MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) – Alabama has the nation’s deadliest prisons, where violence is “too common, cruel, of an unusual nature, and pervasive” the Department of Justice found Wednesday in a scathing report that said male inmates are housed in unconstitutional conditions.
During a single week in Alabama’s prison system, one inmate bled to death after being stabbed repeatedly as two others stood guard at a dormitory’s doors. Another stabbed inmate had to be evacuated by helicopter. A prisoner in a dorm reserved for those with good behavior was attacked with a sock filled with metal locks.
The Justice Department said inmates endure an “extraordinarily high rate of violence at the hands of other prisoners,” with the number of inmate-on-inmate attacks spiking dramatically in the last five and a half years. The department gave Alabama 49 days to begin to correct the violations or possibly face a federal lawsuit.
“Our investigation found reasonable cause to believe that Alabama fails to provide constitutionally adequate conditions and that prisoners experience serious harm, including deadly harm, as a result,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband, who leads the department’s civil rights division, said in a statement.
The report lays out in unsparing detail a culture of violence across the state’s 13 prisons for men, which house roughly 16,000 inmates in dangerously understaffed prisons that are also among the nation’s most overcrowded. It chronicles inmate rapes, beatings and fatal stabbings at the hands of fellow prisoners and decries a management system that undercounts homicides and fails to protect prisoners even when warned of a problem.