Wesley Abernathy was set to be released in December 2025. He had been sentenced to 30 months in ADOC. He died at Bullock Correctional Facility on Mother’s Day this May (photo courtesy of the family),

By Eddie Burkhalter, Appleseed Researcher

Like many Alabama families, Wesley Abernathy’s mother, wife, and sister paid thousands of dollars in extortion payments hoping the money would keep him alive during his short sentence in an Alabama prison. “We have gotten threats from other inmates in there. I was suckered into paying money,” his sister, Darby Martinez explained. “One time he was on the phone with me, and somebody got on there and said, ‘if you don’t send me this money, I’ll kill him tonight.’” 

The family paid dearly. But Wesley died anyway.

“I had to tell my mom. It was horrific. I think that’s the worst pain that I’ve ever been through,” Mrs. Martinez told Appleseed. Wesley, 31, was her mother’s only son. He died at Bullock Correctional Facility on Mother’s Day this May.

Mrs. Martinez talked to her brother by phone the night before he died. They talked for eight minutes, until 10:58 p.m.  “I’ll call you on Mother’s Day. Tell mom and everybody to answer,” Wesley told his sister. Instead, Mrs. Martinez got a call from a prison employee at 6:58 a.m. 

“Let me switch you over to the chaplain,” the man told her. “I knew instantly something was wrong. He couldn’t get the chaplain to answer so he told me ‘I’m very sorry but Wesley passed away.’ I don’t really remember much from that moment. I know they said that I just fell to the ground and was screaming,” Mrs. Martinez said. 

Wesley Abernathy with his sister, Selena Colon, his mother, Aleshia Gonzalez, and his sister, Darby Martinez (photo courtesy of the family),

Wesley was set to be released in December 2025. He had been sentenced to 30 months in ADOC, followed by probation, after pleading guilty to manslaughter.

From January 1st through June 20th  there were 161 deaths among the incarcerated in Alabama prisons, Appleseed learned through a records request. Alabama prisons saw a record 325 deaths in 2023.  So far, ADOC investigations have determined that 112 of those deaths were from preventable causes, with 10 homicides, 13 suicides and 89 overdose deaths. 

Alabama’s overdose mortality rate in prisons last year of 435 per 100,000 was 20 times the national rate across state prisons, according to the latest available national data from the Federal Bureau of Investigations. 

Ms. Martinez estimates that during her brother’s time in prison she sent $3,000 to men who’d threatened his life. Between her, her mother and Wesley’s wife, she estimates they sent between $5,000 and $7,000 to extortionists who threatened to kill him. 

“Because I was scared for his life, and even with us telling the prison, ‘Hey, there’s drugs in there. It’s not as safe there. They were like ‘Oh, well, he’s probably gonna die.’ This is literally what the woman told me on the phone,” Mrs. Martinez said of a female officer she spoke to. “She said, we’ve moved him four times already, and I said, no you have not. You moved him from one dorm to the next. You didn’t try to do anything.” 

Mrs. Martinez said the Law Enforcement Services Division investigator looking into her brother’s death told the family that ADOC told him not to worry about an autopsy because they believed it was an overdose death, but the condition of his body at the funeral home told another story.

The side of Wesley’s face was black, and he had a large knot on his head. “So we started asking. How did this happen?,” Mrs. Martinez said. 

The investigator told the family that he fought for an autopsy to be done because Wesley had bruises on his face, but that according to the funeral home there were no signs that an autopsy had been done. 

“We had my brother cremated, so there’s no going back. They just ripped that away from us. We thought an autopsy was performed because the investigator didn’t even know the autopsy wasn’t even done,” Mrs. Martinez said. 

Wesley had an addiction problem and may have been using drugs while incarcerated, Mrs. Martinez said. She believes he was in debt to those men inside who were selling him drugs. Drug debt is a common catalyst for violence and death inside Alabama prisons. 

