Louisiana sure can use the money...

But Alabama can't afford to keep shipping its prison inmates there. The state sent 600 more prisoners to a private facility in Louisiana recently in a last-minute rush to comply with a state judge's order to eliminate the backlog of state prisoners in county jails. As Jefferson County's sheriff noted, though, the state has erased the problem before, only to see it return with a vengeance.

Alabama's new voluntary sentencing guidelines should trim the incarceration numbers a bit, but any long-term fix to the state's dangerously overcrowded corrections system will require either a large influx of money to build and staff more facilities or a reform of the sentencing laws that impose some of the stiffest penalties in the country on thousands of drug users every year.