ELMORE COUNTY, Ala. — State officials will name a $1 billion prison in Elmore County after Gov. Kay Ivey, who made its construction a priority in her first term.
Members of the Alabama Corrections Institution Finance Authority (ACIFA), which oversees prison financing, voted Wednesday to call the facility the “Governor Kay Ivey Correctional Complex.”
Gina Maiola, a spokeswoman for the governor, said in a statement Wednesday that Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm proposed the move, “and the governor ultimately gave it her blessing.”
“There is no governor in Alabama’s history who has done more to improve the state’s corrections system than Governor Ivey, so it is fitting that one of the new facilities will bear her name,” the statement said. “And her work on this issue is certainly not done.”
A spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Corrections Wednesday referred to Maiola’s statement.
The ACIFA resolution said Ivey “has supported many public safety and corrections initiatives to support the criminal justice system as a whole and the state’s correctional officers specifically.”
The governor has made new prisons the centerpiece of efforts to address the state’s decades-long prison crisis, driven by overcrowding and a lack of staffing.
In 2020, following two scathing reports about conditions in Alabama’s correctional facilities that detailed widespread physical and sexual violence, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state, alleging that the prison conditions violated inmates’ Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Ivey and former Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn pushed for new facilities to address the crisis, arguing that the state’s existing prisons were past their useful lives, dangerous to inmates and staff and lacking in space for rehabilitative programming. Both officials said new prisons would require less staff; would be safer for those inside and would have more space for programming.
After years of effort, Ivey in 2021 managed to get the Legislature to sign off on a $1.3 billion bill that authorized the construction of two 4,000 bed prisons in Elmore and Escambia counties.
The bill also opened the door to a new women’s facility and renovations at existing prisons, but did not provide those projects with dedicated funding sources.
Critics said new prisons would not address problems of staffing and culture in the state’s correctional system contributing to the violence. A 2019 DOJ report said new facilities alone would not address the problems in the system.
Ivey also received criticism for using about $400 million of the state’s federal COVID relief funds to pay for the prisons. The price tag on the Elmore County prison, the first to be built, has soared in the last four years and is expected to consume most of the funding originally allotted to the project. It is not clear where money for the Escambia prison will be found.
This article originally appeared in the Alabama Reflector, an independent, nonprofit news outlet. It appears on FOX54.com under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
