By Eddie Burkhalter, Appleseed Researcher
Anniston, AL — There are days when I have to step away from the work as my phone rings with another desperate voice, a mother crying over a son who’s been killed or overdosed inside an Alabama prison, a sister pleading for help to save a brother being threatened.
Wesley Abernathy and his daughter, Paizlee Abernathy. Eddie wrote about his death in ADOC custody last year.
I’ve spent five years taking those calls from people inside our overpopulated, understaffed, and chaotic prisons and their loved ones both as a print journalist and now as a researcher for Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, a prison reform nonprofit. I’ve met dozens of those mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters in person. I’ve seen and heard how lives are upended when our state fails to protect incarcerated people from sexual and physical violence, as all states are constitutionally bound to do.
I wish I could say that the violence and desperation I saw in the HBO documentary “The Alabama Solution” shocked me. However, the storylines in the film play out every day inside the prisons I know too well. Rehabilitation exists in Alabama Department of Corrections policy, not much in practice. Inside the unair-conditioned dorms packed with people, too many are just as likely to die inside as they are to serve the remainder of their sentences.
One tragic death at the hands of an Alabama Department of Corrections officer, highlighted in the film, reminded me of the death of 44-year-old Christopher Mount. Mr. Mount was beaten and strangled to death while locked inside a segregation cell with another man at Easterling Correctional Facility on Mother’s Day 2023. Easterling is where the film begins. Both men in these segregation cells were beaten so badly family members could hardly recognize their loved ones.
I watched as Mr. Mount’s daughter, 17-years old at the time, stood before Alabama’s Legislative Joint Prison Oversight Committee and described when she saw her father after he died. She brought her father’s ashes in an urn, but security wouldn’t let her bring the urn to the podium when she spoke: “When you see your dad for the first time in 10 years and half of his face is almost gone because he was beaten, it does something to you,” MaKayla Mount told lawmakers.
MaKayla Mount holds an urn containing her father Christopher Mount’s ashes at the Prison Oversight Committee’s 2023 public hearing.
The man who killed Mr. Mount is believed to have taken his own life 20 days later, yet another preventable death tacked onto the growing list.
“My daughter has nightmares and wakes up screaming and crying because all she sees is her dad being beaten and strangled and screaming for help,” Christy Martin, MaKayla’s mother, told me in September 2023.
I tell these tragic stories in hopes that the public sees what I see: a prison system unable to keep people safe and alive. Without the public pushing for change, there’s little hope the state’s decision-makers will choose to confront the corruption and disregard for human life currently running rampant throughout the state’s prison system. Without pressure, change is unlikely to come.
I work almost daily with families trying to protect loved ones inside Alabama prisons who are being threatened with violence. For months, I’ve spoken with a mother whose son was badly beaten and hospitalized for weeks with severe head injuries. He now finds himself in a different prison, sleeping on the floor because he doesn’t know which bunk is his and no officers will help him. Homelessness in Alabama prisons isn’t uncommon. There are images and videos taken on contraband cellphones of men curled up and sleeping on concrete floors.
Alonzo Williamson and his mother, Carol Williamson. He died in 2024 at Limestone prison and Eddie documented their story.
When an incarcerated man obtained a loaded semi-automatic pistol inside William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility on the morning of Sunday, Aug. 13 2023, I tracked the incident in real time through sources I’d developed in the prison, who reached out via social media and by phone to tell me what they were seeing. Within a few hours Derrol Shaw took complete control of the prison, and in videos taken on contraband cell phones could be seen brandishing the gun while wearing an ADOC officer’s vest. He’d held several officers at gunpoint throughout the ordeal. Ultimately, it was other incarcerated men who talked Shaw down and placed the gun outside for officers on the other side of the fences to retrieve. Lives could have been lost that day, and yet ADOC to this day hasn’t confirmed that there was a gun inside the prison that day. Appleseed was the first to report details of the incident.
Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama
I’m also building a database of prison deaths from the last 10 years, and through hundreds of records requests, a picture is forming. The picture shows uncontrolled violence, rampant drug use (most often brought into prisons and sold by staff), suicides and medical neglect.
“Deceased found unresponsive in dorm. Narcan was administered. Track marks noticed on right arm. Cause of death: Combined fentanyl, methamphetamine, and synthetic cannabinoid (MDMB-4en-PINACA),” read the details of 35-year-old Alex Justin Williams’s death on March 2, 2023, at Ventress Correctional Facility. Court records show a history of drug use. Instead of receiving treatment in prison, Williams was given easy access to the deadly drugs that took his life.
Recently, a veteran lieutenant at St. Clair prison, Calvin Bush, was arrested and charged with trafficking fentanyl and marijuana. ADOC said a search of his home turned up 100 grams of crack cocaine, 19 pounds of marijuana, 8.9 pounds of methamphetamine, and 156 cellphones. His arrest came in July, the day after 36-year-old Quarell Henry and 37-year-old Rakeivian Deet died of suspected drug overdoses at the prison where Bush was a supervising officer.
In 2023, Alabama’s overall prison mortality rate was five times the national rate across state prisons. That year, 328 people died while incarcerated in the state, a record high. Looking closer at the causes of death, the overdose death rate that year was 22 times the national rate. Of the at least 100 overdose deaths in 2023, records Appleseed obtained show that fentanyl was involved in 58.Alabama’s prison homicide rate in 2023 was 4.25 times the national rate. The suicide rate was twice the national rate, with 15 people taking their own lives.
Researcher Eddie Burkhalter, in a happier moment, joining Ronald McKeithen in picking up a newly released John Coleman from prison.
Drugs and violence are frequent threats in other prison systems, but elsewhere elected officials are held accountable and take these problems seriously. Here, we pay private lawyers to defend the state’s inaction.
I have spent countless hours making records requests and gathering documents from various state and federal agencies. Even more hours entering those names and the data of the 2023 dead into my spreadsheet. When I got to May 14, I paused and thought of MaKayla Mount, standing in front of that room full of lawmakers and attendees, and in an unwavering voice, telling the story of her father’s brutal death and what it did to her.
I recently caught up with Makayla, who is attending Jefferson State Community College on a scholarship while working full time. She earned a place on the dean’s and president’s lists for both semesters of her first year and this year was one of 40 selected among the 320 applicants to the highly competitive diagnostic imaging program at Wallace State Community College. She’s also determined to continue to help change the system that killed her father.
“My father’s death changed me entirely as a person. What began as a pursuit of justice for him has evolved into a broader mission to seek justice and reform for those who are still living within the Alabama Department of Corrections,” Ms. Mount said.
Speaking before the legislative committee was deeply personal to her. It was an opportunity to honor her father’s memory by giving a voice to those who are rarely heard.
“No one should have to live in constant fear or be denied medical care until they are at death’s door,” she said. “Everyone deserves a real shot at redemption and a fair chance to give back to the world in a positive way. A system that supports growth and rehabilitation doesn’t just help the individual. It strengthens families, communities, and society as a whole. This is why prison reform is so important to me. It’s not just about policy. It’s about humanity.”
Christopher Mount was the 119th person to die in an Alabama prison in 2023. There would be 209 more deaths that year. The next year, 277 more incarcerated lives would be lost. From January 1 through the end of June this year, at least 100 people died in Alabama prisons.
Eddie Richmond was found unresponsive on December 15, 2022 in his bed and died there at Fountain Correctional Facility.
Daniel Terry Williams, 22, was likely smothered to death on November 7, 2022 inside Staton. Eddie’s reporting revealed no charges will be filed.
Eddie has done extensive reporting on the death of Brian Rigsby and the activism of his mother, Pam Moser.
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