Detainees in Module I at the Theo Lacy Facility in Orange, California, on Tuesday, March 14, 2017 (Photo by Jeff Gritchen/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images)
We need governors to act immediately so that we can protect the lives of people who are currently incarcerated in prisons, jails and detention facilities across the country. The Innocence Project has signed on to a letter issued by a coalition of organizations calling on governors to act immediately to help protect people in prisons and jails and the larger community. We ask you to call your governor by filling out the form above and you’ll be connected.
Below are a few of the most vulnerable people who need relief:
Prioritize the immediate release of the elderly and medically vulnerable, including individuals who are pregnant or who have asthma, chronic illness, lung disease, or heart disease.
Release anyone who is within 18 months of his/her release date.
Urge a hold to all new state prison sentences for anyone who is currently not detained.
Release all people held on probation and parole technical violation detainers or sentences. Ensure no new jail or prison sentences based on technical violations.
Ensure that all people released from prison have a transition plan that includes seamless access to medical care and health-related services.
Ask parole boards to release all individuals who are currently on parole and develop an emergency process that can expedite parole hearings.
Create a framework that facilitates the expedient release of as many incarcerated individuals as possible.
For the link to the Innocence Projects action page for petitioning your governor
Montgomery, Ala. — Close to 22,000 Alabamians incarcerated by the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) face a much higher risk of contracting coronavirus than the general public, but there’s been no mention of plans to ensure their safety and well-being. Last week Governor Kay Ivey announced the formation of a Coronavirus Task Force, and the ACLU of Alabama urges the group to prioritize plans for Alabama prisons, which were already experiencing a sustained overcrowding and understaffing crisis before the pandemic.
Statement from Randall Marshall, Executive Director, ACLU of Alabama:
“Incarcerated people cannot follow the CDC recommendation of social distancing, and because Alabama prisons are already operating at 170 percent of their designed capacity, these men and women are at an increased risk of exposure and contamination in the prison population. Furthermore, with over 20 percent of people in ADOC custody over the age of 50, there are thousands who are at higher risk of serious health complications or death if they are infected.
It is imperative that the Governor and ADOC release their plans to prevent the spread of COVID-19 inside the prisons, to quarantine and care for any prisoner who shows symptoms, and to ensure all supplies and food remain stocked during this crisis. They must also address how they plan to provide continued staffing in the event of staff shortages due to illness or caring for an ill family member. ADOC staffing is currently at 40 percent.
These and other questions must be answered now. Alabama leaders have historically disregarded the health and safety of the men and women incarcerated in state prisons. The ACLU of Alabama urges state leaders to not follow that old pattern and make prisons a top priority in Alabama’s COVID-19 response.”
Press Release:Alabama Prisoners and Families Rally in Washington DC to Demand Justice and Equal Protection
Who: Freedom fighters inside Alabama prisons, Alabama women and children with incarcerated loved ones, Local and National Prison Slavery Abolition Organizations What: “Alabama to DC: End Prison Slavery” Rally and press conference with speeches from inside, banners, personal stories, music When: Friday, September 20, 2019, 4 PM to 6 PM Where: Pershing Park, corner of 14th St NW & Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington DC
Washington DC — On September 20, Unheard Voices OTCJ, along with DC Abolition Coalition and allies will gather from 4 PM to 6 PM with a delegation of women and children from Alabama who have been personally impacted by the Alabama DOC to confront the Department of Justice for their inaction after finding ongoing, egregious 8th amendment violations in Alabama prisons earlier this year. As one voice from the inside declares, “the prisons in Alabama are functioning in the same exact manner. Men are being murdered, assaulted, raped, overdosing and being denied mental and medical care constantly. These conditions have become frequent and ADOC is failing to report the many incidents that take place in order to gain favor in the eyes of the Federal agencies involved in investigating ADOC and to gain favor with you, the public.”
We demand that the DOJ follow through on their commitment to file suit against the Alabama prison system! We demand that U.S. Attorney General William Barr uphold his oath of office. We demand #NoNewPrisons!
We know that Alabama politicians and Alabama Attorney General Jay Town are not going to protect the rights of incarcerated individuals and hold their own accountable and prosecute the civil rights violations of prisoners and criminal activities of the ADOC. We know that their priority is only building three new private prisons which will exacerbate the human rights abuses and expand prison slavery in Alabama.
