Alabama is in the midst of a prison crisis: the Department of Justice (DOJ) has declared Alabama’s prison system for men to be unconstitutionally “cruel and unusual” twice since 2019 and has sued the state of Alabama as a result. The DOJ has explicitly stated that building new prisons will not address the constitutional violations that they documented, but Governor Kay Ivey is moving forward with a plan to pay billions of tax dollars to private prison companies to build three private mega prisons anyway.

The prisons would be built within small, rural communities in Bibb, Elmore, and Escambia counties, and plans to build these massive new private prisons are plowing forward without any assessment of the environmental impact they will have on critical water supplies, ecosystems and watersheds in Alabama. Local residents and environmental experts are ringing the alarms as construction looms for prisons that would nearly double the population of these communities without any plan for basic things like drinking water and waste treatment. In addition to the steep human cost of this expansion of mass incarceration in Alabama, we are facing a thoughtless environmental disaster in the making.

Threatened, endangered, and endemic species will be impacted if these gigantic prisons are built. Water quality and availability will be impacted if these gigantic prisons are built. Critical wildlife habitats and the special outdoor places people love may be destroyed.

Please use this portal to take action today by sending letters to Governor Ivey and your state legislators asking them not to move forward with a plan that has irreversible consequences for our rural residents and businesses, wildlife habitats and quality of life in Alabama.