One incarcerated man who was extorting the family told Mrs. Martinez on a prison phone about a month before her brother died that, “We run this prison. The officers do what we say, so they’re not going to protect your brother.” Like so many Alabama families with incarcerated loved ones, Wesley Abernathy’s family did not know who to turn to, or how to create safer conditions for him. There is no guidebook for desperate families and generally no one with any power to help them. “There are people that deserve to be in there. I understand that, but it’s to teach people. Not for all these families that have to get phone calls that their family member is gone.” 

Wesley and his wife, Amber Abernathy (photo courtesy of the family).

Mrs. Martinez described her brother as a good-hearted person who loved to fish, and could most often be found fishing at Guntersville Lake. “He was a good man. He had three babies, and he loved them to death, with everything in him,” Mrs. Martinez said. 

Amber Abernathy, Wesley’s widow, told Appleseed she received a call from the prison warden the morning he died, but that the shock of finding out had her in disbelief. 

“I was just saying, Is this a joke? Are you just kidding? This is not funny. I just was in panic,” Mrs. Abernathy said. The warden told her there was no bruising on the body and that it appeared to have been a medical event. 

Mrs. Abernathy described what the family saw when they arrived at the funeral home. 

“He had lots of bruising on his face – on the right side of his face. He had a knot on the right side of his head, and markings behind his ear and on his right side,” Mrs. Abernathy said. “We were not prepared for that.” 

The Law Enforcement Services Division investigator assigned to her husband’s death told her in an early phone call that they believed he died of a fentanyl overdose, she said, and that there were no bruises or other signs of injury on him. She said that although she suspected he was using drugs in prison he’d never take fentanyl purposefully, and that he had always been afraid of that drug. The investigator told her his body would be set for an autopsy, but that’s not what happened, she explained. 

Mrs. Abernathy said the investigator told her Wesley could be seen on security footage at around 3:30 am the day he died doubled over in pain, before going to the bathroom where he remained doubled over as if his stomach was hurting. He then returned to his bunk. A man who slept nearby Wesley later told the investigator that when Wesley returned from the bathroom he told the man he believes he may have ingested fentanyl. She said the family knows he bought a cigarette from someone the night before and they’re worried that it may have been laced with a drug. 

In another call with the investigator about three weeks after the funeral he told Mrs. Abernathy that he had seen those bruises and had requested an autopsy, Mrs. Abernathy said, but when she explained to the investigator that the funeral home told the family they saw no signs of an autopsy having been done, the news caught the investigator off guard. 

Wesley and his daughter, Paizlee Abernathy (photo courtesy of the family).

“That doesn’t make sense, because I specifically requested for a full autopsy on him. They had his body at forensic sciences, so I don’t understand why they didn’t do an autopsy,” Mrs. Abernathy said the investigator told her, referring to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences (ADFS), which can conduct full autopsies and drug toxicology screens on incarcerated people. 

Mrs. Abernathy requested the report on her husband’s death from the ADFS but in a letter to her on June 20th, and in an identical letter on July 19th, the department said the reports in that case weren’t yet public records because the death was either still under investigation by the local district attorney, or because the department hadn’t yet finalized the reports. 

ADOC declined to directly answer Appleseed’s questions regarding the statement the investigator made about his concerns over the signs of injuries and his request for a full autopsy. 

“The death of inmate Abernathy is still under investigation by the Law Enforcement Services Division. The ADOC does not have the authority to authorize autopsies. Any questions regarding autopsies should be directed to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences,” the ADOC spokesperson wrote to Appleseed. 

ADFS in a response to Appleseed also didn’t answer whether Wesley received a full autopsy or just a toxicology screening, and instead sent a letter identical to those sent to Mrs. Abernathy. 

ADOC first confirmed for Appleseed that autopsies would no longer be done by the state for suspected natural or overdose deaths. UAB Hospital terminated its longstanding agreement with ADOC to conduct autopsies and/or toxicology screens on suspected natural and overdose deaths on April 22, 2024, ADOC told Appleseed. Families recently filed a lawsuit against UAB after discovering that their incarcerated loved ones’ bodies were returned to them for interment missing internal organs. 

