The absurdity of Gov. Kay Ivey
Alabama's monument to mass incarceration will bear her name.
A breathless announcement floated out of Montgomery, Alabama last week regarding the coming-soon mega-prison in Elmore County. You know the one, the state’s monument to mass incarceration with a billion dollar price tag, $1.25 billion specifically. The massive prison construction project that failed to pass the legislature more than once, but was eventually rammed through by Ivey, using $400 million in COVID relief funds.
The “Alabama solution” to unconstitutional prisons, which amounts to ignoring the feds who told us to reduce the prison population and instead, just build more cages. Yeah, that’s the one.
That monstrosity, which will be larger than many county seats in Alabama, will be named after Ivey. More specifically “The Governor Kay Ivey Correctional Complex.” The announcement came with this statement from the Governor’s office:
There is no governor in Alabama’s history who has done more to improve the state’s corrections system than Governor Ivey, so it is fitting that one of the new facilities will bear her name.
Woah, hold up. What did they say? They actually said that? With a straight face? And they weren’t joking around?!?! She actually wants her name on this new mega-prison? According to ADOC Commissioner John Hamm, Ivey gave this her blessing.
How can she not see the hubris? The audacity? The beyond-cringe optics of such a gross ordination? And what alternate universe exists that claims Ivey as the champion of improving prison conditions?
I wasn’t alone in wondering WTAF.
Beyond my initial open-mouthed appall, I recognized this naming as part of a larger, dark legacy that lurks beneath all political points vis a vi mass incarceration. Alabama politicians have excelled at this, going back to slavery and the 1901 racist state constitution founded on white supremacy, through “tough on crime” prosecutors of the last 50 years, like Charlie Graddick, celebrating executions and cooking up policies that sent mostly Black men to prison for life over drug and property crimes.
Locking up the “bad guys” is a coded trope so deeply rooted in Alabama’s DNA that not many people, especially those elected to the highest offices, ever question it. Remember Gov. Fob James, in office the last time the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state over unconstitutional prisons? James’ response was to build new prisons, which now exist as the current carceral archipelago featuring record overdoses and bloodshed, prompting yet another DOJ lawsuit over the exact same conditions, only this time on a much larger scale.
As you can see from the above ad, James trumpeted prison construction as a moral and political victory, “to keep criminals where they belong,” and he was the tough guy basking in the righteous glory of getting it done. Of course, we know what happened as soon as the last checks cleared to the prison construction companies. The state stuffed the prisons full of people with astronomical sentences, and not enough guards to oversee them, insuring perpetual overcrowding, violence and squalor remain the features of ADOC.
I’ve said it before: The Alabama solution is and has always been about building more prisons, instead of trying to solve the problems inside the prisons we already have.
It’s like a doctor ordering nothing but botox treatments for a patient dying of malignant melanoma. The wrinkles aren’t killing the person, it’s the extensive rot of stage four cancer that needs immediate treatment.
Let’s tell the truth about exactly what Kay Ivey has overseen during her time in office. She appointed the most rigidly merciless parole board chair, who crushed parole grants down to a paltry 8 percent last year, denying release to 92 percent of qualified people, which compounded prison overcrowding and spread despair and hopelessness throughout the system like a contagion.
She supported and signed off on policies that make it harder for people in prison to earn “good time,” again compounding overcrowding and despair.
She’s overseen an avalanche of legal spending to fight the DOJ and litigate individual lawsuits over excessive force and wrongful deaths in ADOC. Lawsuits like the one filed by Sandy Ray, whose son Steven Davis was beaten to death by officers at Donaldson prison, some who are still working in the prisons.
The state settled Sandy’s lawsuit for $250,000 earlier this year, but what Sandy really wanted was a meeting with Gov. Ivey. She wanted to sit down with the Governor and tell her about what her son experienced inside ADOC, and how poorly her family was treated by the very people charged with keeping her son safe. Sandy wanted to look Ivey eye to eye, woman to woman. That meeting never happened.
Who can say why? Cowardice? Poor health? Or maybe it’s just that Ivey simply feels she doesn’t have to meet with people like Sandy Ray. She doesn’t have to answer specific questions from me or you or anyone about exactly what all and who all is involved in this new prison world-building. Hell, she didn’t even have to debate her opponent during her last campaign and still won by a landslide.
Has Governor Ivey ever engaged with a single incarcerated person? Has she ever talked with a family whose loved one was killed or beaten or raped inside? Is she even the least bit curious about the corruption inside the largest law enforcement agency in her state? Has she wondered how illicit drugs continue to make their way into solitary confinement units? Does she know there are homeless camps inside the prisons where men sleep on concrete floors because the guards in charge can’t even manage to assign everyone a bed?
I would bet money the answer to all these questions is no. In Alabama, improving the prison system has never meant actually helping the human beings who are trying to survive inside ADOC facilities. It has never required facing the actual truth, that our prisons remains an unmitigated human rights disaster that no billion dollar building can fix.
If doing “more to improve the state’s corrections system” means expanding mass incarceration for decades to come on the backs of taxpayers, lining the pockets of prison construction interests (looking at you Caddell Construction & Goodwyn Mills & Cawood) and funneling millions of dollars to outside lawyers in no-bid contracts (looking at you Bill Lunsford) then yes, she has done more than anyone in state history.
If it means treating the suffering of incarcerated men and women, and their families, as invisible, if it means discouraging any effort that creates exits from prison, if it means doing the same thing we’ve always done, expecting something different to happen this time, then by all means, name the prison after her.
ADOC remains in perpetual crisis: violence, overcrowding, overdoses and deaths have all worsened under her watch. She’s shown no urgency to address these problems, nothing to see here, because she doesn’t care. That lack of compassion and concern isn’t by chance, it’s a political calculation. She doesn’t care because she doesn’t have to.
What her office should have said is no one has done more to harm the people in prison than Governor Ivey, and according to the majority in Alabama, that’s A-OK. And if that’s what it takes to get your name on the biggest jail in state history, she has more than earned it. The Kay Ivey mega-prison will be a fitting legacy.
This needs to be read by Everybody.
Thank you Beth Shelburne for your courage!