This is an opinion column.

The Alabama Legislature’s prison oversight committee meeting this week was a revelation.

Not because of what was said. Because no big solution for the problems that plague us was really discussed.

But you couldn’t sit through it without realizing that nobody – nobody – has a grip on Alabama’s bloated, dangerous, massively expensive, unconstitutional and murderous prison system.  Nobody talks much at all.

Which means we’ll inevitably throw more money at it. And it will fail.

We’ll spend a billion dollars on a brand new prison in Elmore County. Construction is underway, and it will be done in 2026. But it won’t relieve the notorious overcrowding because four other prisons are slated to close.

How’s that gonna work?

It’ll be “an interesting conversation in the future,” prison commissioner John Hamm said, which makes it seem like we’re spitballing the whole thing.

A second new prison planned in Escambia County was supposed to be paid for with that initial billion. But the price tag rose. That one will probably cost another billion dollars, though it’s hard to know now because it has no funding. It will need another legislative act to get it.

And a bunch more cash.

In the meantime we keep stuffing more inmates into sardine cans – close to 100 more each month over the last three years – and that trend is not slowing down..

“Oh, it is going up,” Hamm said of the prison population.

It’s not Hamm’s fault. He didn’t create the problem. He just can’t fix it.  It’s not the legislative committee’s fault, either. But it’s time we understood we’re doing this wrong, Alabama.

The Legislature has oversight meetings, but all it really oversees is the budget. The prison system, like the parole system, is an executive function. The prisons are a mess, but they have to deal with a stubborn parole board, with bills passed by the Legislature that often create more criminals, demand longer sentences and lead to assorted unintended consequences. ADOC lawyers can’t even defend their agency in court anymore, for Attorney General Steve Marshall stripped them of their assistant AG status.

The prisons can’t even tell inmates they can do themselves a favor by getting off drugs or behaving themselves because the parole board won’t let most of them out and the state has stopped giving credits for good time.

Rep. Jim Hill, R-Moody, a member of the oversight committee, said this week he would like to see prisoners who complete drug rehab programs in prison be rewarded for their efforts. He suggested they should somehow be able to parlay completion of such a program into a heightened chance at release.

Which makes complete sense. Everybody at that oversight meeting nodded. Including families of inmates, a group of preachers, and Hamm himself. For all the good it will do. Because it points out exactly why we can’t get things done.

Hamm was asked about it after the meeting. Could he reach out to Pardons & Paroles to come to some such agreement? He was not optimistic.

“They’re a different entity,” he said. “They’re an independent board, so we concentrate on what educational opportunities or rehabilitative opportunities we can give inmates while they’re in custody.”

Like Alabama’s penal system is the Tower of Babel.

I asked Hamm if he would like the parole board to agree to such a thing.

“Oh, we would like to see more individuals get an opportunity to get out,” he said.

That’s the head of the prison system, pretty much throwing his hands in the air.

Because it gets harder to manage prisons, or to encourage rehabilitation, when you can give inmates a checklist of things they need to do to get a better chance of being paroled, only to see those efforts ignored by the parole board. Especially when those denials result in inmates being set off for another five years and sometimes reclassified and sent to a more secure prison because of it.

And it happens all the time. The Parole Board still refuses to let more than a handful of people out of prison each month, and ignores prison overcrowding, federal warnings about the unconstitutional conditions and other atrocities. Shoot, that board even denies paroles in violation of its own standards and the recommendations of parole board staff.

There’s a lot of blame to go around, in all three branches of government. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole, where everybody has a hammer but nobody has the authority or the will to change the game.

The federal government is going to have to finish the game. Because Alabama is lost.

John Archibald is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.