A former correctional officer at Alabama’s largest prison who resigned after 13.5 years with the Alabama Department of Corrections likened the state’s prisons to a developing country and believes the U.S. Department of Justice should intervene.
Stacy George, who resigned from his post as a guard at Limestone Correctional Facility on Oct. 26, the ADOC confirmed, said leaving his job was the hardest thing he’s ever done.
“I felt like less of a man that day because I knew they needed me in there,” George said late Friday morning, standing outside the ADOC’s headquarters in Montgomery. He said he resigned after complications from an injury that he sustained during work kept him from carrying out his duties.
George, who ran for Alabama governor as a Republican in 2014 and 2022, chose to speak to activists, loved ones of those incarcerated, and members of the media because he “wanted the public to know everything.”
“I’ve done this today because I’m a human being,” George said.
George described a prison system stricken with violence, drug use and indignity. The prisons are so understaffed that incarcerated individuals are in control rather than officers, he said.
“The Alabama Department of Corrections is not in control of any prison in Alabama, and they haven’t been for a long time,” George said.
Limestone was so short-staffed that assaults could go unnoticed for long periods, he said.
“There could be someone bleeding to death in a cell and you might not know it for hours,” he said.
He estimated that nine correctional officers would show up for a typical work shift at Limestone near the end of his career. Fully staffed, he said, there should be about 35 correctional officers at the prison. More than 2,200 people are incarcerated at Limestone, ADOC’s monthly report from August shows.
George said that prison staff is incredibly overworked and unable to manage the challenges of the prison population despite being mandated to work 36 hours of overtime each month.
Security measures began during the last few months of his tenure. During the past three months, he said prison staff were no longer being screened for contraband upon entry into Limestone Correctional Facility.
“[Correctional officers] could’ve brought a gun in,” George said, adding that he knew that officers were assisting in bringing in drugs to the prison. A former correctional officer at Donaldson Correctional Facility pleaded guilty in federal court this week for running a scheme to deliver illegal drugs and cellphones to the prison. “…Most people aren’t bringing guns, but they could.”
George said that when he would arrive to work, his supervisors looked “like zombies” after the previous shift. George, who typically handled those in segregated, or isolated, housing, said one of the first things he’d do on his shift is give the men a chance to take showers — if they could find soap.
“’We depend on you to give us a shower’,” he remembered the men saying. Tears began to well in his eyes. “Do you see what I’m talking about? They’re depending on me for a basic human right.”
As he’d walk the floor to check on people, someone might have a noose around their neck or be holding a razor blade and threatening to harm themselves.
Because the prison was so short-staffed, George said he sometimes had to decide whether to respond to a suicidal person or to someone else who had been assaulted or was suffering a medical emergency.
“Alabama prisons are like a third-world country with concrete floors instead of dirt,” he said.
George suggested several ways to reform the prison system, including life-without-parole sentences and modifying the state’s parole process to grant parole to more eligible incarcerated people. Alabama’s incarcerated population included an overhaul of the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles in a list of demands to the ADOC during a three-week-long labor strike that ended in October.
George hopes Gov. Kay Ivey and ADOC Commissioner John Hamm will listen to him and others and realize that the plan to build two new prisons, which George denounced, won’t fix the problems already present in the prison system, he said.
Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser. Contact him at emealins@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanMealins.
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