Alabama Senate committee approves additional staffing for ADOC

An Alabama Senate committee Tuesday approved a bill increasing the number of positions in the Alabama Department of Corrections in order to provide timely information about incarcerated people to the public.

SB 322, sponsored by Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville, allows the Department of Corrections to hire an additional 15 employees to unclassified positions to provide a host of services for those people who are incarcerated and their loved ones.

“The Joint Prison Oversight Committee has been meeting with various people (and) entities about what we can do to try and assist in developing communications and things there,” Chambliss told the Senate County and Municipal Government Committee.

The commissioner will make the appointments, establish the qualification requirements, set the job descriptions, and offer salaries not exceeding what the commissioner makes. The new staff will not need to be certified as corrections officers and will report directly to the commissioner of the department.

The bill also renames the deputy commissioner for prisoner rehabilitation the deputy commissioner for inmate rehabilitation. The deputy commissioner develops and implements programs meant to reduce recidivism.

One of the 15 newly hired employees will lead a department in charge of providing constituent services, which will act as a conduit between Corrections and individuals seeking information about people currently incarcerated in Alabama’s prisons.

That person will also be the liaison between Corrections and the Joint Prison Oversight Committee to review and address issues that constituents have with the services provided by Corrections.

The remaining employees will be placed in individual corrections facilities. Each will be charged with fostering communication between the public and the prison, providing people with information about incidents taking place within each of the facilities.

ADOC Commissioner John Hamm spoke of the legislation at the Joint Prison Oversight Committee meeting earlier this month. Corrections has staff dedicated to providing services to friends and family of those who are incarcerated, but said the system is “fractured” and needs improvement.

“At some point, you might get the same person answering the call, you might not, to find out the information,” Hamm said earlier this month. “What we’re doing is looking at unifying the response to where we will have a group of individuals that work out of the commissioner’s office. Someone will be at each one of the facilities, and at the central office, to handle the constituent calls.”

The idea was generated from feedback the public provided at the public hearing the Joint Prison Oversight Committee hosted in December.

“That was a very difficult meeting, probably the most difficult meeting that I have been in since I have been in the Legislature, hearing from the families and the different things that are going on or alleged to have been going on,” said Chambliss, who serves as chair of the oversight committee.

Family and friends have become concerned about the well-being of loved ones currently incarcerated.

“The primary issue is communication, or lack of communication,” Chambliss said in an interview after the meeting. “Being able to get answers to questions. Families hearing this happened or that happened, and not being able to hear from DOC directly, yes it did or no it didn’t.”

More than 300 people died in Alabama’s prisons in 2023. The U.S. Department of Justice in 2020 filed a lawsuit against the state’s prisons, alleging that physical and sexual violence in the facilities violates inmates’ Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment.

“This is all part of that same process, of knowing what is happening,” Chambliss said. “Obviously there is violence happening. We have seen that. It is documented.”

Some senators expressed concerns about the cost of hiring additional staff.

“We are paying tens of millions of dollars in overtime to corrections officers,” said Senate Finance and Taxation General Fund Chair Greg Albritton, R-Atmore, a member of the committee. “We have tried to reduce training. We have been doing several things. We are spending millions of dollars in advertising trying to increase employment at that level.”

Albritton also cited  the increasing construction costs for the two planned men’s prisons. The price tag for a new men’s prison in Elmore County will top $1 billion, consuming the money appropriated from the Legislature for what was initially planned to be two prisons.

“I have got some issues I would like to talk about how we are going to resolve or move forward with that, and my concerns with ongoing expenses,” Albritton said.