Chase Mathis was confined to a wheelchair when he went to prison. His mobility challenges meant he often did not have enough to eat and did not get his basic needs met. But in Alabama’s drug-infested prisons, lethal drugs are always available even when food is not.

By Eddie Burkhalter, Appleseed Researcher

Chase Mathis died inside Elmore Correctional Facility on June 4, 2024. His grieving family is seeking answers (photo courtesy of his family).

Chase Mathis died inside Elmore Correctional Facility on June 4 moments after his father last spoke to him by phone. Now the father is seeking answers, and wants to expose Alabama’s troubled prisons that failed to keep his son, who entered prison in a wheelchair, alive.

Before prescription pills took their toll, Chase was a farm boy and a prankster, affectionately called Plowboy in his community. “He’s been climbing on tractors since he was big enough to ride a bicycle to the fields…He could pretty much run anything. If he could reach the controls he could run it,” Tim Mathis said. His son grew up in a small rural community between Dothan and Cottonwood. “He loved to shoot fireworks. He loved to hunt. Just normal country stuff.”

Chase Mathis loved making friends and family laugh (photo courtesy of Chase’s family)

Chase went to great lengths to make people laugh, his father remembered. During a friend’s birthday party at a local fast food restaurant, Chase dressed in full clown costume, makeup and all, just to make people smile. 

His son’s life took a turn when he became addicted to prescription pain pills, Mr. Mathis said, but it was a 2014 car accident that sent him to prison. Chase was driving with a friend and was intoxicated when they believe he fell asleep at the wheel. The car struck a tree, killing his friend. Chase suffered multiple broken bones throughout his body, three skull fractures, a torn spleen and an aneurysm. “We stayed in the trauma unit for 41 days before we knew he was going to live,” Mr. Mathis said.  A year-and-a-half later Chase was indicted for murder, but Chase later agreed to a plea deal and a reduced charge of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 15 years. 

Chase’s attorney asked that he be put into the Alabama Department of Corrections’ Substance Abuse Program (SAP), Mr. Mathis said, but he never received that critical treatment once incarcerated. “Ain’t none of that happening,” Mr. Mathis said of the SAP program. “It’s just a crock…If we had known that at the time, if I could go back and do it again I’d say, take your damned chances, go to trial and see what the jury says.” 

ADOC’s own data confirm that there has been a 64% decrease in the number of incarcerated people completing drug treatment over the last decade. Staffing is threadbare at the troubled agency, which constricts the availability of rehabiliative programming. Magnifying Chase’s challenges in prison was the fact that he relied on a wheelchair. He called his father one day in tears, and said he was hungry. “I can’t walk,” Chase told his father, and his dorm is too far from the dining hall. By the time he wheels himself there it’s too late, and the food is being put up, he said. If he buys food from the prison store he has to eat it as soon as he buys it, or else he’ll be robbed of the food, and the officers do nothing to stop it, Chase told his father. 

Mr. Mathis called then-ADOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn to discuss his concerns but Dunn declined to talk to him, so Mr. Mathis said he’d like to visit the prison and talk to him in person. 

“And I was advised that if I set foot on the property up there I’d be charged with a terroristic threat,” Mr. Mathis said. 

“There was no medical rehab whatsoever. He had to teach himself how to walk,” Mr. Mathis said. His son began using drugs in prison, he believes, to get his mind off of the brutal violence and unchecked depravity surrounding him inside daily. 

Mr. Mathis spoke to his son the day he died. Their call ended at 8:32 p.m. on June 4th. He received a call from the prison at 10 p.m. with the news of Chase’s death. An investigator with ADOC’s Law Enforcement Services Division told Mr. Mathis that he believes Chase died within 15 minutes of talking to Mr. Mathis.

Chase Mathis (photo courtesy of the family).

Mr. Mathis said it’s hard to know for certain, but he’s concerned his son may have been killed with what’s known as a “hotshot,” or a lethal dose of drugs administered against one’s will and meant to kill. 

