Carnage down the street

Deaths skyrocket inside Alabama prisons. Does anyone care?

As football season ends and Alabamians are getting ready for the holidays, men continue to die inside Alabama prisons. The death count is now higher than it’s ever been, both for overall deaths and deaths linked to drugs or violence. It’s not shocking to see the spike in deaths given the continued staffing crisis inside ADOC along with the robust prison drug trafficking with no end in sight. What continues to astonish is the craven lack of concern from leaders in Montgomery and the general public. It’s just business as usual, nothing to see here.

Except it’s not. There are 13 major prisons for men tucked inside 13 Alabama communities, which means this carnage is occurring right down the street from neighborhoods, schools, churches, businesses. Yes, these deaths are happening behind the walls that surround the prisons, but out of sight does not relieve citizens of our collective responsibility. Government runs these prisons in our names.

I thought about this recently when I read the incredible feature by Clint Smith in the December issue of The Atlantic titled “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” The article covers the many ways Germany has remembered the atrocities of the Holocaust. When allied forces liberated the first Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, 10 miles north of Munich, Smith writes that American soldiers wondered how this could have happened.

“How thousands of people could have been held captive, tortured, and killed at the camp, while just outside its walls was a small town where people were going about their lives as if impervious to the depravity taking place inside. Buying groceries, playing soccer with their children, drinking coffee with their neighbors. German people, the Americans reasoned, should have to see what had been done in their name.”

Solders brought 30 local officials to the camp to see what their government had done. They encountered piled up corpses and skeletal survivors who were barely alive. Later, American soldiers forced Nazi-sympathizing farmers and other residents around the camp to bury 5,000 bodies as a way to bear witness, to not be allowed to look away.

Alabama prisons are not concentration camps run by the Nazis, but appalling atrocities are occurring inside them every day. The indifference from the German communities surrounding the Nazi death factories, and the question that indifference sparked in allies —how could this happen?—made me think of Alabama’s current populace going about their business—running errands, shopping for Christmas, talking about football, all while state prisons disintegrate into the killing fields.

While I was working on this piece, I got email confirmation from St. Clair County’s coroner that another prison death was caused by a fentanyl overdose. Antonio Lang, 23, was found dead inside a cell at St. Clair prison on July 31. Sources at the time said his death was a suspected overdose, so I submitted a request to St. Clair coroner Dennis Russell for Lang’s cause and manner of death, which Russell said he wouldn’t know for several months due to toxicology tests. I received an email from him today that Lang died from fentanyl and para-fluorfentanyl intoxication. He was easily able to obtain those deadly drugs in a maximum-security prison run by the largest law-enforcement agency in the state. Is anyone in Montgomery bothered by this?

While I was tallying up the overdose deaths from this year, I got a message from a prison source about two more deaths. His messages have become less detailed, more cursory, as the death toll reaches obscene levels. Today the first message was just a photo of a man’s ADOC entry with a single word, DEAD. A numbing occurs when body counts pile up, no matter what side of the deaths you’re on. I feel it in myself too. There is so much horror, so many grim details that run together, it’s hard to keep all the different nightmare stories straight. I’ve become desensitized by the sheer number.

The data is constantly changing as I get new information, confirmations on causes of death and sadly, as new deaths happen. My list grows and grows in real time. As of right now, I’ve tracked 60 deaths this year that were suspected to be drug-related with 19 confirmed overdoses. Of the overdoses, all involved either fentanyl, meth or both.

Donaldson Correctional Facility has seen the most drug-related deaths in the system this year. I’ve tracked 12 suspected, and so far 8 confirmed overdoses through the Jefferson County medical examiner. That tracks with Donaldson seeing overall deaths double since 2019. AL.com reported 37 people have died inside Donaldson this year, surpassing 2021’s total of 26 people. 22 people died at Donaldson in 2020, and 17 died there in 2019. That’s a hell of a thing for the death rate inside a single prison to double in three years. What is anyone in a position of power doing about it?

A student organization called “Alabama Students Against Prisons” or ASAP showed up to Governor Ivey’s tree lighting ceremony in Montgomery Friday night. They held signs calling attention to the record deaths inside ADOC, but the event rolled along like the students were invisible. A reporter from a Montgomery TV station talked to the students, but didn’t interview them or film them for the news. He told them he was just there to cover the event, not a political statement.

This mindset gets us nowhere. The tree lighting itself is a political event, and these students make a substantive argument about a crisis impacting thousands of Alabamians. Why isn’t that newsworthy? When the media acts as a mouthpiece for dog-and-pony shows by politicians, they reinforce the same indifference and apathy that allows prisons to become death traps. Thank God for these students. They give me some hope that Alabama will not go the way of German citizens who saw the smoke pouring out of death camps, but continued to live their lives like their own government wasn’t responsible for death on a massive scale.