By Eddie Burkhalter and Carla Crowder

Seven years after the United States Department of Justice first documented unconstitutional levels of violence, sexual assault, and excessive force by guards fueled by extreme mismanagement, dysfunction and corruption across Alabama’s prison system for men, a new 260-page motion from the federal government reinforces what prisoners and their families have consistently claimed since then: Alabama’s prisons remain catastrophically dangerous and ADOC leadership has failed to take basic measures to address the human rights crisis festering in the state’s largest law enforcement agency.

The DOJ’s motion for summary judgment builds upon the complaints filed in 2020 and 2021 with page after page of recent episodes of institutional violence and abuse along with the state’s ineptitude at curtailing it. “It is not uncommon for prisoners to report being held hostage, beaten, abused and extorted by other prisoners,” the DOJ writes. Although the motion is heavily redacted for safety and security reasons, Appleseed was able to pull the following details from the approximately one-third of the motion that was not redacted. 

The lack of accountability and supervision starts with ADOC’s executive leadership. The DOJ’s motion draws upon depositions from the highest ranks at the department’s central office. 

Concerning former Commissioner John Hamm: “He does not know how many overdose deaths there are in the facilities—he does not receive reports on overdose deaths, but he asked about them “periodically.” He testified he does not visit each facility at least once a year. He has heard reports of prisoners sleeping in dorms they’re not assigned to, selling their racks, and being homeless, but that’s the warden’s job to run the facility and he has not talked to them about those issues. He does not keep track of data about sexual assaults; he does not review LESD reports about sexual assault; and has not talked to wardens about sexual assaults in the facilities.”

Concerning current Commissioner Greg Lovelace, interviewed while he was serving as Chief Deputy Commissioner: “He testified that he is the number two in the organization and is supervising the entire ADOC system for the Commissioner. He spends most of his time on the new prison project, and has not seen any reports regarding the extent of violence, contraband, or sexual assaults in the system.”

The pleading documents wardens who have no clue as to what policies and procedures govern the agency along with flagrant ignorance among agency leaders about critical issues such as staffing, investigative procedures, and corrective action since the DOJ initially raised these issues in its 2019 CRIPA (Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act) report.

“Similarly, Alabama also used to hold regular meetings where they would discuss violence in the prisons, but Alabama stopped these meetings and when the meetings occurred, Alabama did not track whether any recommended violence mitigation measures discussed at the meetings were implemented by the facility wardens.

Alabama fails to respond reasonably to the extensive violence and sexual violence in the prisons. Alabama fails to conduct proper investigations, track valuable information, or use available information to mitigate the substantial risk of violence and sexual violence. These systemic deficiencies, taken as a whole, show deliberate indifference,” according to the motion.

“Erosion of the physical plant”

For years, Gov. Kay Ivey and many legislators have relied on promised new prisons as the remedy. But Alabama prisons have been overcrowded for two decades, the DOJ points out, putting major strain on the physical plant. And yet, maintenance at these current facilities has been woefully lacking.

As the DOJ expert put it: “The erosion of the physical plant of Alabama’s facilities reflects the erosion of willingness or ability to manage the correctional system.”

“Despite acknowledging that the prisons are falling apart, Alabama has failed to respond reasonably to the substantial risk posed to prisoners continuing to be incarcerated in the facilities. For example, there is supposed to be a maintenance supervisor at each prison responsible for the day-to-day maintenance at the prison. However, not every major male prison in Alabama has at least one employee who does maintenance.” 

None of the state’s major prisons have preventive maintenance plans, there are no regular audits of working conditions and the person in charge of research and planning for ADOC “does not have information related to maintenance of facility management and she does not know who would produce that data.” 

Instead the prisons have been left to fall apart, with broken equipment routinely fashioned into weapons.

Governor Ivey’s Alabama solution to an Alabama problem

Violence is pervasive throughout the state’s system and has been for several years, the federal government states in the motion, and yet ADOC “also fails to properly classify all incidents, obscuring the official numbers reported for some violence.” The federal government’s new motion then appears to catalogue dozens of homicides occurring after the state was notified of federal action and vowed to improve conditions. 

