Alabama Department of Corrections proposes $50 million budget increase

At Thursday’s hearing before the state legislature’s joint Finances and Budget Committee, Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm requested a $50 million increase for the ADOC’s 2026 fiscal year budget, which would raise the department’s total budget to over $800 million.

A large portion of the ADOC’s requested budget would go toward staffing needs and increases to wages, salaries, and benefits. Understaffing has long plagued Alabama’s correctional facilities, especially with a steadily increasing custody population, but Hamm indicated that progress is being made.

Hamm highlighted the 266 correctional officers who graduated from the ADOC Training Academy in 2024, the 149 trainees who have reported to the academy as of January this year, and the 50 trainees who completed the ACTIVATE program last year. ACTIVATE is a new partnership between ADOC and the state’s community colleges which prepares students to attend the ADOC Training Academy.

The department’s staffing needs have only grown with the construction of the Governor Kay Ivey Correctional Complex in Elmore County, a new prison set to house 4,000 inmates across 54 buildings and 300 acres of property. Hamm announced that the complex is over halfway completed as of January and that construction is expected to be finished by May 29, 2026. The new facility alone is responsible for $27 million of ADOC’s requested budget increase, with those funds earmarked for medical services and maintenance contracts in addition to staff hirings. The Ivey facility is also ostensibly responsible for a major increase in ADOC’s budget allotment for equipment purchases.

The commissioner did face some questioning over the project’s cost overruns, with one member of the committee pointing out that the funds appropriated for the prison’s construction were originally intended for two separate facilities. However, Hamm seemed to quiet those concerns, explaining that the project’s construction costs will not exceed the contractor’s final guaranteed maximum price of $1.08 billion.

Besides the new prison, the ADOC budget proposal also earmarks funds for salary and benefits increases as well as a court-ordered increase in spending on inmate medical services. $1.5 million dollars was also requested for additional and replacement security camera equipment at the ADOC’s St. Clair Correctional Facility.

Commissioner Hamm was also briefly asked about ADOC’s controversial work-release program, which critics have compared to involuntary servitude and the racist legacy of “convict leasing.” The Center for Constitutional Rights is currently suing the state over the program, arguing that inmates are “forced by the State of Alabama to labor against their will” and that the current prison labor system is unconstitutional. Hamm was asked how much ADOC takes from the wages that inmates make through the work-release program, to which he replied, “40 percent.”