“Chase told me he owed these guys money. He didn’t tell me who they were, but he told the investigator. He gave them their names,” Mr. Mathis said. Chase owed more than $1,000 in separate amounts to three men at Staton prison, he said. He assumed it was drug debt, which is common in Alabama prisons and often results in the extortion of family members, assaults and homicides. Because of that debt and threats he was receiving, Chase told investigators and asked to be moved, his father said, but instead of placing him in a cell by himself for protection, his son was placed in general population. Chase’s deaths just moments after arriving at Elmore prison is suspicious, he explained. 

Chase’s body was sent to the state’s lab at the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences for an autopsy, Mr. Mathis said. He was told by ADOC that the autopsy would be done because the death was under criminal investigation. 

ADOC first confirmed for Appleseed that autopsies would no longer be done by the state for suspected natural or overdose deaths. UAB Hospital terminated its longstanding agreement with ADOC to conduct autopsies and/or toxicology screens on suspected natural and overdose deaths on April 22, 2024, ADOC told Appleseed. Families recently filed a lawsuit against UAB after discovering that their incarcerated loved ones’ bodies were returned to them for interment missing internal organs. 

Mr. Mathis has signed up to speak at the upcoming public hearing during the Joint Legislative Prison Oversight Committee meeting on July 24th. He’s still not sure what he’ll say, but knows he wants to talk about the drug crisis in Alabama’s prisons. 

Mr. Mathis said he’d like to see a nationwide news agency come in and expose the crisis in Alabama’s prisons. “So the average person out here can see, because if we had a dog pound that was run like the facility my child’s been at, they’d be pitching a fit,” he said. 

National coverage of Alabama’s horrific prisons has been widespread at least since 2019, and sadly the humanitarian crisis persists. Reports have appeared in USA Today, The New York Times, CNN, Politico, Fox News and more.

Families with incarcerated loved ones attend the Prison Oversight Committee hearing in December 14, 2023 (photo courtesy of Alabama Daily News).

Reaction from lawmakers on the Joint Legislative Prison Oversight Committee after hearing from family members of incarcerated people at a previous public hearing in December 2023 resulted in passage of SB322 this past legislative session, which creates a family services unit to provide answers and information to families of incarcerated people who have been injured or hospitalized. 

Alabama’s overcrowded, understaffed and deadly prisons have been in a state of crisis for decades, yet with each week the crisis only gets worse. Appleseed regularly talks to family members who have lost loved ones inside prisons, or who are being threatened with violence or death, and family members extorted to keep them safe, and it’s not just Appleseed staff who are having these conversations. 

“I know I’ve said this before, but I’ve gotten another call from another constituent where their son was beat up because the gangs are running our prisons, and the prison guards are bringing the drugs and the cell phones to the gang members,” Alabama House Speaker Pro Tem Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, said during a Legislative Contract Review Committee’s meeting in June. “I mean, these people call me and they’re crying their eyes out because they’ve got a video tape of their son that’s just been (sexually assaulted) or beaten up by the gangs. I feel sorry for you all, but please God, we’ve got to do something to protect these prisoners. It’s insane what’s going on in our prison system.”

By Eddie Burkhalter, Appleseed Researcher

Correctional Officers (from ADOC website)

Alabama’s prison staffing crisis has an outsized role in the violence and record number of deaths seen across the state’s prisons, most everyone agrees. New data obtained by Appleseed shows yet another reason prison staffing remains dangerously low: the large number of terminated prison employees – 366 Department of Corrections staff fired from January 2018 to November 2023.

The list includes only people fired from the department, not retirements or resignations, and was provided following a records request by Appleseed. Among the 366, at least 19 had been charged with work-related crimes, including contraband and assaulting incarcerated people with batons, for striking an incarcerated man “in the facial area with an open hand and push[ing] the inmate into a wall,” and for hitting another incarcerated man on the jaw with a closed fist “requiring surgery for his injury,” according to court records. 