Alabama officials stood before the press and constituents seven years ago and vowed to quickly address these issues.  “Our primary objective is to ensure each facility provides a humane, secure, and safe environment for inmates, and that reforms already in place and proposed bring about positive, tangible changes throughout the prison system,” then ADOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn said in a statement with Gov. Kay Ivey regarding the DOJ’s 2019 findings letter.   

“Over the coming months, my Administration will be working closely with DOJ to ensure that our mutual concerns are addressed and that we remain steadfast in our commitment to public safety, making certain that this Alabama problem has an Alabama solution,” Ivey said in the statement. 

The joint statement reads that ADOC “has been actively working to remedy these concerns by improving correctional officer hiring and retention; developing effective prison management, including efforts to curtail the entry of contraband; and replacing an outdated prison system with state-of-the-art correctional facilities designed to safely, effectively, and humanely manage and meet the needs of a diverse inmate population.”

“In response to DOJ’s findings, it is important to understand all the current efforts ADOC has taken and will continue to take to improve the conditions of confinement within the male prison system,” Mr. Dunn said. “Governor Ivey’s commitment to working closely with the Legislature to resolve this generational problem will ultimately lead to a 21st Century prison system.”

Despite assurances in 2019 that the state was working to address the DOJ’s concerns and stem the tide of contraband and deaths, those deaths only increased in the following years. The new motion documents the following: “From 2019 to 2024, as reported by Alabama, prisoners killed at least 78 other prisoners in ADOC…Prisoners are routinely stabbed with prison-made knives and knives smuggled in from outside.”

Reported and unreported sexual violence also remains rampant inside the state’s prisons, where “prisoners engage in sexual acts for protection, for drugs, and to work off debts.” Unreported sexual violence occurs “hidden behind sheets draped from top bunks to conceal what is happening on lower bunks, all occurring in the absence of staff” and one man “testified he had been beaten, held down, and raped numerous times in ADOC.” This too was documented seven years ago.

Overcrowding and understaffing have been problems for more than two decades, which leads to violence and sexual abuse, the DOJ’s motion states. The prisons have operated above design capacities since at least 2000, and there is regularly one officer covering multiple posts, “leaving entire housing units unsupervised for excessively long periods of time. … Regional Director Edward Ellington testified that it was permissible for an ADOC facility to have no officers assigned to watch a housing unit.” 

“If inmates don’t stop it, it don’t get stopped,” one incarcerated man told the DOJ. “They just come after you’re dead or he’s dead or after they’re all done and be like, Come on, let’s go to Seg.” One prisoner testified that it took him a week to report that he was sexually assaulted “because other prisoners would not let him out of the dorm.” 

ADOC’s inability to control the movement of incarcerated people inside prisons leads to violence and sexual abuse, and staff fail to ensure people are sleeping in their assigned beds. Bed roster counts and the wearing of wristbands that denote which housing unit a person is assigned to are not consistently enforced. 

“Even Commissioner John Hamm minimized unauthorized prisoner movement, testifying, ‘Well, you go visit other people at their house, and I mean, you’re not there with malicious intent, then everything is fine, you go back to your house. So if an inmate in a dorm goes to another dorm and just going to say hi, that’s fine, but they are inmates.’” 

Because movement isn’t controlled, prisoners lose assigned beds to stronger prisoners or due to debts, becoming essentially homeless and “sleeping on the floor, in dayrooms, or even outside.” Controlling movement is critical to keeping sexual assault victims and predators apart. 

One warden interviewed by DOJ investigators couldn’t say how many dorms her facility had, or if her facility’s population was “less than 10,000 prisoners. (It is around 1,200 prisoners).” She didn’t know how many homicides occurred at her prison since she became warden, and knew very little about the homicides that happened in the previous month. 

She was uncertain about the details of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act that governs how state prisons handle sexual assault incidents, and when asked if she could change one thing about her prison “she said the location because of her commute.” 

