FROM THE COVER
Prison Reform Progress Report
© Can Stock Photo / albund
Officials from the Alabama
Department of Corrections and the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles provided a progress report on reform implementation to county officials at the ACCA Annual Convention in August. In short, it is working.“ Our inmate population is going down, and it’ s going down very significantly,” said Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn.“ In fact, Alabama is experiencing the largest percentage decrease in their inmate population of any state in the nation.”
With offenders who are not housed at a DOC facility but are still subject to supervision, there are positive trends as well, said Meredith Barnes, chief legal counsel at the Board of Pardons and Paroles. Technical violations are down, and“ we’ ve seen a decrease in the revocation rate on both the parole and probation front, very significant on the parole front,” she said.“ That’ s a good thing because it is impacting positively the Department of Corrections’ prison population.”
Alabama legislators passed the sweeping Justice Reinvestment Act in 2015. Often referred to simply as“ prison reform,” the law has had significant impacts on both the
Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles and county jail operations. Counties have been particularly affected by changes to community corrections and new utilization
of county jails for intermediate sanctions – called“ dips” and“ dunks” – for probation and parole violators.
There is no doubt it is good news when a prison system that has ranked among the most overcrowded in the nation can report fewer inmates. In five years, overall inmate population is down about 4,500 individuals, which works out to a 30-point decline in overcrowding, Dunn said.
The 2015 reforms were driven in large part by increasingly intense budget pressure on the state’ s General Fund coupled with the possibility that subpar conditions
Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn, left, and Meredith Barnes, chief legal counsel for the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, updated county leaders on the future of Alabama’ s prisons. could lead to federal takeover of the state’ s system. Timing was critical because, as Dunn pointed out, in the last decade or so there is a new wealth of information about effective strategies and programs. Where reform was once about good or promising ideas, now consideration is reserved for evidence-based and data-driven policies.
In his remarks, Dunn put a great deal of emphasis on enhanced
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