A prison in southern Alabama that serves as the state’s only execution facility was on lockdown Saturday, hours after a violent uprising left two prison officials injured.
Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Horton said the prison warden and a corrections officer were stabbed in the uprising at one of the dormitories at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in southern Alabama, just outside of Atmore. About 100 inmates were involved in the disturbance in which inmates took control of a prison dorm and started a fire in the hallway, Horton said.
Holman is the only state prison where executions are carried out, although the dormitory where the violence erupted is not death row.
Horton said three emergency response teams were deployed to bring the prison dorm under control. He said the facility is now calm and remains on lockdown. The violence erupted Friday night when an inmate stabbed an officer after refusing to obey the officer’s instructions.
“When the warden responded to the situation he was also stabbed. Inmates tried to take control of one of the dorms,” Horton said.
Video that was apparently shot from inside the prison by an inmate with a contraband cell phone shows inmates starting a fire at the end of the dormitory and running around the dormitory.
“It is going down,” said the inmate on the expletive-filled video after talking about the stabbings of the warden and officer.
The Department of Corrections confirmed that some inmates inside the prison were able to publish photos of the disturbance using social media. Corrections officers were conducting a complete search of the prison for illegal cell phones and other contraband, prison officials said.
It was the second incidence of violence within a week in the state’s troubled prison system, which has come under criticism for overcrowding and staffing level concerns. A corrections officer was stabbed Monday at St. Clair Correctional facility in Springville while trying to break up a fight between two inmates.
Alabama prisons hold nearly twice the number of inmates the facilities were originally designed to house.
The most recent monthly statistics available from the Alabama Department of Corrections show 830 prisoners housed at Holman in December. While the prison was designed to hold 581 inmates, it was packed with 835 beds at the time.
“It’s going to get worse and worse until we still start dealing with the overcrowding,” Sen. Cam Ward, chairman of the legislative Prison oversight committee, told The Associated Press.
“You can’t have that low level of staffing and that many inmates in such a small confined inmates,” he said. “Anybody who has been inside the facilities know what a dangerous situation those officers work in every day.”
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Sadly, Alabama prisons are among the worst in the US and that’s a rather low bar. I suspect if Alabama prisons were located in, oh, Cuba or anywhere else in the Americas, they would be denounced by the State Department and seen (as they are) as serious human rights violations. Conditions in Alabama prisons are worse than you might imagine.
And, I’d guess, conditions are unlikely to change soon. The GOP dominated state government is probably going to figure out a way to move education (and maybe BP) money around and build a few more prisons but they are also equally likely to put more people in jail. More or less turning off mental health care for poor people throughout the state isn’t going to help.
Did you know that “Alabama sheriffs are personally responsible for paying for prisoners’ food, but are allowed to keep any excess funds if they can feed prisoners for less than the payments they receive from the state”? (See: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2010/apr/15/appalling-prison-and-jail-food-leaves-prisoners-hungry-for-justice/) Yup, Alabama sheriffs get a bonus personal slush fund from feeding prisoners, oh, waste products from cat food factories or worse.
The 2014 DoJ report on sex abuse at Alabama’s Tutwiler women’s prison is horrifying: “At least thirty-six of the ninety-nine total employees were identified as having had sex
with prisoners—approximately 36% of current staff. If we include staff that were identified for other forms of sexual abuse and sexual harassment, the number of staff involved in sexually inappropriate behavior nearly doubles.” https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2014/01/23/tutwiler_findings_1-17-14.pdf
Here’s a recent Vice article that outlines some of the big picture issues in Alabama prisons–violence, crowding, corruption, sex abuse, for starters. Evil food is one of the smaller problems. http://www.vice.com/read/the-horrific-state-of-alabamas-prisons