the end of 2023, ADOC had a total security staff of 1,804 and has seen some slight gains, thanks to improved pay and department recruiting efforts. Still, a March court filing said the department is still 2,000 officers short of adequate staff and that at this current pace, “it will take until the end of 2037 to satisfy this court’s order.”
As impressive and expensive as the new prison will be, lawmakers like Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Atmore, know that ADOC and the state’s long-standing prison problems won’t vanish in May 2026 when it opens.
“This is only the beginning,” Albritton told ADN. “This is the first downpayment, if you will. This will resolve a great deal of the major issues, but it’s not going to solve all the problems. We have a long way to go, but at least we have a plan and at least we’re working on following that plan.”
A potential conundrum
This area of central Alabama knows prisons.
Just southwest and within view of the new construction is Staton Correctional Facility, built in the ‘70s. To the southeast is Elmore Correctional Facility, built in 1981. Both those prisons, along with Kilby Correctional Facility near Montgomery, are supposed to close within a year of opening both the new and yet-to-be-named prisons in Elmore and Escambia counties. That’s according to the 2021 law.
St. Clair Correctional Facility is also supposed to close at a time determined by the ADOC, per the law.
But the current prison intake rate and the drop-off in paroles could make those requirements difficult to meet.
The two new prisons were always meant to be replacement beds, not additional beds in the system. But as of February, there were 20,419 inmates across Alabama’s prisons. That’s 2,555 more than when lawmakers approved the construction plan. And those existing prisons were built to hold a combined 12,115 men and women.
Those numbers caught the attention of Rep. Jim Hill, R-Odenville, earlier this month at the prison oversight committee meeting.
“If we have more people in today than we have the capacity to handle, how do we close facilities that hold 5,000 to 6000 people?” Hill asked Hamm.
“It’s quite the conundrum, isn’t it?” Hamm replied.
Hill said laws can be changed.
The Elmore and Escambia County prisons were Phase I of the 2021 law. There’s also a Phase II: a new women’s prison to replace Julia Tutwiler Prison, also in Elmore County, and renovations or reconstruction of men’s facilities in Limestone and Jefferson counties, and the renovation or replacement of either the Bullock Correctional Facility in Union Springs or Ventress Correctional Facility in Clayton.
But the legislation didn’t direct funding for those projects and says a committee of legislative budget leaders can determine, when Phase I is 70% complete, if the state has the capacity to borrow money for Phase II.
If so, when those are 75% complete, there will be an evaluation of existing men’s facilities to see if others need to be replaced.
Hill last week told ADN that some prisons certainly need to close and he wants St. Clair, which is in his district, shuttered.
“It doesn’t help my county,” Hill said. “…And I’ve seen first-hand the trouble that’s generated out of it.”
In January, a St. Clair inmate whose family testified in mid-December about the violent conditions in Alabama prisons, was discovered dead. It has been one of the most deadly prisons in a violent system.
Hamm compares the prison system to a bathtub in that ADOC doesn’t control the faucet or the drain. The level in 2026 could depend on what the Legislature does to increase or decrease it.
The department is now trying to estimate 2026 populations based on current trajectories.
It begs the question – if populations keep rising, how will the department close existing prisons?
“That’s going to be a question (for) the Department of Corrections, the Governor’s Office and legislative leadership,” Hamm said.
Chambliss said it’s too soon to say what will or won’t happen with current prisons or what possible changes to the law might be needed.
The opening of the new Elmore site is at least two years away and the Escambia site, for which state leaders are still solidifying funding after Elmore’s price increase, will be several years behind it.
“Some are just going to have to close. We don’t have a choice,” Chambliss said.
The committee outlined in the law will make recommendations on existing facilities, but that’s still years down the road.
The Escambia prison construction was delayed when Elmore ate up the lion’s share of the funding outlined in 2021. Escambia County is in Albritton’s district and he said state leaders are “working feverishly” to secure the money. Several hundred million were in the budgets passed by the Senate this month.
“Things are moving a whole lot slower than we want this to occur,” Albritton told ADN recently. “… As far as which ones are going to close and which ones aren’t, we can’t even address that until we know how much we’ve spent on (Elmore and Escambia), and then start looking at what the conditions are and which is taking the most crucial precedent of where we go.
“Less important than what we’re going to be closing is how we deal with what we have left.”
More photos from Alexander Willis.