Ongoing excessive force, assaults and homicides by officers

From 2019 through Jan. 31, 2025, at least 12 ADOC officers and supervisors have been criminally convicted of charges related to assaulting incarcerated people, and at least five more were charged for assaulting prisoners. 

“At Elmore, two officers, a sergeant and a lieutenant, were convicted of an incident in which the sergeant repeatedly punched, kicked, and struck two handcuffed prisoners with a baton”, and at Staton, an officer and a sergeant were convicted of kicking a prisoner and striking him with a baton, then lying about the incident in a report and to a state investigator. 

The DOJ noted the beating death of Steven Davis by multiple officers at Donaldson Correctional Facility in 2019 that resulted in a $250,000 settlement to his mother.  “ADOC settled that case after Judge Proctor denied in part the defendants’ motion to dismiss, concluding that “fourteen incidents in three years is sufficient to plead ‘obvious, flagrant, [and] rampant’ abuse…” 

Despite the repeated warnings as a result of the DOJ litigation, ADOC supervisors failed to prevent and address excessive force, and use excessive force themselves, the DOJ states.  “A lieutenant at Donaldson repeatedly used excessive force, culminating in his criminal conviction in 2023” and yet, “An ADOC official admitted she had never seen a facility report in which a captain recommended corrective action.” 

Despite widespread excessive use of force incidents, ADOC fails to properly investigate or handle these incidents, including one in which a man said an officer woke him “by striking him in the head with a baton because he did not turn over fast enough.” 

“The prisoner had a sleeping disorder. He testified that a baton blow broke his arm and that the warden later arranged for him to be seen by medical. ADOC files do not mention an officer using force in this incident.”

ADOC lacks a system to track use of force, and fails to prevent “the same officers and supervisor, and others, from repeatedly using excessive force against prisoners.” The motion again documents extreme complacency by ADOC leadership and staff over years: “Commissioner Hamm never received training on use of force in a “correctional setting” He did not know whether ADOC had a centralized database to track uses of force. He did not know whether uses of force increased or decreased during his tenure. He had never talked to a warden about use of force. He could not remember the last time he reviewed an LESD investigative report related to use of force.” 

“An ADOC use-of-force investigator testified that she did not recall any manual about how to conduct investigations, and she does not make determinations or recommendations about whether uses of force were justified, nor does she receive training about how to complete audit forms about uses of force. The investigator concurred with facilities’ findings that uses of force were justified, even when the files did not include body chart documentation, photographs, or statements from officers and prisoners.” 

Leadership’s response

In the state’s own motion for summary judgment, filed late Monday by private Alabama attorney William “Bill” Lunsford, he argues that the state has made “demonstrable, consistent, and comprehensive efforts” to resolve the allegations of inadequate correctional staffing; excessive use-of-force by officers against incarcerated people, violence and sexual abuse among the incarcerated and a failing classification system.

On the DOJ’s allegations regarding excessive use-of-force, the state’s motion reads that the DOJ cannot “establish a policy or practice of excessive force or a “history of widespread abuse” that should have put supervisors on notice of repeated excessive uses of force.”

In support of that argument, the state notes that for a particular six-month period, almost half of the use of force incidents reviewed by ADOC’s own review board were deemed unjustified, but the state alleges those instances of excessive use of force were handled properly. Yet, the data the state argues shows ADOC is properly handling excessive use of force instances instead clearly shows that the violence at the hands of officers is widespread.  “For example, between August 2024 and January 2025, ADOC’s Use of Force Review Board reviewed at least 58 use-of-force incidents and found 26 uses of force unjustified or unnecessary,” the state’s motion reads. 

Despite the state’s arguments that ADOC has taken meaningful steps to resolve the DOJ’s concerns, Alabama prisons remain overpopulated, understaffed and filled with contraband. 

