welcome to alabama, son

You ain't from around here, are ya, boy?

That seems to be the message a northern Alabama sheriff was sending when it came to light that not only was he skimping on the $1.75 per day allowance he was allotted to feed his prisoners, he was allowed under Alabama law to keep whatever was left over.

According to the NY Times story, Sheriff Greg Bartlett made somewhere around $212,000 over the past three years by cutting back on how much he spent on feeding his prisoners -- and he legally got to keep the money.

However, as a judge learned about the situation, including information that some inmates had dropped as much as thirty pounds while staying in Sheriff Bartlett's Decatur, Alabama jail, he was so appalled he ordered the sheriff himself confined in his own jail until he could come up with a plan to better feed his inmates.

“There was undisputed evidence that most of the inmates had lost significant weight,” the judge, U. W. Clemon of Federal District Court in Birmingham, said Thursday in an interview. “I could not ignore them.”

So this week, Judge Clemon ordered Sheriff Bartlett himself jailed until he came up with a plan to adequately feed prisoners more, anyway, than a few spoonfuls of grits, part of an egg and a piece of toast at breakfast, and bits of undercooked, bloody chicken at supper.

Delightful. Thank you, Sheriff Bartlett, for propogating the stereotype of southern sheriffs as ignorant, selfish, inhuman monsters. Southern justice at its best.