Alabama Ordered to Improve Prison

A federal judge ruled Monday that Alabama’s prison for women is overcrowded, understaffed and unsafe, and gave state officials four weeks to come up with a plan to solve the problem.

U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson called the Tutwiler prison a “ticking time bomb.”

The ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed by the Southern Center for Human Rights on behalf of 15 Tutwiler inmates.

The women’s prison near Wetumpka was built in the 1940s to hold a maximum of 364 inmates; it now houses 1,017.

“The situation there has become so volatile with people living in large open dormitories, extremely idle with almost no supervision at all. It is a recipe for violence,” said Tamara Serwer, a Southern Center for Human Rights attorney.

Thompson gave Gov. Donald Siegelman and prisons Commissioner Mike Haley until Dec. 30 to submit a plan to relieve the “unconstitutionally unsafe conditions.”

Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett said Haley was studying Thompson’s ruling and “will come up with a plan and submit it.”

Corbett said prison officials might revise a plan that is already in place to deal with overcrowding in general in the state’s prison system.

A spokesman for Siegelman, Mike Kanarick, said the governor will come up with a plan that includes alternative punishment for nonviolent prisoners.

Thompson’s ruling says that lack of money is not an excuse for the overcrowding at Tutwiler, but Corbett said, “The bottom line is it does come down to adequate funding.”

Prison officials also face an order from a state judge that they transfer all state prisoners from county jails to state prisons within 30 days of sentencing.