Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced today that her administration has deemed four development teams qualified to bid on the construction of three men’s prisons.

The announcement is the latest step in Ivey’s plans to select companies to finance, design, build, and maintain three new men’s prisons that the state would lease and operate. Initial estimates peg the total cost at about $900 million. The developers would bear the upfront costs and the state would lease the facilities for up to about $78 million a year.

Five developer teams had sent statements in August outlining their qualifications to bid. Today’s announcement comes after evaluations of those statements by the Ivey administration.

The four developer teams picked:

Alabama Prison Transformation Partners: Star America; BL Harbert International; Butler-Cohen; Arrington Watkins Architects; and Johnson Controls, Inc.

CoreCivic: CoreCivic; Caddell Construction; DLR Group; and R&N Systems Design.

Corvias: Corvias; Municipal Capital Markets Group; HDR Architecture; JE Dunn Construction (no relation to ADOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn) & CORE Construction (joint venture); TKC Management Services; TreanorHL; Seay, Seay & Litchfield Architects; White-Spunner Construction; Mead & Hunt; and Baldwin Consulting Group

GEO Group: GEO: White Construction Company; and NELSON Wakefield Beasley & Associates.

The Ivey administration released introductory statements from the developer teams that have more information. They can be found at the end of this article.

A developer team could be picked to build one or two of the three prisons, but not all three.

The four developer teams will receive a request for proposals that the governor’s office said it would release in December. The RFP will serve as the foundation for negotiations with the developer teams, the governor’s office said in a press release.

The Alabama Department of Corrections expects to receive proposals in the spring of 2020.

Alabama’s prisons are filled beyond capacity. According to the most recent monthly statistical report, in August, the ADOC has 20,935 prisoners in facilities designed for 12,412. The inmate population is increasing after declining over the last few years.

The Ivey administration’s plan calls for some of the 13 men’s prisons to close. The three new prisons would house a total of about 10,000 inmates. One would have special accommodations for medical care, mental health care, elderly inmates, and prisoner intake. It would be built in central Alabama.

Specific locations have not been picked and prisons that would close have not been named.

In April, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a report that an investigation found that the level of violence, weapons, drugs and other dangers in Alabama’s prisons create conditions that violate the constitution. State officials have been working with the DOJ on ways to address the problems and avert a lawsuit by the DOJ against Alabama.

The DOJ report said new facilities alone would not fix the problems but also noted the poor conditions of Alabama prisons.

ADOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn has said new prisons would allow an expansion of education, treatment, and rehabilitation programs that are difficult to accommodate in the older prisons.

The Ivey administration said the developer teams’ qualifications were evaluated by the ADOC, the Alabama Department of Finance, including the Division of Construction Management, and private consultants Hoar Program Management and CGL.

Of the five developer teams that submitted statements of qualifications in August, only Corrections Consultants LLC was left off the list released today.