Still another former prison worker was charged with assault for causing injury to an incarcerated man by “kicking and/or punching him” and two officers were arrested in May 2022 and charged with criminally negligent homicide in the death of 27-year-old Jason Kirkland, who was found dead after he became stuck inside his cell’s small metal door used to pass food through and asphyxiated. 

An officer was arrested in May 2022 and charged with multiple crimes in connection with allegedly attempting to smuggle marijuana inside a frozen Poweraid bottle into Fountain Correctional Facility. Another officer was arrested in February 2020 after attempting to bring seven ounces of marijuana, three ounces of meth, two knives and other contraband into Fountain prison. That officer was convicted in federal court and was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. 

But those 19 former ADOC employees charged with work-related crimes don’t come close to painting the entire picture of corruption and violence at the hands of ADOC employees; many former ADOC officers and staff quit before they’re fired, as Appleseed’s review of court records showed. Records for a former officer charged with assault for allegedly beating a man with a baton at Donaldson Correctional Facility in 2021 showed that two other former officers were also charged with assault in that incident, but those two officers weren’t listed by ADOC as having been fired during that time. Additionally, challenges with securing evidence and witnesses for incidents that occur in a correctional setting result in corrupt staff getting quietly pushed out the door rather than criminally prosecuted.

Equal Justice Initiative notes that, “since 2019, EJI has identified at least 89 ADOC employees who have been criminally charged or administratively sanctioned for misconduct within Alabama prisons. In 30 of these cases, the offending officers were supervisors.”

In one case, a lieutenant with 20 years experience attacked Victor Russo, a 60-year-old incarcerated man, who later died.  Mohammad Jenkins, who was a shift commander at Donaldson Correctional Facility, pleaded guilty to using excessive force on Russo, then lying afterwards to cover up his abuse, according to the United States Department of Justice. “Specifically, on Feb. 16, 2022, Jenkins willfully deprived inmate V.R. of his right to be free from excessive force by kicking him, hitting him, spraying him with chemical spray, striking him with a can of chemical spray and striking him with a shoe, while V.R. was restrained inside of a holding cell and not posing a threat,” the DOJ stated. 

ADOC’s staffing problems, which have been a driver of the violence and death inside Alabama’s prisons, have plagued ADOC for decades, and recent court orders to improve have gone unanswered. From December 2017 until Sept. 30, 2020, the state showed an increase of just 25 officers over nearly two years, which was less than 1.5 percent of a judge’s order to add 2,000 correctional officers by February 2022, and the staffing problem has only worsened. ADOC’s quarterly reports show total security staffing fell from 2,102 in December 2021 to 1,763 by September 2023, even after massive recruiting efforts, pay raises and incentives. 

Violence could lead to early releases

Despite such a significant number of terminations, the assaultive and criminal behavior by ADOC officers keeps occurring. Now, violence against incarcerated people in Alabama is leading lawyers to request early release based on the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) inability to keep people in its custody safe.

This month, a grand jury indicted Limestone Correctional officers Samuel Dial and Jesse Cobb with felony assault for what court records allege is the beating of a 74-year-old incarcerated man in the head with a “broom handle.” Less than two weeks later, the man’s attorney on Feb. 21 filed a motion asking the court to reconsider releasing his client early because of the assault. Hospital records attached to the filing show the man suffered an intracranial hemorrhage and an abrasion to his left arm. 

The two officers remained employed by ADOC as of Friday were working at “non-contact posts” pending the outcome of ADOC’s criminal investigation, the department told Appleseed.

Despite signs of repeated, unlawful behavior by one man long before this episode, he remained a law enforcement officer at the ADOC. That officer,  Jesse Cobb, has been arrested four times since 2013, charged twice with driving under the influence, once for leaving the scene of an accident and twice for public intoxication. 

The earliest of Cobb’s DUI charges was dismissed for reasons court records do not make clear. Cobb in August 2014 pleaded guilty to a separate DUI charge in which court records state he was driving his motorcycle drunk and told the arresting officer “I work for the department of corrections.” The arresting officer in his notes said that Cobb was “using his job to establish dominance.” Cobb received a 180 day suspended jail sentence and was ordered to attend DUI school. The 2014 was later appealed and the charge dropped by the City of Athens, court records show. 

