This is an opinion column.
If Alabama were a country all its own, it would have a higher incarceration rate than any democracy on earth.
It’s easy to go to prison here. And to stay there for a long, long time.
The state’s prison system has been rebuked as a constitutional and human rights nightmare by Republican and Democratic justice departments alike, by both the Trump and Biden administrations. Alabama’s parole system has been decried as broken by two former chief justices of the Alabama Supreme Court: Roy Moore on the right and Sue Bell Cobb on the left.
These are people who can’t look out a window and see eye to eye on the weather. But they can agree this is not how justice is supposed to work.
The parole system these days releases only a fraction of those eligible, only a fraction of those recommended by its own staff, only a fraction of those who should be given a second chance. That’s according to the agency’s own guidelines, which the parole board ignores.
So prisons already devoid of hope become even more overcrowded, and hopeless, and expensive. We’ll spend a billion dollars on a new prison, another billion dollars for a prison health contract, and ignore federal warnings that Alabama prisons are havens for drugs, extortion, gang rape, murder and profiteering by staff and prisoners alike.
While the state does next to nothing to fix it.
The federal government notified the governor, prison officials, and AG Steve Marshall of those findings in 2019, and sued two years later when little had been done.
“The United States engaged in multiple rounds of negotiations with the State beginning in the spring of 2019,” the Justice Department wrote. “Since the spring of 2019, the State of Alabama has failed or refused to correct the unconstitutional conditions in Alabama’s prisons for men.”
Unconstitutional, the feds say, because they are unusually cruel.
But Marshall has been clear. He has defended the prison system and authorized millions of dollars to defend the indefensible. He has opposed almost all paroles, arguing that “most of our current prison population ought to stay locked up” and that reforms aren’t needed because “there is simply nobody else to reform.”
After months of reporting on people up for parole, my colleague Ivana Hrynkiw again called Marshall’s office. She asked if the AG had anything more to say on the subject. She got this response.
“We do not have anything further to add,” Marshall’s spokesperson said, “as we disagree with the premise of every article you have written on the topic.”
For months now, AL.com has written story after story about prisons, and paroles. The premise, if I may be so bold, is that not everyone who is in Alabama prisons needs to be there forever. Not everyone should be written off as unredeemable.
If there is something unique about Alabama that puts all our inmates beyond hope for reform, then we as a state must be doing something wrong.
Marshall disagrees with that premise, it seems.
Despite across-the-aisle condemnations of both the prison and parole systems. Despite billions of dollars spent on objectively failing systems. Despite questions of constitution, and of conscience.
Justice, to Marshall, is a one-way street. That means punishment. Harsh, unbending, unquestioning, never-ending punishment.
No second chances, ever. No second looks at convictions. No possibility that redemption can be achieved, or that courts can get it wrong – even in a state that has seen through history that people are sometimes jailed or even killed by bad evidence, or decisions from a judge or jury.
We’ve seen the innocent locked up as the guilty go free.
We see punishment for punishment’s sake. So 68-year-old Leon Hotchkiss remains in prison for decades for growing five pounds of pot. So Kenny McCroskey goes back to prison for decades – over the objection of his parole officer – for missing an appointment with that officer. So Leola Harris, in her 70s now, spends life in a wheelchair, on dialysis, in Alabama prisons, without a hope. Or the possibility, in Marshall’s eyes, of reform.
This is not a political story. The Jeff Sessions and Merrick Garland justice departments both saw Alabama’s sins. It is not about opening prison doors to let the violent loose on the world. It is about reasonable application of existing laws and established standards of parole.
It is not about good guys and bad guys. But when the state of Alabama becomes the party that willfully violates the rights of people, the bad guys are harder to identify.
What’s worse? Condoning a torturous, unconstitutional system filled with rape, assault and murder – and fighting to keep people in it forever – or growing five pounds of weed in your back yard?
John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.