Earlier this month, there was a considerable amount of buzz suggesting a solution to Alabama’s decades-long prison dilemma was imminent.
With the possibility of federal COVID-19 relief money coming to the state to make up for the state’s lost tax receipts due to the pandemic, there had even been some discussion of a new women’s prison, in addition to the men’s facilities needed to address Department of Justice Eighth Amendment violation concerns.
During an interview with Mobile radio FM Talk 106.5’s “The Jeff Poor Show,” State Sen. Greg Albritton (R-Atmore), the chairman of the Alabama Senate General Fund budget committee, said he was not quite as optimistic as he had been earlier given disagreements over what he deemed “key things.”
“If you’d ask me a couple of days ago, I’d had been much more optimistic than today,” he said. “There is a lot of agreement on a lot of things. But there continues to be disagreement over key things. We’re still working on it. We’re still meeting. We’re still having discussions even as we speak. We hope to be able to get there, but it is not an easy path.”
“There are two or three major issues that are sticking points right now that I’m aware of,” Albritton continued. “There could be more. I don’t know yet. But there’s still enough out there to cause concern as to whether we can move forward or not. We hope so, and we continue to work in an optimistic manner together to find a path or way to overcome those obstacles. And we’re still working on that. We’ve got to do something. The status quo is untenable right now.”
The Escambia County lawmaker said specific guidance on federal COVID-19 relief money has yet to come. There were other proposals beyond corrections as to where that money should be allocated, which were complicating the process.
“[W]e haven’t gotten anything new from the feds at this point,” he said. “We’ve combed through all of the directions and such, and it still appears appropriate uses of the money for this, for the construction in some ways and some manners, but, you know, there are more complications than that. And that is, there are demands for that money from everybody. We have a particular amount that’s available, and the demands are about three times that that is available. And then, we still have the prison problem. And so, there are complications, but it is not just the feds’ holdup in that. That’s a part of it. It’s more complicated than that.”
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Alabama, the editor of Breitbart TV, a columnist for Mobile’s Lagniappe Weekly, and host of Mobile’s “The Jeff Poor Show” from 9 a.m.-12 p.m. on FM Talk 106.5.
