Facts and Policy Reforms for Alabama
Like most states, Alabama’s prison population has exploded in recent decades.
Between 1980 and 2016, the state’s prison population grew more than fourfold. It reached its peak in 2012, when 32,574 people were in prison. While recent reforms have slightly decreased that number, Alabama’s prisons are among the most overcrowded in the country.
One in every five people in Alabama is older than 50. The state’s large and growing prison population of older people can be attributed largely to Alabama’s sentencing laws, which allow for high maximum sentences for a wide range of offenses. Because of these laws, 30 percent of the prison population is serving sentences of 20 or more years. Drug possession, distribution, trafficking, and manufacturing offenses accounted for 34 percent of all admissions to Alabama’s correctional system in 2017. The current prison population is overwhelming the system: In 2017, they were operating at 164 percent of design capacity.
Unsurprisingly, Alabama’s mass incarceration crisis has had an enormous impact on people of color, especially Black people. One in 30 adult Black men in Alabama were imprisoned as of 2017—nearly four times the rate of white men. While Black people constituted only 26 percent of the total state adult population in 2017, they made more than half of the state’s prison population. Ending mass incarceration is a critical — although insufficient — step towards addressing racial disparities in Alabama’s criminal justice system as well as its broader society.
Women are also being sent to prison in Alabama at alarming rates. Between 2008 and 2017, the population of women in prison increased by 14 percent, while the population of men in prison fell by 9 percent. The rate of imprisonment for women in Alabama is the eleventh highest in the country, as of 2016.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Alabama can dramatically reduce its prison population by implementing just a few sensible reforms:
- Reducing the amount of time people spend in prison by reforming harsh drug laws by amending the criminal code
- Doing away with direct and discretionary transfers of juveniles to adult court.
- Increasing the value threshold that defines whether a property offense is a misdemeanor or a felony.
- Eliminating or significantly scaling back mandatory minimum sentences.
- Repealing Alabama’s Habitual Felony Offender Act, which is one of the most punitive habitual offender laws in the country.
- Releasing aging people in prison who pose no threat to public safety.
If Alabama were to follow these and other reforms in this Smart Justice 50-State Blueprint, 12,511 fewer people would be in prison in Alabama by 2025, saving nearly $470 million that could be invested in schools, services, and other resources that would strengthen communities.
For more information, along with detailed breakdowns of Alabama’s prison population and the reforms needed to reduce it, click here.