SHEFFIELD – Alabama State Representative Johnny Mack Morrow held a public meeting Monday night to present his draft of a State Constitutional Amendment. The meeting, held at the city’s Municipal Building, was to provide the County Commission, city officials and the public a basic foundation to move forward on curbing unregulated housing and employment of State prison parolees, including those convicted of sex crimes. The amendment is written for Colbert County only.
Morrow has been working “full steam ahead” on the amendment since it was found out about 4 weeks ago that a closed-down motel, the 4 Way, had been purchased by a company owned principally by Joe McKinney, of McKinney Lumber Company, situated next door to the motel. According to Morrow and Colbert County residents who are aware to this issue, up to 33 parolees from all over the state would be brought here to work in McKinney’s wood pallet manufacturing facility and would live in his motel. The parolees would be paid by the company for their work and, in turn, would pay $220 per week for their housing. Another corporate entity would collect and hold the parolees paychecks and would, in turn pay McKinney’s company the rent on the parolees behalf. Any surplus in each parolees accounts would be held for them, or doled-out to them as the company saw fit. We have reached out to Joe McKinney numerous times for his response to this issue. He has declined to give The Quad-Cities Daily an interview.
This Amendment, if passed, will be the first Home Rule Constitutional Amendment in Alabama. Several Colbert County Commissioners were at the hearing and expressed to the audience their support of Morrow’s proposal. Representative Morrow made it clear to the attendees that his submission was only the foundation for the final bill. He asked the County Commissioners to take this work-in-progress and proceed in designing a bill that would contain all of the legal elements of the finished product. The Commissioners agreed to work on the bill in a timely manner, with the goal of having this amendment ready for a November special session of the State Legislature.
Dr. Mark McIlwayne
Dr. Mark R. McIlwain, who has been at the forefront of this effort with Representative Morrow, painted the consequences of inaction in stark terms. He annotated statistics from the United States Department of Justice that say, “More recently, Hanson and Morton-Bourgon (2004) conducted a meta-analysis of 95 studies involving a combined sample of 31,216 sex offenders. The average sexual recidivism rate found was 13.7 percent and the average overall recidivism rate was 36.9 percent, based on an average followup period of 5 to 6 years.”
McIlwain said, “If that facility were to open and 18 of the residents were paroled sexual offenders, within 6 years of operation, there would be between 2 and 7 sexual assault victims because of this place.”
