It's clear Gov. Robert Bentley didn't go to business school, because his $1.5 billion prison bill would get laughed out of a boardroom.
Bentley wants to put $1.5 billion on the state's credit card so we can build new prisons. By the time the money comes due, we'll owe double the amount we borrowed. Meanwhile, the Alabama Senate has voted not to repay the $437 million we borrowed back in 2012, and yet they want us to believe they'll make good on this $1.5 billion credit card bill for new prisons.
If we're going to borrow from our future to fund our present, I think the only solution is to invest those resources in our future.
When we see a spike in our prison population as we have in Alabama, the problem isn't an increase in the number of people who can't tell right from wrong. There are systemic issues that are facing our communities that we must address.
Consider if your roof was leaking in your house. You could keep putting buckets all around, catching drips, and emptying them as fast as they fill up, or you could climb up on the roof, repair the spot, and stop the water from leaking.
That's where we are with our prisons - we're trying to stop a growing problem with patchwork solutions, never once looking at why the problem is growing in the first place.
Building more prisons is just adding more buckets to catch the water dripping into our house. It's time to fix the roof.
We can fix the roof by investing our money into schools instead of prisons. When children have the chance to learn, grow, and reach their full potential--and more importantly, to know they have potential--they make better decisions and are less likely to fall into a life of crime as they grow up. Consider this stunning statistic: we determine the number of beds we will need in our prisons by third grade literacy rates.
We can fix the roof by investing our money into our communities to ensure that hard work pays for men and women across this state. There is no denying that poverty and crime are linked--that is, higher rates of poverty in a community are linked to higher rates of domestic violence, higher rates of drug use, and higher rates of non-violent crimes like bad checks and fraud. When we provide opportunities in the communities that need it most, we can lower our poverty rates, promote healthy families, and decrease the temptation to turn to crime in the first place.
We can fix the roof by investing in rehabilitation rather than retribution. Often people who commit crimes aren't malicious or vindictive--they're simply stuck. Rather than locking those people in jail and throwing away the key, let's help them learn a trade, gain valuable life skills, and obtain the confidence necessary to stay on the right track. Especially as we see children starting down the wrong paths, we can help those young people find their passion and invest in their futures. Giving judges the flexibility to rehabilitate people rather than implement mandatory minimum sentences for offenders could go a long way.
We can fix the roof in so many ways that would be more worthwhile than new prisons. With this prison plan, we're asking our children to pay a credit card bill for a project that will directly impact their generation. Let's give them a bill worth paying rather than sinking them deeper in debt under a roof that still leaks.
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