Judge Pryor urging sentencing reforms in Alabama

As detailed in this newspaper article from The Mobile Register, Eleventh Circuit Judge William Pryor in a speech earlier this week to the Southern Legislative Conference, said that "sentencing practices in many states have grown unfair and bulged prison populations over the last two decades."  Earlier this year Judge Pryor, who served as Alabama's Attorney General before his appointment(s) to the bench, also gave a very pro-reform speech as the Keynote speaker at the Columbia Law Review's terrific symposium "Sentencing: What's at Stake for the States?" (background here; Pryor's keynote address appears at Lessons of a Sentencing Reformer from the Deep South, 105 Colum. L. Rev. 943 (May 2005).)

Here are some interesting passages from the Register article:

"If sentencing reform has been urgently needed anywhere, it's in Alabama," [Pryor] said. "Crisis is the only word that could fairly be used to describe the condition in my state."...  Pryor ticked off statistics familiar to those who have studied the state's corrections system. Between 1930 and 1980, he said, Alabama's prison population held fairly steady at about 5,000 inmates. That number doubled by 1990 and increased to 23,000 by 2003.

In an interview after his speech, Pryor said other states have enjoyed great success at reducing overcrowded prisons by reforming their sentencing structures. Now that he is a judge, he said it is not for him to say when or how the state should proceed.  But he told the conference delegates during his address that while different "stakeholders" distrusted each other, "I could not find a defender of the status quo."