Cobb in July 2018 pleaded guilty to public intoxication and received a $50 fine plus court costs, and he was again arrested in January 2022 and charged with leaving the scene of an accident, public intoxication and failure to report an accident. Court records state he crashed into a guardrail, left the scene and the next day met with a state trooper and said he left the scene “because he was drunk.” Cobb pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and to public intoxication and received a one year suspended jail sentence and two years unsupervised probation. 

“You’re just making your problem bigger, in a new building.”

Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas, told Appleseed that the staffing problem itself can result in officers breaking the law. 

“In a low staffed environment, officers are more likely to want to make deals with incarcerated people to try to keep the peace there. So it’s like, Oh, I’ll bring you in some contraband,” Deitch said. “And then there’s also the fact that low staffing allows more bad things to happen inside: Not enough people to notice that staff are bringing in contraband.” 

Appleseed regularly receives videos from inside prisons showing open drug use, assaults, injured and dying people and with no officers in sight. 

ADOC did raise pay for correctional officers and trainees last year, but Deitch said it’s a mistake to think that it’s solely a salary issue. “Counterintuitively it’s better to raise the standards for what it takes to be an officer, raise the educational level, raise the age, raise what kind of things you’re looking for,” Deitch said. “Because then it makes the job more appealing to the kind of people you actually would want to have working there.”

The most important change ADOC could make to improve hiring, she said, is to improve prison conditions, and proponents of Alabama’s new under-construction $1.08 billion prison say that’s what’s needed to fix the state’s deadly prison crisis, but Deitch cautioned about placing all bets on that new prison building. 

“Building a new building doesn’t do anything about the culture. This is a system that has a very dysfunctional culture. It’s a culture that supports violence. It’s a culture that supports the bringing in of contraband. Breaking of rules. All sorts of violations, and unless you change that culture, the new building isn’t going to do anything,” Deitch said. “You’re just making your problem bigger, in a new building.”

By Eddie Burkhalter, Appleseed Researcher

Klifton Adam Bond (source Facebook)

Just 22 days after friends of Klifton Adam Bond’s family spoke to the Legislative Joint Prison Oversight Committee about Bond’s injuries following a severe beating, Mr. Bond was found dead in his cell at St. Clair Correctional Facility. 

For lawmakers who listened to those pleas for help, the death of this 38-year-old man should be yet another call to push for meaningful oversight of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), which continues to prove itself incapable of protecting the incarcerated from violence and death. 

Mr. Bond was attacked on Nov. 6, 2023 at Donaldson Correctional Facility and remained in a hospital intensive care unit for 12 days, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of his mother, as reported by Alabama Daily News. Doctors performed brain surgery on Mr. Bond and told the family he’d require extensive rehabilitation, a friend of the family told the prison oversight committee. Instead, Mr. Bond was moved to St. Clair prison on Jan. 3, 2024 and was found unresponsive in his cell the next day, according to ADOC. 

It’s unclear how he died and Appleseed is working to learn more, but in social media posts the family makes clear they believe it was a homicide. The lawsuit alleges that Mr. Bond had been fearful for his life in the days leading up to his death, and that several officers wanted to retaliate against Mr. Bond for his effort to get other incarcerated people medical care. 

Barbara Ann Turner, a friend of Mr. Bond’s family, spoke to lawmakers in December at the Joint Prison Oversight Committee meeting, and pleaded for action. The committee’s annual public hearing is statutorily mandated, and while all six lawmakers on the committee attended, there was no one from the Department of Corrections present. “He was beaten with a pipe, he was stabbed all over his body,” Ms. Turner told the lawmakers, noting that it took intervention from a state senator to get confirmation from the prison’s warden that Bond had been assaulted and was being treated at a hospital. 

“It’s never been worse.”

