Mayhem, violence and death — but not “corrections”

  We need prisons. They should confine violent felons and people who steal, whether from a convenience store or a pension fund.

  But by every legal, financial, and humanitarian standard, the Alabama Department of Corrections is a failure. By the most basic measure of prison operations, Corrections isn’t doing its job.

  Before any other consideration, prisons must be safe for staff and inmates.  And they ought to offer those in the cells an opportunity to reform, even if the incarcerated never step outside the barbed wire again.

  This is not how the Alabama Department of Corrections operates. Instead, we have prisons like Ventress in Clayton. Ventress is where inmates can get treatment for drug and alcohol addiction.

  It’s also a place, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, where in 2018 a corrections officer beat a handcuffed inmate, yelling in earshot of four nurses, “I am the reaper of death, now say my name!” That same year, another Ventress corrections officer struck a restrained inmate so hard he broke his jaw in two places and left blood on a nearby wall.

  There’s also Bullock Correctional Facility near Union Springs, where according to one lawsuit, officials placed a sexual assault victim in the same dorm as his attacker, leading to a second sexual assault.

  Travis Sessions, a 28-year-old inmate, drowned in his own blood, according to yet another lawsuit, at Red Eagle Community Work Center north of Montgomery after officers ignored his requests for help. And let’s not forget Steven Davis, beaten to death by corrections officers at Donaldson Correctional Facility in 2019.

  Corrections chose to negotiate its way through dozens of cases like these instead of risking a court fight, as Beth Shelburne reported last week. The department has settled 94 lawsuits alleging that corrections officers used excessive force against inmates. It’s helped push the department’s legal bills over $57 million.

  That’s a lot of money. If you worked at a company that had to settle dozens of lawsuits over the same pattern of behavior, you’d be trained to stop that behavior. Or your company would be out of business.

  In ADOC’s case, we’re talking about patterns that have led to credible allegations that corrections officers left inmates with crippling injuries. Or brain damage. Or dead.

  What does the state do?

  It cuts a check.

  The department leans on a state liability fund to pay settlements. Inmates or their survivors get a relative pittance. Private attorneys representing officers accused of wrongdoing get much more. Shelburne reported that lawyers representing officers got $12.9 million from the state between 2020 and 2024. Settlement payments to inmates and survivors amounted to $4.4 million.

  State leaders, by and large, are fine with this.

  Excessive force, you say? Here’s a check. Neglect? Talk to our attorneys. Physical trauma? PTSD? People coming out of prison worse than when they went in? Not our problem.

  Alabama government values nothing more than its power to confine, to punish and, in some cases, to kill. State officials have fought a DOJ lawsuit over violence in men’s prisons for about four years. It is in court over failures to deliver proper medical and mental health care to inmates. Lawmakers smile benignly as the price of a new prison in Elmore soars far above initial estimates.

  So Alabama will pay any price to keep that power and use it with little regard for constitutional restraints. Corrections’ budget grew from $544.1 million in 2021 to an expected $826.7 million next year, a 52% growth rate bigger than Medicaid (44%), which paid for the deliveries of most of the babies born in the state in 2022.

  But the state will not or cannot correct the savage status quo in our prisons. Corrections officers can face multiple lawsuits alleging excessive force and not only hold onto their jobs, but win promotions.

  Alabama has a lot of stubborn problems, like poverty and shrinking health care access. The prison crisis is something else: a deadly humanitarian disaster that our leaders deliberately built and continually tolerate while private individuals and companies profit off the chaos. People die in state prisons or emerge with major physical and psychological injuries. The state treats each one of those lives as a sunk cost, a string of numbers to go onto a spreadsheet.

  Which means we’re beyond reform. You can’t even tear Corrections down to the studs, because those are rotten, too. If we want prisons that maintain public safety, we need a whole new correctional agency. One that keeps order in its facilities. That treats violence as a failing that has to be fixed, not a monthly bill. Above all, we need a prison department built from a foundation of rehabilitation, not retribution.

  At the moment, that project is a political impossibility. Alabama politicians think the price of fixing our prisons is far higher than the cost of ignoring it.

  But maybe we can stop calling the agency supervising our prisons “Corrections.” It’s publicly subsidized mayhem that gets nothing right.

  About the author: Brian Lyman is the editor of Alabama Reflector. He has covered Alabama politics since 2006 and has worked at the Montgomery Advertiser, the Press-Register, and The Anniston Star. A 2024 Pulitzer finalist for Commentary, his work has also won awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Alabama Press Association, and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights.

  This article was published by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.