It seems like every time I look at the news there is another case of a missing person. Every one of these cases is heartbreaking, and, in fact, many are preventable. I don’t know about you, but every time I read about one of these cases, I find myself thinking about the ways in which […]

As multiple recent state and national news stories have illustrated, overcrowded state prisons is one of the key challenges facing Alabama. While the state legislature has made significant strides over the past few years in the area of criminal justice reform, Alabama’s prisons are still at about 166% of capacity. This creates a dangerous environment […]

Police officers, sheriffs and district attorneys do heroic work every day to lock up criminals and keep our streets and neighborhoods safe. Yet many parts of our criminal justice system are broken, and layers of bureaucracy and a thicket of self-serving fees and outdated rules create barriers for people who have already paid their debt […]

The members of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles aren’t doing their jobs. In July, Jimmy O’Neal Spencer was charged with the brutal killings of Martha Dell Reliford, 65, Marie Kitchens Martin, 74, and Martin’s seven-year-old great-grandson, Colton Ryan Lee, in Guntersville. Spencer, a man with a violent rap sheet going back to the early 1980s, had […]

No one makes it through life without regrets. The split-second decision we wish we could take back, the risk we never should have taken, the people we failed to prioritize—these are the moments that open our eyes to our need for a fresh start. Unfortunately, not everyone gets a second chance. Right now, there are 22,401 adults in […]

April is National Autism Awareness Month and as the father of a child on the autism spectrum, I know firsthand the importance of raising awareness for the 50,000 Alabamians impacted by autism. Affecting one in every 68 people, autism has become the country’s fastest growing developmental disability. I have spent the past decade advocating to […]

Budget cuts. Tax increases. Agency restructurings. We’ve heard and seen it all over the past several months since the Legislature first came to order in early March. Since that time, there has been a regular session and two special sessions. Throughout each, a lot of ideas were bounced off the wall – some stuck, some […]

The biggest threat to public safety looms over our great state of Alabama like a storm cloud. Our prison system is grossly over capacity, doesn’t rehabilitate those who need it the most, and places a burden on our parole officers and other officials who can’t handle the unnecessarily high-intake volume. The good news is that […]

Right now, Alabama is on track to solve one of the biggest threats to its budget and autonomy: our state criminal justice system. You may not know its full significance. We have spent the last decade unable to deal with increasing burdens on our state prisons. Our facilities hold almost twice the number of inmates […]

I have the pleasure of serving as Vice Chairman of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that states are The Laboratories of Democracy – the good ideas of governance come from the state level, and then are often adopted nationwide if proven to […]

Before this session, my fellow legislators and I understood that our state faced a financial reckoning – especially in terms of the General Fund Budget – which funds all non-Education spending in our state. Vital programs instrumental to the daily lives of Alabama’s citizens are being cut to the bone – and then filleted even […]

When most state laws dealing with computers were first written, the average Alabama family did not have a home computer. These laws focused on protecting the physical components of computers, and not the valuable personal information families and businesses use on a daily basis to access their bank accounts and other platforms that have become […]