Just hours after Mr. Bond’s January 4th death, members of the Alabama Joint Contract Review Committee met in Montgomery and heard a request from an ADOC employee to approve a contract for court-ordered oversight of the department. That oversight is connected to a long-running lawsuit over mental health care in prisons, and the reports drafted by the external monitors aren’t currently made public. 

State Representative Chris England

Representative Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, a member of the committee, told Mandy Speirs, assistant general counsel for the Alabama Department of Corrections, of the hundreds of emails he regularly receives from families of incarcerated people describing the violence and death, and pleading for help. “We actually had a meeting here in this room last month of the Prison Oversight Committee, where some of the same people who were sending the emails came to talk to us about some of the horrors they’re experiencing in our prison system,” Rep. England said. “And unfortunately, no one from the Department of Corrections showed up.” 

Rep. England asked if the reports created by those external monitors could be released to the committee, to which Ms. Speirs responded that she would determine whether that was possible. He also questioned whether the committee should create additional oversight of ADOC which could give an “unbiased report.” 

“Not only what’s going on inside the facilities but what the Department of Corrections is doing to address them, but something has got to give because it’s really getting out of control,” Rep. England said. 

“I will say, and I understand, but to make a small defense is that there are two sides to every story and the DOC…for every email that you have, I’m sure we have information for that,” Ms. Speirs said. 

Appleseed reached out to Gov. Kay Ivey’s office with questions about executive branch responses to the crisis, but has received no response. While select lawmakers have been hearing from impacted families and speaking out about the problems, there have been no public statements or explanation for the increasingly deadly prison conditions from the Administration in charge of running prisons. “The Governor’s Office is pretending that nothing is wrong,” Rep. England told Appleseed. “The Executive Branch is in control and responsible for the day to day operations of the prison system and it’s never been worse.” 

It remains unclear what the “other side” is to the frequent cases of individuals being beaten to death while in custody of the state’s largest law enforcement agency, including instances where correctional officers are involved. The story of the beating death of Rubyn Murray, 39, who had served 19 years of a 20-year sentence for robbery, is one of a correctional officer allegedly using his authority to help end the life of a man he was paid to keep alive. D’Marcus Sanders, then an ADOC sergeant at Elmore Correctional Facility, is charged with murder in connection with Mr. Murray’s death in July. According to court records, Mr. Sanders unlocked Mr. Murray’s cell door and allowed two other incarcerated men to enter and beat Mr. Murray, causing serious injuries that later resulted in his death. The Alabama Board of Pardons and Parole denied parole for Mr. Murray in February of 2021. His conviction stemmed from a robbery of a Montgomery convenience store in which $125 was stolen; no one was injured, according to court records.

Alabama taxpayers will pay the cost to defend Mr. Sanders in court after an Elmore County District judge approved an affidavit of hardship filed on behalf of Mr. Sanders and declared the former correctional officer indigent. 

State officials have been provided detailed accounts of unconstitutionally dangerous prison conditions for the last five years, yet the violence only increases. The federal government in December 2020, sued the state and the Department of Corrections alleging that the state “fails to provide adequate protection from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, fails to provide safe and sanitary conditions, and subjects prisoners to excessive force at the hands of prison staff.” That lawsuit is scheduled for trial in November, 2024. 

“The most brutal meeting I’ve been in”

State Senator Dan Roberts

Senator Dan Roberts, R-Mountain Brook, is chair of the Legislature’s Contract Review Committee and a member of the Joint Prison Oversight Committee. Sen. Roberts spoke to Ms. Speirs during the Contract Review meeting. “That was the most brutal meeting that I’ve been in since I’ve been elected,” Sen. Roberts said of the Dec. 13, 2023, Prison Oversight meeting, where fourteen Alabama families and advocates spoke to lawmakers about Alabama’s broken prison system. 

Among them was 17-year-old MaKayla Mount, whose father, Christopher Mount, was brutally beaten and strangled to death inside a suicide cell at Easterling Correctional Facility after being placed there with another man. “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,” Ms. Mount told committee members. 

