MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm was urged Tuesday during a budget hearing to “pick up the pace” on prison construction and hiring initiatives amid mounting scrutiny on the state for its violent and dangerous prison system.
“Time is not our friend in this; the longer we work, the longer we try to stretch this out, the more difficult that it becomes from both a federal and state level,” said Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Range, the chair of the Senate General Fund committee.
“We’ve got to move this a little faster, we’ve got to pick up the pace. As far as the Legislature, we’re doing all that we possibly can in regards to this.”
Alabama’s prison system remains among the most violent in the nation, and has sparked a flurry of lawsuits against the state, compelling ADOC to hire more staff and improve prison conditions.
Staffing
In 2017, in a case against the state that alleged ADOC provided constitutionally inadequate mental-health care, a judge ordered the agency to hire an additional 2,000 correctional officers by 2022, later extending it to 2025. At the time, it had around 2,150.
Despite the court order, ADOC correctional officer staff had shrunk to 1,705 as of March of this year.
After a substantial pay increase for correctional officers went into effect earlier this year, however, ADOC staff has been on an upward trend, with 1,953 correctional officers now employed on a full-time basis as of June.
“We’re certainly proud of how we’re coming about on hiring; it is difficult to hire individuals generally whether it’s support or security staff, but security staff in particular,” Hamm told members of the committee. “It’s a tough job, we’re not attracting folks that want something easy.”
Hamm said completed job applications had increased after the correctional officer pay increased by 223%, from 2,233 submitted between January and March, to 7,223 between May and July. The agency also held 76 hiring events so far this year that had attracted 1,191 candidates.
While Albritton thanked Hamm for having “changed the trend upward,” recruiting new employees continued to be a struggle, Hamm said.
Of the 1,191 candidates that attended the ADOC hiring events, only 453 passed the physical training assessment, and even more were eliminated from consideration due to failing drug screens, Hamm said.
Candidates with affiliations with gangs also posed a problem to recruiting, Hamm explained.
“It shouldn’t be a shock to you, but we have gang members actually trying to get employed by ADOC,” he said. “One batch of employees that we went through, some 400-and-something, we had about 155 that had gang affiliations, so that knocks down our potential candidates.”
After the meeting, Hamm was asked whether he anticipated that ADOC would satisfy the court order to hire an additional 2,000 correction officers by 2025.
“Probably not,” he told members of the press. “That’s 2,000 over what we have, and we’ve been averaging 55 correctional officer trainees in academy classes through four years.”
Prisons
Regarding what the state is doing to improve prison conditions, as was ordered by the U.S. Department of Justice in a 2020 lawsuit, the state is currently working to construct two new 4,000-bed prisons, one in Elmore County, which is already under construction, and another in Escambia County.
While the two new prisons won’t increase the state prison system’s inmate capacity, as an equal number of beds will be lost upon the completion of the new prisons with the closure of older ones, the new facilities will have specialized health and mental health care services for inmates, as well as safer designs with small cells instead of open dormitories.
The issue, Hamm says, is a lack of money.
While state lawmakers allocated roughly $1.2 billion in 2021 for the construction of the prisons in Elmore and Escambia counties, the prison in Elmore County, initially projected to cost $623 million, saw its cost rise to $1.08 billion.
Hamm revealed at the hearing that coupled with additional costs such as prison furnishing, the total cost of the project would be roughly $1.25 billion, eating up the entirety of the funding initially allocated for two prisons.
Things like inmate costs have risen too, he said, rising in excess of 20% since 2020, from an average inmate daily cost of $72.28 to a projected $87.23 this year. Medical services, salaries and food made up a substantial portion of ADOC expenditures, as did rising rates of incarceration.
“Those costs have gone up roughly $2 million a year, and that is something that is eating out of our operations budget every year,” Hamm said.
“Our inmate population is going to continue to go up because there are certain laws that will be taking effect that we’re going to be getting in some more people and keeping some people a little bit longer.”
Albritton pressed Hamm on the progress being made at the prison in Escambia County, to which Hamm said that ADOC was currently in negotiations with a company for design services, the same company that was selected for the prison in Elmore County.
“I would encourage ADOC to move forward as swiftly as we can while we have the money,” Albritton said. “We need you all picking up the pace a little bit.”
Albritton later said he has pressed for months for work on the Escambia County prison to get underway, but to no avail, and suggested ADOC had the ability to expedite work on the project.
The department recently told ADN it didn’t have full funding for the second prison.
“We have the money to start now, so why don’t we? Get the design, start doing the groundwork, start to put the sewer stuff in,” Albritton told ADN. The new prison is his district.
“We could do that. In fact, I’ve been pushing for months to get that going. I think we’re dragging our feet when we already have the money, we already know the plans, we already know where it’s going to go. Let’s get started.”
Hamm, however, told ADN that there was nothing else his agency could do to expedite the project without additional funding.
“We can push on the design contract for Escambia, but past that, we have to have funds,” he told ADN.