Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said Tuesday that the state is making progress in increasing prison security staff but will not meet a federal judge’s directive to add 2,000 more officers within a year. The state’s new $1 billion 4,000 bed prison is scheduled for completion in 2026, Hamm said, but building a second new prison, as the state plans, will require additional funding. The Alabama prison system, which faces a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit, has come under criticism for high rates of violence, crowding and understaffing. Hamm said pay raises and new recruiting efforts have helped reverse a downward trend in prison staffing numbers, the Associated Press reports. The number of full-time security staff for the 20,000-inmate system was 2,102 in January 2022 but dropped to 1,705 in April 2023. It has risen again to 1,953.
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled in 2017 that mental health care in state prisons is “horrendously inadequate” and ordered the state to add as many as 2,000 correctional officers. Thompson has given the state until July 1, 2025, to increase staff. Hamm said the state would not meet that target but said he believed the state could demonstrate a good-faith effort to boost staffing levels. Lawyers for inmates wrote in a June court filing that the state has “zero net gain” in correctional officers since Thompson’s 2017 order. “Even with small gains over the past few quarters, [the state] is so far short of officers that it may not regain the level of officers that it had in 2017, and certainly won’t reach full compliance by July 2025,” lawyers wrote. Some members of the legislative budget committees on Tuesday expressed frustration over the cost of the state’s new prison. Hamm said the cost is about $1.08 billion but rises to $1.25 billion when including furnishings and other expenses to make the facility operational. Officials had estimated the prison would cost $623 million.
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