MaKayla Mount holds an urn containing her father’s ashes at the Prison Oversight Committee’s public hearing.

Appleseed is awaiting ADOC’s official count of prison deaths during 2023, but the number is expected to set a record for a second straight year. ADOC opened investigations into 247 deaths from Jan. 1 until Sept. 30, the last date for which the department has made that data available in ADOC’s quarterly reports. 

If prison deaths during the last three months of the year remained on pace, Alabama prisons would have seen more deaths last year than ever. Alabama prisons saw a 34 percent increase in deaths between 2021 and 2022, according to the federal data, although the U.S. Department of Justice’s 252 deaths in 2022 is less than what Appleseed and The Montgomery Advertiser confirmed through the Alabama Department of Corrections to be 270 deaths that year, which would put the increase at 43 percent. 

The death rate in Alabama prisons has climbed to five times the national average. Alabama’s prisoner mortality rate is 1,370 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with a national average of 330 deaths per 100,000, according to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics. 

By Eddie Burkhalter, Appleseed Researcher

Alabama’s incarceration rate is again on the rise, outpacing most other states, nearly four years after the federal government sued the state over unconstitutional conditions in its dangerous, understaffed prisons.  

Alabama had the 12th highest rate of increase in the number of people incarcerated in state prisons between 2021 and 2022, with a nearly six percent increase in that time, according to a November report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. 

Only 10 states had a higher rate of imprisonment than Alabama in 2021, and only eight had higher rates in 2022, according to the federal data. 

The report put the percentage of Alabama’s incarcerated classified as violent offenders at 61.3 percent of the 21,413 imprisoned in 2021. That’s markedly lower than what the state classifies as violent offenders. The Alabama Sentencing Commission in its 2023 report stated that 80 percent of the in-house prison population was serving a sentence for a violent offense. The difference between the state and federal estimate comes down to how Alabama more broadly defines what is legally a violent offense, as Alabama Reflector reported in April. 

Alabama prisons saw a 34 percent increase in deaths between 2021 and 2022, according to the federal data, although the U.S. Department of Justice’s 252 deaths in 2022 is less than what Appleseed and The Montgomery Advertiser confirmed through the Alabama Department of Corrections to be 270 deaths that year, which would put the increase at 43 percent. 

Alabama prisons had a 4.2 percent decrease in releases between 2021 and 2022, while overcrowding remained extremely high, at 170 percent design capacity on Dec. 31, 2022, according to the data. 

Racial disparities in incarceration remain extreme. Black Alabamians made up 26.8 percent of the state’s population in 2022, but 52.7 percent of Alabama’s prison population, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Census Bureau. 

Elected officials have responded to the prison crowding and violence by funding construction of the most expensive new prison in the U.S., the $1.08 billion, 4,000-bed Elmore megaprison. 

The increases in incarceration come at a time when statewide crime data is incomplete, making it difficult to understand and analyze the impact of increased incarceration on public safety.  Because of changes in the reporting system, only partial data is available on crime.alabama.gov, a collaborative effort between the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) and the Institute of Data and Analytics at the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business to track and report crime data.

Despite Alabama’s punitive practices and high incarceration rates, the state’s homicide rate persistently outpaces national numbers. In 2021, Alabama had the third highest homicide rate in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Alabama’s homicide rate of 15.9 deaths per 100,000 people was nearly double the rate in several other southern states including Virginia, Florida, and Texas.

What’s more, as Appleseed previously reported, in recent years Alabama’s overall crime rates saw a sharp decline that coincided with a decline in incarceration rates. Alabama’s crime rate declined by 17% from 2005 to 2019, the most recent year data is available from ALEA. Robbery, the most common violent crime, sunk by 48%. During much of that period, the state’s incarceration rate fell as a result of increased paroles and implementation of Sentencing Standards, which require non-prison options such as probation and community supervision for many offenses. These statistics, which have accumulated over several years, strongly suggest that less incarceration – especially in prisons with rampant violence, harsh conditions, and little rehabilitation – could improve public safety.