Those gathered at this family-friendly event will amplify the cry heard from behind the walls: “We are MEN!” These words are an echo of those spoken on the first day of the 1971 Attica Rebellion — a reminder of our past, a call to action, and an insistence on the humanity of incarcerated individuals whose constitutional rights require equal protection and enforcement by the Department of Justice.
Twenty U.S. states’ constitutions, including the Constitution of Alabama, contain the same shortcoming found in the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. They permit slavery, or in the case of Louisiana, “involuntary servitude,” as punishment for a crime.
Until recently, Colorado had the same problem, but Colorado has amended its Constitution to ban slavery. Period. No exceptions. Alabama can do the same.1
Banning slavery is not simply a formality. U.S. prisons market the labor of prisoners and have created financial incentives to maintain that labor force. While prisoners may benefit from training, and may prefer employment to doing nothing, they and society as a whole do not benefit from labor without a living wage, labor without workers’ rights, labor that undermines others’ wages, and labor that creates motivations to keep more people in prison longer.
Paying prisoners for their labor enables them not only to better provide for themselves while in prison, but also to pay bills and unpaid court fees that may have landed many of them in prison in the first place. Compensating prisoners for their labor through a legitimate “Work Time” system that reduces their sentence grants hardworking prisoners the opportunity to be reviewed early by parole boards — which also helps state taxpayers.
As a constituent, I urge you to take immediate action to amend our state constitution to ban slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime, and in all circumstances. While Colorado has amended its Constitution to ban slavery entirely, our state lags behind. Our current Constitution protects and promotes the legal exploitation of people’s labor and human dignity and should be amended immediately.
After signing the petition, please use the tools on the next webpage to share it with your friends.
P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others.
Footnote:
1. Rhode Island has banned slavery in its Constitution since 1843. Twenty-seven states’ constitutions don’t mention slavery. Vermont’s Constitution allows slavery for people under 21 years old or consenting to it or enslaved for payment of debts, damages, fines, or costs. These are the 20 states that allow slavery as punishment for crime: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregeon, Tennessee, Utah, and Wisconsin. The state of Colorado has removed itself from that list.
A federal judge has determined that the risk of suicide among state prisoners in Alabama “is so severe and imminent” that he ordered the state’s Department of Corrections to immediately implement permanent mental health remedies to address “severe and systematic inadequacies.”
The decision by Judge Myron Thompson on Saturday, comes after 15 prisoners killed themselves in the span of 15 months.
In a 210-page ruling that includes summaries of the circumstances leading to each of the inmate suicides, Thompson agreed with prisoners’ attorneys that the spike had reached crisis levels, a result of what he previously said are “horrendously inadequate” mental health services provided to inmates.
In addition to ordering the Alabama Department of Corrections to comply with a host of court ordered measures he issued in a 2017 ruling, Thompson also required the state to establish an internal monitoring system and said the court will appoint an interim external monitor to oversee the department’s progress.
“The more someone fails to do something he agreed to do, the bigger the need to supervise whether he does it in the future,” Thompson wrote, adding that existing monitoring efforts “have been too little, too late.”
Five of the 15 suicides occurred between January and March this year. In one instance a prisoner with “severe mental illnesses, as well as intellectual and physical disabilities” killed himself 10 days after testifying in court that he had not received adequate treatment, according to the documents. In another, a man hanged himself roughly 12 hours after being transferred from mental health observation to a segregated cell, rather than being placed on suicide watch.
Although ADOC acknowledged in the court documents that persistent and severe correctional understaffing has significantly contributed to its noncompliance, attorneys had argued that prison officials were working on a plan to reduce the rash of suicides.
“The defendants argue that they cannot prevent all suicides in ADOC. It is true that, as in the free world, not all suicides can be prevented. But this reality in no way excuses ADOC’s substantial and pervasive suicide-prevention inadequacies. Unless and until ADOC lives up to its Eighth Amendment obligations, avoidable tragedies will continue,” Thompson wrote.
Lawyers from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program, which represent prisoners in the ongoing case, welcomed the increased oversight.
“The court’s opinion recognizes the urgency of the situation facing ADOC. The system remains grossly understaffed and people are dying as a result,” Maria Morris, senior supervising attorney at the SPLC told Mary Scott Hodgin, reporter for NPR member station WBHM.
