Alabama’s prisons are, to be generous, a disgrace. The state has been sued over what’s going on in those prisons repeatedly and they’ve been investigated by reporters at The Birmingham News, as well as investigators at the Equal Justice Initiative and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC’s June 2014 report is a horrific read that ought to bring fury and tears to anyone who has even an ounce of humanity.
The list of morally criminal treatment of prisoners includes severe overcrowding, sexual abuse, and deaths from inadequate or entirely absent medical care. One blind prisoner was forced to sign a Do Not Resuscitate consent form he couldn’t read. There are 15.2 full-time-equivalent physicians and 12.4 FTE dentists for more than 25,000 prisoners in the system.
As Sofia Resnick at Rewire writes, these reports “paint a picture of widespread violence, rape, corruption, and filth.” So bad is the situation that the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating not just one prison as is usually the case, but all 15 of them operated by the Alabama Department of Corrections.
Yes, that would be the DOJ now overseen by Attorney General Jefferson B. Sessions, the former Alabama senator much of whose reputation was built on support for “tough on crime” measures that have contributed to prison problems not only in Alabama but other states as well.
Resnick writes:
Sessions’ past and current records pushing policies that contribute to mass incarceration worry the civil rights attorneys and activists who have long been calling attention to Alabama’s deeply troubled prison system. Believing what the state needs is serious prison reform, some are skeptical of how deep this DOJ’s investigation will delve, and what reforms it will (or won’t) recommend.
“When it was announced, it was the most far-reaching investigation into a prison system that the Department of Justice had ever announced it was undertaking,” Maria Morris, an attorney for the SPLC—one of the leading plaintiffs involved in multiple legal claims against Alabama’s correctional system—told Rewire. “And the head of the Department of Justice is now the former senator from Alabama. We have no idea how that will play out. We certainly hope that he will push the department to do a really thorough and comprehensive investigation.”
Hope is a fine sentiment. But you’ll excuse me if I seriously doubt a Sessions-vetted DOJ report on Alabama’s prisons will be worth a half-pint of spit.
Sessions didn’t initiate the investigation. That emerged last October when America’s last real president was still in the White House. The DOJ has already investigated the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, ADOC’s only women’s prison. Investigators found rampant sexual abuse and violence, both of inmate vs. inmate and staff vs. inmate. A settlement was reached in May 2015 in which ADOC agreed to clean up its act at the prison.
But the systemwide investigation started by Attorney General Loretta Lynch is now in the hands of a very different person. As for its current status, a spokesperson for the DOJ would only say that it’s in process.
As Resnick notes, Sessions’ career is replete with a hard-nosed approach that doesn’t lower crime rates. When he ran for state attorney general in 1994, he supported policies the legislature was debating to try repeat juvenile offenders as adults and to allow prosecutors to use juvenile criminal records when considering sentences of adults. In 1995, after winning the state attorney general contest, Sessions backed legislation to revive chain gangs, with prisoners engaging in hard labor while shackled together, a particularly pernicious practice in a former slave state with a disproportionate number of black prisoners. It’s not hard to imagine Sessions bringing back the whip if he could get away with it.
[Sessions] has additionally encouraged the proliferation of private prisons, something the Obama administration had been trying to phase out given their problematic history.
Of note, Sessions still holds strong ties to the private prison industry. The GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest private prison corporations, hired two of Sessions’ Senate legislative aides.
Although Alabama’s Dickensian prisons clearly need serious reform, including more money for improved facilities and larger staffs, private prisons have not proved to be an improvement. On the contrary. And given what Sessions has said and done since rising to his high post, there’s no reason to believe he will push Alabama or any state to adopt measures that would make a huge difference in society and in prisons themselves, that being to stop locking up so many people.