USA: Alabama sheriffs filled their wallets by starving prisoners

Alabama law lets sheriffs keep whatever doesn’t get spent on food from their jail food funds. Now 49 of those sheriffs are refusing to disclose how much of that money made it to detainees’ plates, and how much landed in their own pockets.

Since July, two civil-rights groups have been asking Alabama sheriffs for their bookkeeping on jailhouse meal funds. The two groups, the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, have good reason to ask: One Alabama sheriff recently came under fire for taking money from her jail’s food fund and investing it in an alleged get-rich-quick car loan scheme run by a convicted fraudster. But instead of turning over documents on food funds, Alabama’s sheriffs remain tight-lipped. So the two civil rights groups are suing the 49 sheriffs to find out where detainees’ dinner money is going.

“In most counties, money comes in on a per-inmate, per-day basis,” Aaron Littman, a staff attorney at the SCHR told The Daily Beast. In most cases, Alabama gives sheriffs $1.75 per day to feed each detainee, although that rate might vary for people detained on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

If sheriffs don’t spend all the meal money, Alabama lets them pocket it for personal use. For some sheriffs, that means hundreds of thousands in bonus cash. In Alabama’s Etowah County, the sheriff took $250,000 in “compensation” from “food provisions” in 2016, according to documents reviewed by the SCHR.

But most counties do not reveal how much of their jails’ food budgets made it to the dinner table, and how much went to sheriffs’ bank accounts. Beginning in July 2017, SCHR sent Alabama sheriffs four letters requesting documents on how the meal funds were being spent, which should have been available to anyone who asked under the Alabama Public Records Law. None of the sheriffs turned over the records.

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