On September 26th, prisoners in Alabama began a work stoppage to protest their living conditions and several of the state’s tough sentencing and parole laws. (It’s one of only seven states that do not pay prisoners for their labor.) In response to the strike, Kay Ivey, the state’s Republican governor, called the prisoners’ demands “unreasonable.” Prisoners have reported retaliation by guards. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have documented overcrowding, abuse by guards, and sexual assault in Alabama’s prisons; these issues have long been a concern for human-rights advocates. During the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice sued the state and its Department of Corrections. In the last five years, parole rates have declined precipitously, exacerbating issues such as overcrowding. Meanwhile, deaths in prison have increased by more than fifty per cent, and suicide and drug use are rampant.
Beth Shelburne is a journalist in Alabama who has been covering the state of Alabama’s prisons. As part of the A.C.L.U.’s Smart Justice Campaign, she is also the author of many of the organization’s reports on Alabama’s prisons. (Her Substack column is called “Moth to Flame.”) We recently spoke by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the historical roots of the current problems in Alabama’s prisons, why conditions have deteriorated in the past several years, and divisions among the prisoners about how far to take their current protest.
There have been concerns about Alabama’s prisons for a long time. What was the impetus for this protest to happen now? What pushed things over the edge?
It’s been percolating for many, many years. It’s important to frame what’s happening right now in the prisons correctly. Most of the coverage has portrayed the event in terms of incarcerated people uniting against the prison system, but I think the situation is much more complicated and nuanced and volatile. I haven’t been calling it a “strike.” Because of these dynamics, I think “work stoppage” is more accurate. I do think that the incarcerated population is in unanimous agreement that the conditions inside the prisons are so dire, so desperate, so violent, chaotic, corrupt, and dangerous, that something absolutely has to change. And any remedy that might have resulted from the Department of Justice just hasn’t happened. The disappointment in things not changing as a result of the Department of Justice coming in has led to this work stoppage.
There are different factions inside the prisons involved in this action, and the tactics being used to achieve the stoppage vary by facility. I’ve talked to people who were involved in the organizing and they’re in complete support of doing this, however long it takes, through any means necessary, even if it ends in bloodshed. I’ve talked to people who support the demands that have been put out but don’t support tactics involving threats and intimidation. And then I’ve talked to people who absolutely don’t support this at all, but they’re going along with it out of fear. There are all kinds of dynamics at play. It’s not exactly a kumbaya moment inside the prisons. There’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty—and a sense of dread—regarding how this will end, and I fear it will not end well.
To take a step back, how would you fundamentally describe the state of Alabama’s prisons, and how would you say they differ from the prisons in other parts of the country, if you think that they do?
Yeah, I do. The problems in Alabama are different, just because of scope and scale. The problems of overcrowding, understaffing, violence, and corruption are fundamental to our carceral system, and exist in every jail and prison across the United States, but in Alabama they’re all on steroids. In the past ten years or so, which is about the time that I’ve been consistently covering these issues, you have had a hemorrhaging of staff, coupled with an insistence on keeping people in prison as opposed to creating pathways out of prison, and an explosion in the contraband trade that, of course, is facilitated when there’s a lack of staff, or corrupt staff, in place.
Again, these issues exist everywhere, but they are so widespread and so normalized inside Alabama’s prison system that they exist around the clock. Any sentence can turn into a death sentence, and the level of violence, exploitation, sexual abuse, and extortion is just off the charts. It sounds like hyperbole when you start talking to people in the system because you just think there’s no way that all of it can be true. It sounds like “Lord of the Flies.” But I’ve been tracking the data, particularly the death data—it backs up all of these stories about the lawlessness that is pervasive throughout the system.
What data have you collected that particularly stand out to you?
Since 2018, I’ve been looking at the number of deaths inside the prisons, particularly deaths due to prison violence, like homicides between incarcerated people, homicides due to excessive force, drug-related deaths (which include overdoses and things such as disease or sepsis due to long-term I.V.-drug use), and also suicides. Over that period, we’ve seen this astonishing increase in deaths due to these causes.
What has really blown me away is the number of drug-related deaths. That skyrocketed during COVID. These are overdose deaths due to lethal levels of fentanyl, methamphetamines, and synthetic drugs that make their way through the prison. These are widely available, and very easy to obtain. They’re used out in the open, and trafficked by staff and incarcerated people. The people who end up in prison as a result of substance use are really the ones who are suffering, because they are immediately exploited and can very easily end up in debt. Their families are extorted, and they are regularly the victims of assault and murder.
In 2021, I tracked about forty deaths due to these causes. About twenty of them were drug-related. This year, I am at sixty such deaths, and we’ve just started October, so we’ve got three months to go. Forty of the deaths were connected to drugs—the number of drug-related deaths from last year to this year has doubled. These problems persist because there is an unwillingness to admit that the main source of this contraband trade is staff, and you can’t fix what you can’t admit.
The Department of Corrections will publicly announce arrests of officers who are caught with drugs, but I hear time and again from staff and from incarcerated people that those arrests really amount to low-hanging fruit. They have not chopped off the head of the snake, and this corruption is pervasive throughout the agency. It goes all the way up the food chain. Until they do that, these problems will continue.
We’ll link to the A.C.L.U. report that you did on these deaths, but can you explain why you think it’s gotten so much worse since 2018? We know that prisons were particularly hard hit by COVID. What has caused things to deteriorate so much in the last four years or so?
It’s interesting because it times out exactly as the Department of Justice has gotten actively involved in investigating Alabama’s prisons, releasing findings about the unconstitutional conditions, and then ultimately suing the state. You would think that the opposite would happen. You would think that things would improve. That hasn’t been the case.
I think there are a number of factors happening at once. Some of them we’ve already been talking about: the corruption and understaffing, which have only gotten worse. There’s been a real hemorrhaging of staff inside the agency. It’s more nuanced than just staff levels; the administration of the Department of Corrections made some decisions on how to address the understaffing that have not worked out well. Basic correctional officers are limited in their power; some very young, inexperienced, and unqualified people are filling a lot of these empty positions. As you can imagine, that creates a lot of discomfort among the staff. There has been an exodus, not just of officers but of a lot of the more seasoned lieutenants and captains and sergeants, people that are management-level correctional officers, because they’ve grown so frustrated with this dynamic of having to train very young, inexperienced people who have no idea what they’re walking into.