“The time has long since come for ADOC to comply with its constitutional obligations, Morris added in a written statement.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice determined the state “routinely violates the constitutional rights of prisoners by failing to protect them from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and sexual abuse,” NPR’s Debbie Elliott reported.
The immediate steps ordered by Thompson were intended to address specific failures by the ADOC. They include adequately-trained personnel for suicide risk assessments; placing people who are suicidal or potentially suicidal on suicide watch; following up with inmates released from suicide watch; and limiting segregated confinement for prisoners released from suicide watch.
Additionally, ADOC must enforce existing policies, including 30-minute check-ins on people in segregation, where most of the suicides occurred, and requiring that staff take immediate life-saving measures when they find an inmate attempting suicide, including immediately cutting down inmates who have hanged themselves.
Julia Tutwiler Prison for women in Wetumpka. (Source: WBRC file photo)
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — A bill would require jails and prisons to provide female inmates with tampons or sanitary pads.
The Alabama House of Representatives voted 101-0 Tuesday for the legislation that now moves to the Alabama Senate.
The bill by Rep. Rolanda Hollis of Birmingham would write into law that jails and prisons are required to provide the items.
Hollis says she has heard stories of inmates resorting to fashioning their own hygiene items when they could not obtain them.
Department of Corrections Bob Horton says feminine hygiene items are readily available in bathrooms at Alabama’s only prison for women.
The state prison system in 2015 agreed to make the products available and free as part of a wide-ranging settlement agreement with the Department of Justice to improve conditions at the prison.
By David Fathi, Director, National Prison Project and published here
A trove of photographs depicting brutalized and murdered prisoners in Alabama’s St. Clair Correctional Facility has thrust the treatment of our nation’s 2.3 million incarcerated people into public view. The first horror is what these people have endured in prison. The second horror is that while shocking, it is not a surprise.
As a lawyer who has represented prisoners for more than two decades, I have come to expect such violence and degradation of human beings held in appalling conditions like those seen in these photos. The only thing that’s unusual is that, for a brief moment at least, the curtain has been pulled aside and the everyday brutality of our prisons laid bare for all to see.
Transparency is like daylight — applied directly, it can be a disinfectant. And to protect the health and lives of incarcerated people across our country we need full transparency of how they are treated.
That is not the case currently. Prisons are closed institutions, literally walled off from public view. To some extent, this is unavoidable and understandable. While journalists and members of the public can freely wander into the Department of Motor Vehicles, in prisons safety and security considerations preclude similarly unfettered access. Those same considerations require some monitoring and control of communications between prisoners and the outside world.
But to a large extent, the hidden nature of U.S. prisons represents a deliberate policy choice — one that is unique among the democracies we think of as our peer nations.
Many countries have an independent national agency that monitors prison conditions and enforces minimal standards of health, safety, and humane treatment. In Great Britain, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons has the power to conduct unannounced inspections of all prisons; a similar agency operates in Canada. In countries that have ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture(OPCAT), prison monitoring by a national oversight body is supplemented by periodic visits by the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture.
By contrast, the United States has no independent national agency that monitors prison conditions. The U.S. also has not ratified OPCAT or any other treaty that would provide for outside monitoring. The bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons concluded that “[f]ew [U.S.] states have monitoring systems that operate outside state and local departments of corrections, and the few systems that do exist are generally underresourced and lacking in real power.”
Perhaps for this reason, the main vehicle for oversight of conditions in U.S. prisons has been the federal courts. Litigation can permeate prison walls and allow us into the housing units and the solitary confinement cells where prisoners live and die. It allows us to review videos and records otherwise shielded from public view. It allows us to compel prison officials to testify publicly and under oath.
But the federal courts’ oversight role has been sharply limited by the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). The PLRA subjects lawsuits brought by prisoners in the federal courts to a host of burdens and restrictions that apply to no other litigants. Consequently, there has been a significant decline in judicial oversight of prison conditions. Between 1995 and 2000 alone, the number of states with fewer than 10 percent of their prison populations under court supervision more than doubled, from 12 to 28.
