Before spending billions on mega prisons, let’s fix Alabama’s vending machine justice - AL.com

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Beth Shelburne is a writer and journalist based in Birmingham. She previously served as a news anchor and reporter at Fox 6 WBRC. She currently works part-time as an investigative reporter for the Campaign for Smart Justice with ACLU of Alabama.

35 years, 4 months and 22 days. That’s how long the state of Alabama has kept Michael Schumacher, 60, in prison for a robbery he committed in 1985. Schumacher was sentenced to a mandatory life without parole — the harshest punishment next to the death penalty — under Alabama’s draconian habitual felony offender act, because he had three prior drug-related convictions from Georgia on his record. If convicted today, the maximum sentence Schumacher would face under Alabama’s current guidelines would allow him to be considered for parole after 15 years.

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Schumacher is among more than 500 people Alabama has sentenced to die in prison under our state’s repeat offender law. I’ve been talking to many of them over the last several years, trying to elevate the lived experience of incarceration when the punishment does not fit the crime. At least 300 of them, like Schumacher, are there for robberies, burglaries and drug cases, many that resulted in no physical injury. The average age in this population is 54. They are part of an aging prison population that has exploded by 3000 percent in Alabama in the last 40 years, largely due to the habitual offender law, which imposes longer sentences each time someone commits a felony. For years, it mandated a life without parole sentence for anyone convicted of a Class A offense who had any three prior felony convictions on their record.

“Everybody will admit privately it is the root of a lot of the problems we face now,” Dick Brewbaker said, a retired Republican lawmaker. He supported reforming the law because it not only crowded the prisons, but also took away judges' discretion, turning criminal sentences into one-size-fits-all.

“It just turned into vending machine justice,” he said.

I traced this evolution of Alabama’s habitual offender law in a recent feature published by The Daily Beast, arguing that its story demonstrates the difficulty in unwinding excessive criminal justice policy, no matter how broken the system. The law was designed by former attorney general Charlie “lock-em-up” Graddick in the late 1970s, the same man that Governor Kay Ivey appointed as director of the Bureau of Pardons and Paroles. Since he took over, paroles have plummeted to unprecedented, historic lows, even as Alabama prisons grapple with a raging, deadly virus and monstrous overcrowding.

Since the 70s, many Alabamaians have grown to view the habitual offender law as unnecessarily harsh, but over a dozen attempts to soften the mandatory punishments in the following decades fizzled under pressure from law enforcement and the victim’s advocacy organization VOCAL. Finally, lawmakers amended the law in 2000, ostensibly to make it less severe, but the damage was never undone. Then in 2014, the legislature inexplicably reversed the amendment that allowed people like Schumacher to appeal their sentences, slamming the door on their opportunity for a second chance. Over 100 of them have already served at least 30-years in prison, a longer sentence than some people receive for rape or murder.

Gov. Kay Ivey’s “Alabama solution” to our unconstitutionally violent and crowded prisons is to build even more prisons at a cost of $2.6 billion of taxpayer money. On September 3, Ivey announced that two private companies were awarded contracts to design and build three mega-prisons, which the companies will own and lease back to the state. One company, CoreCivic, is the second largest private prison company in the country with a long record of abuses similar to the problems that drew the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate and conclude the Alabama Department of Corrections' cruel and usual punishments violate the Constitution. In addition to shady math, Ivey’s plan ignores Alabama’s over-incarceration, particularly among people of color. Three out of four people sentenced to life under the habitual offender law are Black.

People like Ronald McKeithen, who was sentenced to life without parole at 22 for a robbery of a grocery store. At the time, McKeithen was using IV drugs and admittedly, making terrible decisions. But today, he lives in the honor dorm at Donaldson prison and has a stellar prison record. Even the victim in the case, Farooq Janjua, believes the sentence is excessive. When I contacted him, he didn’t believe McKeithen was still in prison for the 1983 robbery. “That was a long time ago,” Janjua said. “If he’s really still serving time for that robbery, it looks like that’s not fair.”

Schumacher, McKeithen and hundreds of others are not the same people they were decades ago when they committed crimes. Despite their hopeless sentences, they haven’t given up on themselves. As they’ve grown up and matured in prison, they’ve taken classes and now mentor younger prisoners and go to church. McKeithen is an accomplished artist. Schumacher won the prison’s scrabble tournament. These are good people who deserve a chance to live a normal life again.

When Governor Ivey says new prisons will allow Alabama to move from warehousing criminals to rehabilitating future citizens, she’s not telling the truth. Our prisons have always warehoused human beings, which is what they were designed to do, and building bigger prisons won’t change that. If leaders were really interested in rehabilitating future citizens, they would do more to create real pathways out of prison, like fixing our parole crisis and repealing the habitual offender law that turns prison into a dead end, instead of building new prisons to keep people like Schumacher and McKeithen locked up for the rest of their lives.

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Before spending billions on mega prisons, let’s fix Alabama’s vending machine justice - AL.com
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