In April 2019 there were 27,660 people in custody of ADOC, with 5,480 of those aged 50 or older. This April there were 28,568 incarcerated by the state, and 8,171 aged 50 and older. The month that DOJ’s report was published in 2019, Alabama prisons were at 168 percent capacity. The state’s prisons were at 171 percent capacity in March 2026. 

Alabama prisons hit a record high number of in-custody deaths in 2023, when 327 people died, and more people died in Alabama prisons per capita than in any state in the nation in 2024, and at a rate that was nearly double those of the next highest state. In 2023 Alabama prisons had an overdose mortality rate 20 times the national average across all state prisons in 2019, the last year for which the federal government has made that data available.

Not for lack of funding

ADOC’s funding has exploded during the course of the litigation as the agency has increased pay for officers, signed expensive contracts for medical care and legal services, and spent double the budgeted amount for a new mega prison. The general fund allocation to the agency has gone from $486 million in 2019 to the current $883 million, swallowing 25% of the entire General Fund.

The Alabama Corrections Institution Finance Authority this month agreed to borrow almost $200 million to build a new 4,000-bed prison in Escambia County, which increased the budget for that prison project from $700 million to $900 million. The state’s other new 4,000-bed prison project in Elmore County has already cost more than $1.25 billion. 

The rising costs of these two new prisons is already at least $900 million more than the state Legislature in 2021 approved, when the expected cost then was set at $1.3 billion for both prisons. 

The cost to taxpayers to defend the state’s unconstitutional prisons in courts continues to balloon as well. Mr. Lunsford has already been paid at least $56.4 million defending ADOC, and with an additional $38 million he’s set to receive to defend the state’s prisons from the DOJ’s lawsuit, he’ll have been paid $94.4 million. 

With this motion, the DOJ argues that the 260 pages of facts laid out are beyond dispute; that the state violates the Eighth Amendment rights of incarcerated men and that the plaintiffs are entitled to judgment in their favor.

By Eddie Burkhalter, Appleseed Researcher

The private Alabama attorney William “Bill” Lunsford, individually and in his role as an appointed state Deputy Attorney General, has been paid $48.8 million defending the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) as of Aug. 5, and millions more of our tax dollars are headed his way.

That staggering number, taxpayer funds paid to defend the state’s deadly, chaotic prisons, will skyrocket to $86.8 million if the latest contract increase request of $38 million by ADOC goes through as expected. Most of the new money is for an anticipated trial in the slow-moving DOJ case. Appleseed confirmed these totals through state records.

It’s hard to imagine Alabama could prevail in a trial where the U.S. Department of Justice is expected to lay out a case that federal attorneys have been building since 2019, when the DOJ first issued an initial report detailing the widespread, horrifying abuses inside Alabama’s prisons for men. The DOJ filed suit in December 2020. Since then, the state has completely failed to curtail the violence, death, and corruption at the heart of the lawsuit, instead overseeing years of record deaths totaling more than 1,300 since the case began. Many of those facts are also on full display in the documentary The Alabama Solution, which uses cell phone footage from inside Alabama prisons to show rampant violence, deadly force by officers, open-air drug use and a system in chaos. The trial is set for November.

Across the country, few states have let lawsuits over conditions much less troubling go all the way to trial. Instead, state officials agree to bring those prison systems into line, working with federal officials and the courts on settlement agreements that are enforced by monitors. Alabama is an outlier when it comes to dragging these cases on, and one has to question what the state gains in doing so.

It’s hard to question, however, whether Lunsford stands to gain by pushing towards a trial, instead of a settlement, because the many tens of millions in tax dollars going to him seem to speak louder than the voices of those who argue the money could be better spent actually trying to solve the myriad systemic issues inside Alabama’s deadly prisons. 

Comparing the legal costs with other state spending on lawyers in Alabama makes the Lunsford contracts even more alarming. His current and anticipated payments could fund the salaries of every District Attorney in the State of Alabama for at least nine years, according to recent state General Fund budget documents. The Lunsford contract amounts could also fund the entire Alabama Attorney General’s Office, which employs about 80, for six years.  

