“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,”- Judge Henry Allred, Walker County, Alabama.
I’ve heard the above said many times by Southerners, especially in rural areas. It’s a really cute saying used when people want to make excuses for failing to repair a broken judicial and corrections system.
Alabama is our nation’s most religious state, per Pew Research surveys. Yet, supposedly religious people (like this judge would surely claim to be), make these kinds of uncaring statements. I’m just not sure how they justify this indifference to the downtrodden with the Bible, the teachings of Jesus, and their Sunday school lessons. But somehow they do.
As of this year, the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) has reorganized. But internal turmoil has not stopped this well-established Montgomery based legal advocacy group from addressing some of our most pressing social justice issues. One such issue is the dysfunctional Alabama prison system.
Specifically, the SPLC has issued a report (August 15, 2019) which shows how strangely and irrationally the Alabama community corrections system functions. And, in line with the above quote, how uncaring it seems to be. In the document, they outline how a typical lower income parolee trying to make ends meet gets charged with the cost of community monitoring, in this example $140 a month.
For many Americans, that’s just a drop in the bucket, but not for a parolee. I did limited work for an LEAA federally funded Tampa comprehensive work release program decades ago and it opened my eyes. None of the x-cons I met wanted to go back inside. However, parolees have tremendous obstacles ahead of them. One is finding a job with the anchor of a conviction around their necks. Another is finding a position making more than minimum wage, so they can actually afford to pay bills and take care of their families.
The facts are that most convicts are not like Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen or Charlie Kushner (Jared’s Dad, a billionaire imprisoned due to corruption). They are not well educated and do not have a lot of cash. They don’t have easily transferable skills when they get out. They don’t have extensive networks of friends and business associates who will hire them. They need help, not superfluous charges from the community corrections people.
The SPLC study also discovered that work release in Alabama is little more than indentured servitude. People are paid just a fraction of what they should be paid via loopholes related to convicts. Again, the underlying goal must be to get these folks back into the work force and prevent recidivism which is costly to society and the state. The aim is not to keep Alabama from spending money on convicts to the exclusion of its effects on recidivism.
Which brings me to my conclusion. Alabama needs to do a much better job of determining how to keep convicts who have paid their debt to society from returning to the corrections system. That must be the long-range objective, but right now, it clearly is not.
Jack Bernard is a retired corporate Senior Vice President and the former Chair of the Jasper County,GA Republican Party. His columns regarding social and political issues are widely published in the South and around the nation.