The lack of public knowledge about our prisons has real costs. Most obviously, a lack of oversight facilitates neglect and mistreatment of prisoners and prevents accountability when such misconduct occurs. But there are other consequences as well. Prisons represent the ultimate in big, coercive government — in many states, they represent one of the largest line items in the state budget. They are empowered to confine thousands of people against their will for years or decades and, in some circumstances, to use lethal force against them.
Given these high stakes and the potential for abuse, prisons should be subject to the most exacting scrutiny and public oversight. The reality, though, is just the opposite. Prisons are among the least transparent and accountable government agencies.
Many states ban in-person interviews with prisoners, and prison officials have barred specific journalists whose reporting they considered too critical. Some states have amended their freedom of information laws to limit their application to prisons, even barring prisoners from submitting requests. The federal prison system enacted a rule banning prisoners from publishing their writings under a byline; the rule was later invalidated by a federal court. Arizona went so far as to pass a law making it a crime for prisoners to post information on the internet; that statute, too, was overturned as a violation of the First Amendment.
As long as the public is kept in the dark, horrors like those at the St. Clair Correctional Facility will continue unseen. Increased transparency and oversight are just first steps in correcting the dreadful conditions in our prisons, but make no mistake — the need for them is as immediate as it is urgent.
The contraband is scary enough: Homemade knives with grips whittled to fit particular hands. Homemade machetes. And homemade armor, with books and magazines for padding.
Then there is the blood: In puddles. In toilets. Scrawled on the wall in desperate messages. Bloody scalps, bloody footprints, blood streaming down a cheek like tears.
And the dead: a man kneeling like a supplicant, hands bound behind his back with white fabric strips and black laces. Another, hanging from a twisted sheet in the dark, virtually naked, illuminated by a flashlight beam.
These were ugly scenes from inside an American prison, apparently taken as official documentation of violence and rule violations.
Prisons are the black boxes of our society. With their vast complexes and razor wire barriers, everyone knows where they are, but few know what goes on inside. Prisoner communication is sharply curtailed — it is monitored, censored and costly. Visitation rules are strict. Office inspections are often announced in advance.
So when prisoners go on hunger strikes or work strikes, or engage in deadly riots, the public rarely understands exactly why. How could they? Many people harbor a vague belief that whatever treatment prisoners get, they surely must deserve. It is a view perpetuated by a lack of detail.
But some weeks ago, The New York Times received more than 2,000 photographs that evidence suggests were taken inside the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Alabama. Some show inmates as they are being treated in a cramped, cluttered examination room. Others are clinical: frontal portraits, close-ups of wounds.
It is hard to imagine a cache of images less suitable for publication — they are full of nudity, indignity and gore. It is also hard to imagine photographs that cry out more insistently to be seen.St. Clair is the most violent prison in Alabama, which has the country’s highest prison homicide rate, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.
St. Clair is the most violent prison in Alabama, which has the country’s highest prison homicide rate, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.
As I scrolled through them, shock rose from my gut to my sternum. Was I looking at a prison, or a 19th-century battlefield? Those pictured betrayed little emotion and certainly none of the bravado broadcast by their tattoos: South Side Hot Boy, Something Serious, $elfmade.
After considering the inmates’ privacy, audience sensibilities and our inability to provide more context for the specific incidents depicted, The Times determined that few of these photos could be published. But they could be described.
St. Clair is known to be a deeply troubled institution in a state with an overcrowded, understaffed, antiquated prison system. Alabama has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates and, as measured by the most recent counts of homicides available, its deadliest prisons, according to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit civil rights organization in Montgomery. Suicide is epidemic as well — there have been 15 in the past 15 months.
For years there have been complaints that St. Clair inmates are heavily armed — some for self-protection — and allowed to move freely about the compound. In fact, St. Clair is more deadly now than it was in 2014, when the Equal Justice Initiative brought suit against it for failing to protect prisoners. There have been four stabbing deathsthere in seven months.
Last June, the group said the prison was failing to comply with a settlement agreement.
Prison officials dispute that, saying the Alabama Department of Corrections is committed to improving safety and security. The department has requested money to raise salaries and increase the number of officers. Multiple law enforcement agencies recently teamed up to conduct a contraband search at St. Clair that recovered 167 makeshift weapons, said Bob Horton, a department spokesman.
But as of October, the prison was still severely short staffed, with more vacancies than actual officers.
