Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Riley announces 'elimination' of state inmate backlog

And immediately grants $155,000 to a drug task force in Elmore County to fill the jails back up!!!
And they say I'm stoned!!


Gov. Bob Riley and Corrections Commissioner Richard Allen announced that the number of state inmates in county jails beyond the 30-day allowable limit has reached zero. Riley said a backlog that was 800 in January has been eliminated and is working to keep it that way.

Coming to office in January of 2003, Riley’s administration inherited a backlog of almost 1,600 state inmates in county jails over a 30-day limit. That backlog remained at zero for about a year before it began building up again.

After implementing an Action Plan by the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) to deal with issues including the backlog of inmates in county jails, the plan has worked to adjust several prisons to open up more space for prisoners. The addition of 850 new beds is a result of the reconstruction of several facilities and ADOC recently signed a contract to house 600 prisoners at a private prison in Louisiana.
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This is anything but PROBLEM SOLVED. Sure, the state inmates may be out of county facilities where the state reimbursed the counties $1.75 per inmate per day(could you live on $1.75 a day?) but now they are in out-of-state facilities and that is costing us twice what it would cost to house them here. Not to mention how hard this is on inmates families. It is further destruction of the famiy unit because of difficulty in visiting due to cost of travel.

It will cause a rise in recidivism because studies have shown that an inmate who receives at least 12 visits while in prison has a lower recidivism rate than those whose family never comes to visit or visits rarely.

Most of these inmates are likely non-violent drug offenders and until the drug laws are fixed more and more people will go into the prison system and this will once again become a problem in county jails.

Tell the Bob Riley you are not as stupid as he wishes you were and that you are INSULTED by this expensive shell game being passed off as a solution to the problem.

Vote Nall Y'all...It's Just Common Sense

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