Alabama prisons are America

Violating human rights is nothing new

There’s been much coverage lately of Donald Trump’s monstrous mass deportations.

You’ve likely seen the images from CECOT, the mega-prison in El Salvador, shackled bodies packed so tight that the population appears as one giant organism made of tattooed flesh and shaved heads.

Maybe you’ve read about the barbaric mistaken arrests, including that of makeup artist Andry Hernández Romero from Venezuela, abducted and sent there because Trump’s goons claimed his tattoos connected him to a gang. No one knows if he’s still alive.

There is shocked chatter everywhere about these recent developments, rightfully so. But I’ve found myself wondering why the horrors inside Alabama prisons, and for that matter American prisons writ large, do not garner the same collective outrage, at least not in a sustained way that forces a national reckoning.

I know our attention spans are limited. But it seems every few years, some novel iteration of mass incarceration from afar snaps us to attention. Torture inside Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Secret CIA black sites in places like Lithuania. Forced feedings at Guantanamo Bay.

All of these examples are terrible results of authoritarian power. But why do they shock the conscience as if similar examples of brutality are not happening inside American prisons?

Is the home grown brutality of mass incarceration so routine to be expected? Is this new attention about El Salvador’s CECOT a case of shiny ball syndrome, where the new thing gets our attention simply because it’s new? And then we move on to the next shiny ball?

By the way, cruelty via confinement isn’t new. I titled a 2022 essay about the bloodshed inside Donaldson Prison “Carnage down the street,” because it seemed like no one cared that record deaths from violent assaults were happening in Alabama’s most populous county. Prison walls and razor wire don’t just disappear people, they seem to also dissolve public awareness.

The list of human rights violations inside ADOC is devastatingly long. I can name a dozen recent cases of grisly deaths inside Alabama prisons that haunt my nightmares. Tommy Rutledge, baked to death in an overheated cell at Donaldson prison. Christopher Latham, beaten to death over a $10 drug debt. Charles Braggs, who died by suicide in solitary confinement, his body covered in mysterious injuries, starved down to 131 pounds. He was 6’3.

Occasionally a story out of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) is so ghastly it makes international headlines. In 2023 it was the drugging, kidnapping, rape, torture and murder of Daniel Williams, a 22-year old new father with a baby face who died from his injuries on the day he was supposed to be released from prison. No one was charged in his death.

Daniel Williams, photo from Alabama Appleseed report

Despite international outrage connected to the case, and the state’s prison oversight committee getting an earful from multiple families impacted by prison horrors, nothing meaningful has been done to address the nonstop violence, drug trafficking and indifference that leads to horrific murders like Daniel’s.

Alabama’s prison system has been brutalizing human beings since its inception, and the fundamental problem has always been policy rooted in racist, classist punishment, locking away far too many people for way too long. Sadly, attempts by the federal government to remedy Alabama’s unconstitutional prisons have failed.

“The fundamental policy at work, the punishment of offenders by caging them for extraordinary lengths of time under primitive conditions remained what it had always been,” wrote Larry Yackle, about the 1984 end of federal intervention in Alabama prisons. The thesis of his book titled Reform and Regret, is that nothing changed, despite a decade of unprecedented litigation.

Fast forward 30 years, and the same problems persist, only now on a bigger scale. Correctional expert Eldon Vail named over-incarceration as the primary cause for the crisis inside ADOC.

“The most fundamental problem is that ADOC has about twice as many inmates than they are able to safely and humanely manage,” wrote Vail, in an analysis for the mental health class action lawsuit Braggs v. Dunn. “It is a system in a state of perpetual collapse.”

And yet, Alabama’s legislative session is wrapping up without even the slightest effort to address this perpetual collapse or any of its shameful, awful outcomes. Everyone familiar with the reality recognizes a true human rights crisis inside the prisons, but lawmakers can’t be bothered. One of them, Rep. Chris Sell from Greenville, even said our prisons aren’t brutal enough, and floated the possibility of transferring Alabama prisoners to CECOT in an attention-seeking bill that he admitted was just for show.

“I’m just saying that maybe our prisons are too soft nowadays,” Sell said. “These other countries, I think, are way better at maintaining more order. And we can’t do that because of our federal laws.”

Please stop wasting our time.

The United States of America is the most over-incarcerated nation in the history of humanity. It’s true that atrocities happen in prisons around the world, but don’t think we’re immune.

There is a lot to be outraged about right now, but that has always been the case with American jails and prisons. And it’s not just in Alabama and other death belt states.

Headlines in the last month include the first guilty plea after 10 prison guards beat a man to death in New York, prison infirmaries that have become torture chambers, and an investigative report about the growing issue of mentally ill people starving to death in jail.

Cruelty and brutality are features of American prisons, not exceptions. And Alabama prisons are a case study in the very worst case scenario fueled by unchecked power, zero accountability and the fever dream of public indifference.

If you think our government only abuses suspected terrorists, gang members and undocumented immigrants in far away places, you are kidding yourself.

This is us. This is who we are. It’s nothing new.