A second lawsuit, brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy group in Montgomery, says the prisons have failed to provide adequate mental health care. (The photos show a message painted on the wall in blood, with letters about the height of a cinder block. “I ask everyone for help,” it read in part. “Mental Health won’t help.”)
An inmate held in solitary testified that his monthly mental health sessions lasted only five to 10 minutes.He cut himself with razor blades and used his blood to write a plea for help.
The photos were given to The Times by the S.P.L.C., which said it had received them on a thumb drive.
Bob Horton, a spokesman for the corrections department, said the department could not authenticate the photos.
But Maria Morris, a staff lawyer at the S.P.L.C., said the environment shown looked like St. Clair, and some photos had identifying information that corresponded to known inmates or showed men that the S.P.L.C. recognized as its clients (S.P.L.C. removed the identifying information before giving the images to The Times).
The man who painted the blood on the wall, referred to in the lawsuit as M.P., had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and repeatedly tried to kill himself. He testified that he had been held in solitary confinement for six years, allowed to exercise one hour a day in ankle shackles.
Ms. Morris has specialized in prisoner’s rights litigation for more than a decade. She hears accounts of rape, beating or stabbing on a daily basis. I asked what it was like for her to see the photographs.
They made it impossible, she explained, to retreat into that small, self-protective corner of her mind — the place where it was possible to imagine that her clients’ stories might not be as bad as they sounded.
“Seeing what had been done to those people’s bodies — it just stripped away all of the numbing,” she said. “It was very painful to see that all of the suffering that I’ve been hearing about and trying to relate to the court — how deep it goes.”
The thumb drive included a document titled “READ ME FIRST” and claiming to be from a corrections officer. It said the photos represented only a “small portion of the injuries from inmate-on-inmate violence in the past three years.”
The writer said that the current legal agreements governing the prison stood no chance of working: “The day-to-day treatment of these men does nothing but foster anger and despair. Until major fundamental changes take place in our sentencing and housing of these men it will only continue to get worse. I can’t help but wonder if the public knows just how bad these men are treated day after day and year after year.”Testimony shows that fires in solitary confinement are common, and are sometimes used to get attention in a medical emergency.
Testimony shows that fires in solitary confinement are common, and are sometimes used to get attention in a medical emergency.
The photos show dozens of wounded men. One had been stabbed at least 10 times. Another had a hole in his lip you could stick a pencil through. A pair of handcuffed wrists displayed 15 precise slashes. There was a recurring palette of pale red and sickly, Mercurochrome yellow. One man’s back had a shiv at least an inch wide still buried in it, right between the shoulder blades.
There were three individuals pictured in a folder called “Dead men” and seven in a folder called “Murders,” all of whom could be identified through news reports, press releases and booking photographs.
But most disturbing were the images that seemed to echo the most painful aspects of African-American history.
Many convincing arguments have been made that our penal system was at least partly designed to extend control of black people and their labor, particularly in the South, where after slavery ended black men were conscripted into chain gangs for offenses like vagrancy and “selling cotton after sunset.”
Amid the St. Clair pictures were 19 taken of a black man who was completely naked but for a pair of handcuffs, photographed from the front, back, left and right. In one frame two white officers, standing guard inches away from him, avert their eyes.
Another image brought to mind the photos of the monstrously disfigured face of Emmett Till, the teenage victim of a 1955 lynching in Mississippi, which galvanized the civil rights movement when they were published by Jet magazine.
Though separated by more than half a century and by a wide gulf in circumstances, the St. Clair photos showed another mutilated, African-American face, this time belonging to Emory Cook, a 54-year-old prisoner killed in a cell three years ago. Under Alabama’s harsh version of a three-strikes law, Mr. Cook had been serving a life sentence for third-degree burglary.
As a prisoner, he was entitled to be protected from harm. He looked like he had been hit with a plank.
Correction: April 1, 2019 An earlier version of this article misidentified the location of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit civil rights organization. It is in Montgomery, Ala., not Birmingham.
Shaila Dewan is a national reporter and editor covering criminal justice issues including prosecution, policing and incarceration. @shailadewan
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Prisoners at the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Alabama made knives out of fan blades and other materials.
Houston County Jail, Dothan, Alabama - Share Your Experiences 
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