In Alabama's Prisons, Conditions

In Alabama's Prison System, Conditions Continue to Deteriorate

As the U.S. Department of Justice presses forward with a lawsuit alleging Eighth Amendment violations in Alabama’s prison system, historical issues have yet to be addressed.

By Daniel Schmidt

Jan. 28, 2022

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – As Gov. Kay Ivey signed Alabama’s largest prison construction program into state law on Oct. 1, 2021, she and other legislative leaders promised that big changes were coming to what is considered one of the nation’s most violent and overcrowded prison systems. Those changes didn’t come fast enough.

Within 10 days of Ivey’s signature, two prisoners – Kenneth Gilchrist and Travis Hutchins – were stabbed to death in separate prisons. At the time, their deaths received routine news coverage and not much else. Yet with their deaths in such proximity to the prison construction bill’s signing, they were a reminder of what’s at stake and how far the state has to go to fix its prison system.

“I’m not saying this to get sympathy, but in so many ways it’s like hell,” said Swift Justice, who is currently incarcerated in Alabama and goes by the pseudonym to protect his identity. Over the course of 27 years spent in prisons across the state, he says he has witnessed how conditions have deteriorated over time and how the state’s prison system “systematically dehumanizes those that end up behind bars.”

Prisoners and advocates claim that dangerous overcrowding in correctional facilities caused by state legislation, corruption and violence associated with the state’s correctional officer force and unsanitary everyday conditions that the DOJ says violate prisoners’ constitutional rights protected under the Eighth Amendment are primary contributors to said systematic dehumanization.

Overcrowding

ADOC’s prisons have historically been known for dangerous overcrowding which is partially the result of state-level legislation known as the habitual offender sentencing enhancement. Passed in 1977, the Habitual Felony Offender Act mandated longer sentences for individuals with prior felonies. In practical terms, this means that someone convicted of numerous non-violent felonies could serve a similar sentence to that of someone convicted of first-degree murder.

The Alabama ACLU says that around 500 people, or 2.5% of the state’s prison population, are currently serving life sentences for non-fatal crimes because of the HFOA. While this is not a significant portion of prisoners, such long sentences for non-fatal crimes have only contributed to long-term overcrowding in ADOC facilities.

Other state-level legislation that has contributed to overcrowding in Alabama’s prisons is current drug possession laws. In Alabama, possession of a controlled substance is a Class C felony and punishable by up to three years in prison.

According to annual reports published by ADOC, an average of 21% of all new admissions between 2015 and 2019 were for the possession of a controlled substance, by far the largest cause of new admissions. In fact, new admissions for possession as a share of all new admissions have consistently grown year over year since 2015.

Once the incarcerated have served enough of their sentence and become eligible for parole, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles has the final say on whether they are able to leave prison under the supervision of parole officers. In recent years, the parole board, which is made up of a former prosecutor, former state trooper and former probation officer, has approved fewer and fewer eligible prisoners.

This decline in paroles has had perhaps the most sizable and inequitable impact on overcrowding. Since September 2019, parole has been granted to only around 15% of the roughly 4,200 prisoners that appeared before the parole board. During that same time, Black prisoners have been granted parole 61% less often than white prisoners, according to monthly statistical reports on the ABPP website.

Corrections and Violence

Despite ADOC facilities not being as crowded now as they were in 2011, when the in-house prison population peaked at over 25,000, glaring issues that have plagued the state’s prison system for decades have spiraled out of control in recent years. Among those issues is the prevalence of violence, which has exploded in recent years.

Of the 128 combined homicides and suicides officially recognized by the state that have occurred since October 2007, 53 of those have occurred since September 2019. This does not take into account a 781% increase in assaults between October 2010 and September 2021.

Gilchrist, 31, was stabbed to death at Donaldson Correctional Facility in Jefferson County on Oct. 11. Gilchrist was convicted of attempted murder and burglary in 2012 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Hutchins, 34, was stabbed to death at the Bibb Correctional Facility in Bibb County on Oct. 7. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Hutchins was the target of two other unrelated stabbings in 2016 and 2020 and was the plaintiff in an unsuccessful 2016 civil lawsuit alleging that correctional officers “acted with deliberate indifference to his safety when they failed to protect him from attack.”

In recent months, this violence has only escalated further. While ADOC has yet to publish monthly statistical reports for December 2021, anecdotal reports from those currently incarcerated say that the mood behind bars has become increasingly tense.

