Alabama Prison Numbers on Rise...AGAIN

The Birmingham News is reporting that while the number of state prison inmates declined nationally the number increased in Alabama...mostly due to non-violent drug offenses.

The nation's number of state prison inmates dropped slightly in 2009 -- the first decrease recorded in nearly 38 years -- but Ala­bama's prison population went in the other direction.

According to a report from the Public Safety Per­formance Project of the Pew Center on the States, Ala­bama's jurisdictional prison population -- the number of inmates the state is re­sponsible for housing -- to­taled 31,561 on Jan. 1. That is an increase of 3.5 percent over the population of 30,508 listed on Dec. 31, 2008.

Over the same period, ac­cording to the report, the nation's state prison pop­ulation dropped 0.4 percent, from 1,408,830 to 1,403,091.

Alabama Corrections Commissioner Richard Al­len said his department has been working to reduce its prison population. If the state had not adopted a package of sentencing guidelines several years ago, the population would be even higher, he said.

One problem is that judges and district attor­neys are not using the guidelines as much "as we think they should," Allen said.

According to a Depart­ment of Corrections report prepared for Allen, drug of­fenders made up nearly 34 percent of the 11,729 in­mates who entered the ju­risdictional prison popula­tion in fiscal 2008.

So, 34% of the new entries into the prison system in Alabama were drug offenders. Boy I tell ya, that drug war just works out so magnificently for keeping people from using drugs, don't it?

Why can't legislators grow a pair and stop doing stupid shit like this which only makes the problem worse?