Hello, DOJ? Are you there?

Alabama prisons are calling. Why aren't you picking up?

It has now been over three and a half years since the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) released findings in its multi-year investigation of Alabama prisons for men, that characterized constitutional violations as “severe, systemic, and exacerbated by serious deficiencies in staffing and supervision; overcrowding; ineffective housing and classification protocols; inadequate incident reporting; inability to control the flow of contraband into and within the prisons, including illegal drugs and weapons; ineffective prison management and training; insufficient maintenance and cleaning of facilities; the use of segregation and solitary confinement to both punish and protect victims of violence and/or sexual abuse; and a high level of violence that is too common, cruel, of an unusual nature, and pervasive.”

All of these problems aggressively persist inside the prisons, and in fact have worsened in the time between the release of the findings and now. You’d think the opposite would happen, as I said in a Q&A with The New Yorker—the DOJ is a law enforcement bureaucracy with all the powers of the federal government at its fingertips. And yet, here we are. Alabama prisons remain an epic shit show. In a nation known for mass incarceration shit shows, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) wins the gold medal.

So my questions are no longer focused on the factors that contribute to this morass of suffering. We know what they are: overcrowding, understaffing, corruption, cruelty & indifference, incompetence and profiteering. My main question today is why is this still happening? Seriously, why do these problems continue unabated?

If the long arm of the law has been here investigating since 2016, what the fuck exactly is left to do? How many more people have to die?

Ah yes, the lawyers must file some more papers. Investigation+findings+lawsuit=time. But in this tragedy, time=death. And I mean all kinds of time and all kinds of deaths. Time during investigation=death. Time between findings and lawsuit=death. Time after lawsuit before trial=death. Time anyone is sentenced to in ADOC=death. If not immediate death, then it’s a slow death. A death of spirit, of hope, death by a million cuts. Death by erasure. And death by waiting for accountability from the DOJ which still seems like it will never arrive.

A group of incarcerated individuals recently asked a court to intervene. On October 7, they filed a motion arguing that the DOJ’s lawsuit does not address urgent issues currently faced by Alabama’s prison population and Alabama’s only discernible response to pursue the construction of two mega-prisons comes “at the expense, literally and figuratively, of efforts to ameliorate the crisis immediately at hand.”

The group also contends ADOC’s decision to only serve two meals a day, a “holiday schedule,” in response to the recent work stoppage inside the prisons has “acute and deleterious” effects on their health, particularly people with ongoing medical issues that require special diets, like diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. The plaintiffs are asking for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to remedy the situation. So far the court has not responded.

(A 2019 headline after the DOJ released findings that Alabama prisons are unconstitutional)

Where are these sweeping changes trumpeted by the media coverage? Somewhere, perhaps in conference rooms and offices in Washington D.C. and certainly in conference rooms and offices in Alabama, lawyers and investigators wearing nice clothes mull over the horrors, but the specifics about what’s being said and done—it’s all secret, “privileged” in the words of law enforcement or legalese. That means little to the over 20,000 men and women locked up in these hellholes. What does Attorney General Merrick Garland think about this calamity? Why has President Biden not replaced the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Prim Escalona? No one is saying.

I’ve tracked the deaths inside ADOC since 2018 and the numbers are horrific. Since 2020, despair connected to the COVID shutdown and paroles grinding to a halt has driven drug use inside the prisons. Drug-related deaths, including fatal overdoses, have skyrocketed with no end in sight. The most common drugs I’ve seen in autopsy reports include fentanyl, methamphetamines and synthetic cannabis with street names like brown clown and flakka. People are dying in record numbers and no one in state leadership seems to give a damn.

I’m just one individual who works out of my own house, typically wearing jeans, surrounded by two sleeping dogs with no more tools than a phone, a computer and a long list of sources. I have no arresting power, no capability to issue subpoenas, hell—it’s hard for me to even get state agencies to acknowledge my open records requests. In short, I’m just a woman asking questions and sometimes writing about what I find.

That’s why I was stunned by something said by the father of a man who died in ADOC custody. He called me to ask if I could help him figure out what happened. “I got your name from the DOJ,” he said. “They said you might be able to help me.”

You’ve got to be shitting me.

The DOJ has a budget of $30 billion and over 100,000 employees. This investigation into Alabama prisons is now in its 6th year. Since then, at least 78 people have been killed in institutional violence, including excessive force, since the investigation began in 2016. As one of my incarcerated friends recently asked, what the hell else has to happen in this shit show for somebody to do something?