Alabama's punishment culture

From paddling to prison abuse to executions, what does this say about us?

A new horrific death inside the Alabama Department of Corrections caught the attention of national media this week. Daniel Williams, 22, died after suffering days of abuse, hard for some to comprehend inside a maximum-security prison. Daniel, who was scheduled to be released this month, was tied up and abused by other incarcerated men inside Staton Prison for several days before prison staff finally intervened, sending him to a hospital where he died. His family learned these details not from ADOC, but from men inside the prison.

(Daniel Williams, from “Justice for Daniel” page on Facebook.)

This story is all too common. For the last decade as I’ve reported on the relentless crisis inside Alabama prisons, I’ve heard dozens of similar accounts involving conditions that defy our collective imagining of possible harms inside prison: human trafficking, homelessness, protracted gang rapes, kidnapping, torture.

When prison deaths make headlines, astonishment from the public will briefly dominate social media. But how do these things happen inside a prison? I no longer ask this question, because the answer rests in a grim acceptance at the heart of my work trying to shine light into this darkness: it happens by design. It happens because the prison staff allow it to happen. It happens because the people we elect wholeheartedly endorse corporeal punishment as justice. What I mean is, it happens because we want it to happen.

Of course, I personally don’t want it to happen. If you’re reading this, you probably don’t either. The we is our collective, Alabama as a population, and cruelty is what I’ve come to expect from our taxpayer-funded prison system with cruelty as its main feature. A few years ago scholar and historian Dr. Wayne Flynt told me Alabama’s legacy of prison abuse falls on a harsh continuum that exists across state institutions and has been a dominating feature since Alabama’s founding.

“The idea of punitive, exact, immediate justice, oftentimes violent justice, was written into the DNA on the Alabama frontier,” Flynt said. “I think the confidence of most Alabamians is not in moral suasion, it’s in harsh justice.”

The truth is our punishment systems have always been standouts in the United States. Whether it’s whipping a misbehaving child or killing a man convicted of murder, severe punishment is seen as morally righteous among people of all races across Alabama. For example, our public schools paddle children at one of the highest rates in the country. Of the 16 states that allow corporal punishment in public schools, Alabama paddled the third highest number of children, behind only Texas and Arkansas. Reported this week by journalist Trisha Powell Crain, in fact, Alabama schools continued paddling children during the pandemic, 17% of them disabled.

I don’t even know what to say about that.

This past week, the state executed Casey McWhorter, who reminded everyone in his last words that the state is no better than the murder for which he was convicted. “It’s not lost on me that a habitual abuser of women is carrying out this procedure,” Casey said in his last words, amplifying a truth that it takes a certain intentional violence by a specific type of people to carry out killing by lethal injection.

Casey’s killer, as exposed last year by journalist Ivana Hrynkiw, was once fired from a state law enforcement agency for “mercilessly beating” a woman. Like others inside ADOC, he was allowed to fail up, promoted up the chain of command to eventually earn the six-figure salaried spot of Holman Prison warden and state executioner. This wasn’t an accident, it’s part of a culture that celebrates and promotes not just violence, but lawlessness, which writer Josh Moon points to in a column arguing the state lacks the moral standing to conduct executions.

I don’t know what the answer is to all this, but the common theme of self-righteous violence that undergirds these long-running features of Alabama life is worth considering. Beyond headlines of prison horrors, paddling studies and executions, people continue to abuse other people inside Alabama prisons, school leaders continue to hit at-risk children inside Alabama public schools and the Attorney General will continue to seek death warrants and pursue killing Alabama citizens, including by a new untested means of nitrogen hypoxia to ring in the new year.

Every prison death I’ve covered is accompanied by traumatized family members desperate for answers about what happened to their son, their father, their husband. And in each case ADOC closes rank, providing only general information like “the death is under investigation.” As many as 190 people died inside Alabama prisons in the first six months of the year, but the true number of people who have died inside Alabama prisons remains unknown. In October of 2022, ADOC stopped publishing data about homicides and suicides in its monthly statistical reports.

The effort to obfuscate, cover up or justify horrors inside ADOC makes me wonder if underneath the public swagger about justice lies a knowing of wrong. That deep down, elected politicians and others in power who maintain a united front about “Alabama values” and “upholding the rule of law” and “protecting the public,” that somewhere deep in their consciousness, they want to hide the extent of cruelties they commit, endorse or enable because they know it’s deeply and fundamentally wrong.

Or perhaps I’m giving them too much credit. Maybe hiding the truth is simply transactional for them, a way to protect the institution from more lawsuits, and deep down there’s nothing else there beyond self-righteousness and ambition. And a willingness to hurt. The intention of causing harm, whether by a convicted criminal, a licensed educator or an elected leader—it all has the same outcome. Pain and trauma is pain and trauma, no matter the justification used, and we all bleed the same.