On Facebook groups such as Alabama Prison Advocacy & Reform and Alabama Incarcerated Families United, numerous posts have been made since the start of 2022 about fatal and non-fatal stabbings and even a fire being set at Donaldson Correctional Facility after multiple prisoners were said to have been stabbed and tempers flared.

A major factor in this escalation of violence has been the dwindling number of correctional officers employed by ADOC.

In the DOJ’s lawsuit against the state, it was found that the state employed only 1,000 out of 3,300 correctional officers authorized by the Alabama Legislature for fiscal year 2018. Inside ADOC facilities, this lack of correctional officers has created an atmosphere of impunity where violence, whether it be committed by prisoners or officers themselves, is routine.

Ron McKeithen, a formerly incarcerated man who spent 37 years in prisons across Alabama, detailed how corrections officers wield the threat of violence to exert control over the prison population. “They don’t have enough officers in there to control the prisons. They’ll come in force with their blackjacks out and their mace, and if you don’t get into compliance they just start swinging and hitting,” said McKeithen. “They don’t give you a chance.”

The use of excessive force by correctional officers against the incarcerated is not a new phenomenon, although recent instances of brutality have received more legal and media attention than in the past.

A prominent example of this came in July 2020 when Sgts. Keith Finch and Orlanda Walker and correctional officers Jordan Thomas and Kevin Blaylock from Bibb Correctional Facility were indicted by a federal grand jury for use of excessive force and obstruction of justice.

According to the indictments, officers fractured both of a prisoner’s arms with a baton, repeatedly kicked him and falsified paperwork to cover up the incident. Despite Thomas pleading guilty to the excessive force charge and testifying against Sgt. Finch and Blaylock, the two were acquitted of all charges in November 2021. Currently, Sgt. Walker has yet to go on trial for the obstruction of justice charge.

These instances of brutality and subsequent coverups by prison staff have been confirmed by former ADOC employees. “Hope,” a former nurse who wished to remain anonymous, spent over nine years working in Alabama’s prison system and recounted a particularly troubling incident involving correctional officers at Bullock Correctional Facility in 2008.

“I heard him begging while they were beating and beating him. When they brought him to me, I had to put a mask and goggles on because they had beaten him so badly and maced him. I was gagging from all the mace,” Hope said. “They tried to get me to say that he attacked them, and I told them ‘I’m not going to say that because I didn’t see it happen, but I heard him begging you to leave him alone.’ We have what we call a body chart, and they wanted me to forge it. I refused to do it.”

The threat of violence posed by some correctional officers is not limited to direct actions. Due to staffing shortages and what has been described by current and former prisoners as an apathetic approach to security, prisoner-on-prisoner violence has become increasingly common.

“We’ve interviewed multiple people who have said that guards, captains and lieutenants will say ‘You’ve got a problem? I can’t help you. Get a knife.’ Like don’t bring your little complaints to me, get a knife. That’s the management style,” Carla Crowder, executive director of the Alabama Appleseed Center, said.

Prison Conditions and Everyday Life

Another major area for concern highlighted in the DOJ’s lawsuit is the physical environment that the incarcerated live in for the duration of their sentence. In the lawsuit, it is alleged that facilities have broken or damaged locks, defective plumbing for toilets and showers that can cause routine flooding in particular facilities and “fail to provide sanitary conditions for prisoners.”

After decades of underfunding for routine maintenance, the governor signed a $1.3 billion prison construction plan on Oct. 1, 2021, that aims to build three high-capacity prisons and renovate several existing prisons.

The state is sourcing nearly one-third of the amount, $400 million, from COVID-19 relief funding provided by the federal government. Prison officials and Ivey advanced the construction plan after the DOJ found that ADOC facilities had fallen into disrepair after the state had mostly performed maintenance on an emergency basis for years.

Leaked images from Kilby and St. Clair Correctional Facilities have only reinforced accusations of increasingly unsanitary conditions in the DOJ’s lawsuit. Photographs reveal dirty and warped mattresses and trash-filled cells, and cellphone footage released by a prisoner on YouTube shows numerous rodents in water bottles that he claims were caught in his cell.

Those images were taken around the same time the state announced that visitation policy would be changing, which would allow visitation in ADOC facilities effective Dec. 4, 2021. Prior to that, friends and loved ones had been barred from visiting the incarcerated since March 13, 2020, or almost 21 months, due to the pandemic.

