As Alabama Cuts Benefits, Desperate Man ‘Robs’ Bank To Get Food, Shelter In Jail

He is in danger of being abused by guards and other prisoners.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/07/11/2278871/alabama-jail-poverty/

By Scott Keyes posted from ThinkProgress Economy on Jul 11, 2013

So desperate for food and shelter, an Alabama man did the unthinkable this week: robbing a bank so he could turn himself in and get sent to jail.

Rickie Lawrence Gardner, a 49-year-old man from the small town of Moulton, Alabama, entered Bank Independent on Monday and handed the teller a note saying he had a gun and to hand over the bank’s money. After the employee complied, Gardner took the bag of cash, walked outside, and locked it in his car. He then sat on a bench in front of the bank and waited for police officers to arrive.

“When officers got there, he did not offer any kind of resistance. He was just waiting on them,” Moulton Police Chief Lyndon McWhorter said. “His is the first bank robbery I’ve ever worked where the robber was waiting outside the bank for the police to turn himself in.”

What drove Gardner to such a drastic measure? He was on the cusp of losing his job because a leg injury put him in so much pain that it prevented him from working. Facing possible homelessness, jail was a preferable option in his mind. And he wasn’t looking for just a short stay. Despite his note, Gardner wasn’t even carrying a gun when he committed the robbery; he’d only mentioned it in the note, according to the AP, “because he thought it would get him a longer sentence.”

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Perhaps most tragic about Gardner’s saga is that even if he gets his wish and winds up in prison, Alabama’s incarceration system is severely overcrowded and underfunded. Because it draws its funding largely from the General Fund, state lawmakers’ budget-cutting zeal could produce shortfalls in prison funding. As a result, Chris Sanders, a policy analyst at the public interest group Arise Citizens’ Policy Project, notes that Gardner could be entering “a system that runs at nearly double its designed capacity and that many people long have believed to be teetering on the brink of a federal takeover.”