In a state that purportedly prides itself on fiscal conservatism, only one Alabama lawmaker has questioned the legal spending. Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, has temporarily held up the two new contracts for Lunsford to defend the ADOC against the federal government’s lawsuit.

Rep. England, a member of the state Legislature’s Contract Review Committee and the Joint Prison Oversight Committee, put a 45-day hold – all he’s legally allowed to do – on a $30 million contract to Lunsford to pay for litigating the DOJ’s lawsuit over prisons for men, and another $3 million to Lunsford for his legal work on the longrunning Braggs v. Dunn lawsuit over mental health treatment inside state prisons. 

ADOC’s request Thursday would push the total spent to defend the department in Braggs v. Dunn to $14.2 million. Legal spending in Braggs has not been a good investment. In June, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson’s findings of deliberate indifference at the institutional level, concluding that ADOC’s mental healthcare was “horrendously inadequate.” The Eleventh Circuit ruled that the prison system violated the constitutional rights of thousands of incarcerated people with severe mental health conditions by showing deliberate indifference to their mental healthcare needs.

In a candid conversation with Appleseed the former director of another state’s department of corrections explained that it makes no sense for a state to place the majority of its prison litigation with one private attorney, whose business is centered on prison litigation, because it incentivises that attorney to drag the case out and continue billing those legal hours instead of finding ways to help solve the crisis and save the state money. 

A question worth asking is, if most DOJ lawsuits over prisons ended in either consent decrees or settlement agreements, what has Alabama gained by dragging out this legal fight? 

Other states settle and address the problems, Alabama write checks to private lawyers

The Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) of 1980 is a federal law meant to protect people incarcerated in state and local prisons and jails, those in nursing homes, mental health facilities and other group settings. The DOJ’s 2020 CRIPA lawsuit against Alabama is one of many the federal government has filed since the law’s inception, but one of very few that appears to be headed all the way to trial. 

In these matters, the DOJ generally issues a findings letter to states documenting civil rights abuses in prisons and jails, as it did to Alabama in 2019, and if the federal government isn’t able to secure an agreed upon resolution, the DOJ can file a lawsuit, as it did over Alabama’s prisons for men. 

In most of those other states where a lawsuit is filed, the cases are adjudicated through settlement agreements or consent decrees prior to going to trial, where the outcomes are uncertain, the costs to states in legal fees can be exorbitant, and the abuses persist as the cases drag out. 

Among the many examples of cases settling without trials:

In 1996 the DOJ filed four CRIPA complaints –  with Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Florida  – and all four were later settled. 

In 1997 there were six new CRIPA complaints filed, and four of those six ended in settlements. 

All four of the DOJ’s CRIPA complaints filed in 1998 were settled, and the following year, in 1999, the DOJ filed seven new CRIPA complaints and all seven later ended in settlements before going to trial. 

The DOJ’s investigation in 1998 found that staff at five county jails in Phoenix, Arizona “used excessive physical force and restraints in violation of the constitutional rights of individuals detained in the jails.” Arizona and the DOJ entered into a settlement agreement that required the jails to increase staffing and better train staff in the use of force.

Similarly, all three CRIPA lawsuits filed by the DOJ in 2000 settled prior to trials, and another two new CRIPA lawsuits filed in 2001 also settled. 

More recently, Massachusetts Department of Corrections settled with the DOJ in 2022 over mental health care and suicide prevention. The DOJ’s investigation found  “unconstitutional conditions and circumstances where incarcerated people in mental health crisis harmed themselves up to and including suicide…The department found that MDOC did not adequately supervise individuals in mental health crisis, did not provide them adequate mental health care, and used prolonged mental health watches under restrictive housing conditions.”

Settlements have continued in recent years. In 2023 the DOJ entered into a consent decree with the Minnesota Department of Corrections over what the federal government said was disability discrimination throughout the prison system. Virginia in 2019 settled a DOJ lawsuit over religious practices inside Virginia Department of Corrections prisons. The New Jersey Department of Corrections in 2022 signed onto a consent decree with the DOJ over allegations of sexual abuse, excessive force and retaliation at a prison for women. 

