….and such small portions

Jan 8, 2009

By Ken.

At his blog Likelihood of Success, Ron Coleman brings us a tale of the ultimate moral hazard — the Alabama Sheriff who, under state law, gets to pocket money left over after he’s done feeding jail inmates. This one ends with another bad guy in jail.

U.S. District Judge U.W. Clemon had court security arrest Morgan County Sheriff Greg Bartlett after dramatic testimony from skinny prisoners about paper-thin bologna and cold grits. The hearing offered a rare look into Alabama’s unusual practice of letting sheriffs pocket money left over from feeding inmates.

The sheriff, who showed no emotion when his arrest was ordered, had testified that he legally kept as personal income about $212,000 over three years with surplus meal money but denied that inmates were improperly fed.

Clemon, however, said the sheriff would be jailed until he comes up with a plan to provide the 300 jail inmates with nutrionally adequate meals, as required by a 2001 court order.

The state law in question is jaw-dropping.

Sheriffs in 55 of Alabama’s 67 counties operate under the system allowing them to make money operating their jail kitchens. The law pays sheriffs $1.75 a day for each prisoner they house and lets the elected officers pocket any profit they can generate.

The law doesn’t require the leftover money to be spent at the jail or within the department; sheriffs can keep it as personal income. They historically have provided little information about profits under the practice that dates back to the Depression.

Aside from the ridiculous and corruption-inspiring Alabama law, the only thing surprising about this story is that there were any consequences to the Sheriff. As I’ve argued before, treating prisoners brutally is almost never going to get you fired or defeated at election. It’s far more likely to make you a local — or even national — hero, thanks to a culture that for the most part accepts the proposition that prisoners are by definition evil and sub-human, and that anything done to them is merely an appropriate consequence of their crimes and a positive correction for past coddling. For the most part, people don’t care that some jail inmates are merely accused defendants and not yet convicts; that’s a liberal media nuance. Nor do they care that a great many of them have been convicted of drug crimes as part of the War on Drugs, a vast expansion of government power and of the population of jails and prisons.

The odd thing is that the part of the populace most inclined to cheer for the “tough on crime” Sheriffs is the same part that, at least nominally, is responsive to rhetoric about getting big government off of our backs. People don’t seem to make the connection between the taxman and the bureaucrat and the jailer. Yet the connection is inescapable. Expansion of the law enforcement and prison systems means expanded government, more entrenched bureaucracy, stronger government employee unions, and more powerful politicians. Normalizing and condoning brutality towards prisoners necessarily normalizes subservience to government in general. So if you laugh and hoot and pump your fist when the county Sheriff starves prisoners, don’t come crying to me when you are treated with brutal indifference, incompetence, neglect, or privileged hostility by some other facet of the government.

Edit: More from Jonathan Turley.