While prisoners and their loved ones are thankful ADOC ended the nation’s longest continuous suspension of visitation, they have been unhappy with certain restrictions included in the policy change.

Family members have complained on Facebook advocacy group pages about visits being limited to an hour, visitors being required to wear masks while guards supervising the visits go maskless and visitors being distanced behind plexiglass barriers without any physical contact with their incarcerated loved ones.

They say it is yet another tactic to humiliate and dehumanize prisoners and their families, and that is if those wanting to visit are even successful in getting anyone to answer the phone and schedule a visit.

Advocates and family members have also shared stories about unsanitary and unsafe conditions that threaten the health and safety of those currently incarcerated.

Stories have included prisoners not showering in over a month at Donaldson Correctional Facility, numerous phone calls having to be made for an 80-year-old incarcerated man at Limestone Correctional Center to be seen by doctors for a blocked vein and bugs in black-eyed peas served to prisoners at Elba Work Release Center.

Attempts for comment from ADOC on these allegations have yet to be responded to.

Solving the Crisis

Monica Riley, the Alabama ACLU’s policy strategist and an advocate for the incarcerated, believes that a different approach to the state’s prison crisis is needed to ensure that current and historical problems do not continue. For Riley, that means addressing both the future of ADOC facilities and state legislation that has filled them.

“We have this idea of building mega prisons because this is what’s going to be the solution. Well, the DOJ has told us that this is not a viable solution,” Riley said. “We also have legislation that continues to incarcerate more people instead of simply trying to find solutions that prevent incarceration all-around.”

With the signing of the prison bill on Oct. 1, 2021, it appears all but certain that the state will construct those three new prisons, although the exact timeline for them being built is currently unclear. However, changes to the habitual offender law and the parole process can ensure that Alabama’s prison population does not grow again as it did after the construction of new prisons in the 1970s and 1980s.

While changes to the HFOA would not have as broad an impact on overcrowding as changes concerning the parole process, it would help prevent potential long-term crowding in the new prisons by allowing judges to use discretion when handing down sentences to repeat offenders and reserve lengthy sentences for only the most heinous of crimes.

Legislation introduced by Rep. Christopher England (D-Tuscaloosa), known as HB-107, would have provided adjustments to the HFOA and relevant statutes had it not been postponed indefinitely by the state Legislature in May 2021.

Adjustments to the state’s current parole process would have an even greater impact on ADOC’s in-house population moving forward. As the process currently stands, board members are chosen and approved by elected officials, which could allow for ideologically similar individuals to be installed on the board.

This has recently had an impact on the parole board’s ability to consistently approve or deny eligible prisoners. Based on data from the Bureau of Pardons and Paroles’ fiscal year 2021 annual report, 648 of the roughly 4,200 eligible prisoners, or 15.3%, were ultimately granted parole. This was in contradiction to the board’s guidelines, which recommended parole for 76% of those 4,200 eligible prisoners.

In addition to existing legislation and policies, critics of Alabama’s prison operations say HB-143, known as the Sgt. Nick Risner Act, has the potential to worsen overcrowding over time. The bill, introduced by Rep. Lynn Greer (R-Rogersville), would prohibit those convicted of a crime that caused the death of another person from being eligible for parole even if they do not have disciplinary problems on their prison record.

According to the ADOC’s annual report for fiscal year 2019, around 3% of all jurisdictional admissions, or 425 prisoners, would be subject to this legislation from that fiscal year alone.

Advocates for the incarcerated say changes to existing state legislation and policies that routinely put and keep people behind bars are crucial to alleviating current overcrowding and making the criminal justice system work for the people again. They also warn about the consequences of new legislation such as the bill introduced by Rep. Greer.

“Repealing some of the legislation that we currently have, repealing the Habitual Felony Offenders Act, being able to push that legislation through to at least let some of these people out of the prison system and relieve the overcrowding is a huge first step,” Riley said. “Also, we have to have legislators stop presenting new legislation every single year that creates more avenues for Alabama to incarcerate more people.”

Viable, bipartisan solutions to decades-long problems have been hard to come by especially as political polarization drives the two political parties apart on almost every issue. Regardless of the outcome of the DOJ lawsuit and future legislation, one thing is for certain: the stakes are high and more lives like Kenneth Gilchrist’s and Travis Hutchins’ are on the line.