Ministers and family members described the dangerous conditions that incarcerated people endure in Alabama correctional facilities at a legislative committee hearing Wednesday.
Speaking to a meeting of the Joint Prison Oversight Committee at the Alabama Statehouse that drew hundreds of people, relatives of incarcerated people and those who work with them described assaults, drug overdoses and extortion against inmates and their families, almost five years after the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit alleging the conditions in Alabama’s correctional facilities violate inmates’ Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Robert White, a pastor with the ministry Montgomery City of Refuge, told members of the committee on Tuesday that inmates were being “intimidated or extorted” from their bunks, creating what he described as homelessness even though they are in custody at the facility because they have no place to sleep or rest.
“They have to sleep on the floor, in very deplorable positions because someone has taken their bunk from them,” he said.
White also said that people who are incarcerated continue to live in violent conditions.