Alabama is spending $1.25 billion to build a 4,000-bed prison for men intended to help with the crowding, violence, weapons, and drugs that plague the state’s aging and understaffed correctional facilities.
But state lawmakers got a reminder Wednesday that there is no plan to replace Julia Tutwiler Prison, the state’s only major prison for women, which opened in 1942.
A woman who served time at Tutwiler on a drug distribution charge told the Alabama Legislature’s Joint Prison Oversight Committee that problems go well beyond the old building’s structural shortcomings and include rampant drug sales and use…