James | 
07 16th, 2009| 
Five Facts about Alabama Prisons
From:
1. Judges override jury verdicts to get reelected. Alabama is the only state practicing Standardless Judicial Override. An Alabama Judge can sentence a convicted criminal to death even if the jury recommends another sentence, such as life without parole. In 2006, 30% of new death sentence inmates were put on death row by their trial judges after juries had ruled on life without parole. About 20% of individuals currently on death row were condemned by judicial override.
Alabama trial judges have the ability to override jury verdicts in the other directly, taking death penalty rulings and reducing them to life sentences, however this has happened only a handful of times since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Several Alabama local governments have tried to promote standards for Judicial override. These attempts have been defeated because of political pressure for local and state politicians (including elected judges) to appear “tough on crime.”
2. Excessive sentences contributed to prisons being filled to 200% capacity. The AL DOC incarcerates 30,896 individuals. The prison system is built to accommodate 13,403 prisoners. The inmate-to-staff ratio is close to 10:1, about twice the national average. That ratio applies only to the number of COs employed. In terms of the number of officers on duty at any given time, it isn’t rare to have 250-300 inmates per officer.
Since 2001, 86 new felonies have been added to the books, but the prisons’ square footage has remained static. Even Governor Bob Riley, a conservative Republican, has expressed concern about the state of Alabama’s prisons. In 1980, Alabama instituted the Habitual Felony Offender Act, which provides for lengthier sentences for habitual offenders (meaning someone convicted of one previous felony, unlike California’s “3 Strikes” law that creates a life sentence after 3 felony convictions). The sentence enhancement don’t even rely on felonies either. Sentences can be increased to excess over misdemeanor and nonviolent convictions. These sentence enhancements led Alabama to have the highest rate of life sentences in the U.S. with almost half of inmates serving 20 or more years in 2000.