Mississippi lawmaker: “We don’t want to be in a situation like Alabama.” 

The DOJ in 2020 opened an investigation into four prisons operated by the Mississippi Department of Corrections, including Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman), Southern Mississippi Correctional Institute, Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, and the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, and four years later released a 60-page report that mirrors many of the findings in Alabama’s case, and states that “MDOC routinely violates the constitutional rights of people incarcerated at all three facilities by failing to protect them from widespread physical violence.” 

“The state does not adequately supervise the incarcerated population, control the flow of contraband, adequately investigate incidents of serious harm, or provide adequate living conditions. These problems are exacerbated by chronic understaffing that has allowed gangs to exert improper influence inside the prisons,” the DOJ’s report on Mississippi’s prisons reads. 

It’s been six years since the DOJ opened the investigation into Mississippi’s prisons, and two years since the release of the report, and the DOJ hasn’t filed a lawsuit, as it did just two years after filing its first report on Alabama prisons. 

Instead, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves hired Burl Cain, former head of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, to lead the state’s prison system and enact reforms. 

Cain, a controversial prison leader who opponents say overused solitary confinement and who faced allegations of a land deal with the family of an incarcerated man and an audit that showed he used prison workers at his private property, oversaw marked reforms at Angola prison, which in the 1970s was known for rampant violence. 

In an effort to help prevent a DOJ lawsuit, air-conditioning was installed in all but one unit inside 124-year-old Parchman prison, and a third of South Mississippi Correctional Institution now as AC, according to the Clarion Ledger. That one unit in Parchman, that had been the site of a gang war that drew national attention, was shut down and those incarcerated persons sent to another facility. 

“That’s hard work. That helps us with the Justice Department,” Cain told the Clarion Ledger. 

Mississippi state Sen. Juan Barnett, chairman of the Senate Corrections Committee, has warned his state lawmakers that if they fail to make the needed fixes, Mississippi could be facing a DOJ lawsuit as well. A bill he filed that would have closed Parchman and likely sent a portion of those incarcerated persons to a prison operated by a private prison company failed in a senate committee in 2025.  “We don’t want to be in a situation like Alabama,” Barnett told the Clarion Ledger. 

But Attorney Bill Lunsford is collecting tax dollars in Mississippi, as well. This time as the monitor for a private medical care contract. Last summer, that state approved a one-year $687,000 contract with Lunsford to lead a team from his firm, Butler Snow, to monitor the medical contractor providing care for the Mississippi Department of Corrections, according to Mississippi Today, which published a series of articles detailing medical neglect inside Mississippi’s prisons. 

“A complicated, sticky wicket.”

Remarkably, despite making millions defending Alabama’s prison system and asking for many millions more, an attorney working in Lunsford’s Butler Snow office filed a motion in the DOJ’s case on August 5 that failed to properly redact sensitive information about a new security measure within ADOC. Appleseed was able to read the data despite the redactions. 

Appleseed isn’t sharing that data, as it involves a large-scale security measure, but the misstep is at least the second embarrassing instance involving Lunsford and his team’s work on Alabama prison litigation. A federal judge in July 2025 removed Lunsford and two other attorneys from a civil rights lawsuit when the attorney for the plaintiff notified the court that a filing by Lunsford’s team included incorrect information made up by artificial intelligence. State records show Lunsford’s team took in $172,396 in the case in which AI was used.

After Rep. England spent more than 20 minutes questioning ADOC’s representative about the requested additional millions to Lunsford during last week’s Joint Contract Review Committee meeting, state Sen. Dan Roberts, R-Mountain Brook, the committee chair, noted that the state was working toward construction of a new 4,000-bed prison and is “anticipating building another facility” but that construction is “a little behind schedule.” The enormous new prison, which has swallowed $1.3 billion in state funding, should insulate the state against future litigation costs, Roberts suggested, before adding: “It is a complicated, sticky wicket.”