Prisoners in Alabama keep dying as inmates go on statewide labour strike

Federal government sued Alabama prisons for poor conditions in 2020

At least three people incarcerated in Alabama prisons have died since thousands of inmates began striking in September to protest poor conditions, the latest sign of deterioration in a state correctional system the Justice Department sued in 2020 for its excessive violence and poor safety record.

On Sunday, officials at William Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, found a 60-year-old Black inmate “unresponsive,” in a communal dormitory, according to state records reported by the Marshall Project.

Official said they found “no evidence found to suggest trauma or foul play” in the death of the man, whose name has been identified but isn’t public pending familiar notification.

Since the strike began on 26 September, two others have died in stabbings, 29-year-old Joseph Agee and 30-year-old Denarieya Smith.

Incarcerated people across the state have refused to work or leave their cells, in protest against a variety of conditions inside Alabama facilities that include understaffing, few opportunities at parole, pervasive violence and sexual assault, drug use, suicide, and a 50 per cent increase in inmate deaths in the last five years. At least 14 people have died in custody this year, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. The state is one of just seven in the country that don’t pay incarcerated people for their controversial labour behind bars.

“Maybe they have to start listening. I think they know something is wrong, but did they know we’re really tired of it? By stopping work now, we are sending this system that’s already in crisis into another crisis,” K Shaun Traywick, an incarcerated activist, told The Guardian.

Prisoners say state officials have retaliated by cutting back to two meals a day or feeding them inedible food. As work stoppages continue, trash has piled up inside Alabama prisons, and activists say laundry inside has gone filthy for days without being washed.

In September, the Department of Corrections said in a statement that because Alabama prisons rely on inmates for much of their labour, the lack of food “is not a retaliatory measure but logistically necessary to ensure that other critical services are being provided.”

“I do think that the incarcerated population is in unanimous agreement that the conditions inside the prisons are so dire, so desperate, so violent, chaotic, corrupt, and dangerous, that something absolutely has to change,” Alabama-based journalist Beth Shelburne told The New Yorker.

“The problems of overcrowding, understaffing, violence, and corruption are fundamental to our carceral system, and exist in every jail and prison across the United States, but in Alabama they’re all on steroids,” she added.

Confronting this crisis is an Alabama prison system that’s been shedding employees rapidly.

As of June, the state was operating with a little over half the number of correctional officers it had authorised for its prisons.

Incarcerated activists and their allies on the outside have asked the state for streamlined medical review processes, clearer parole guidelines, retroactive appeal of the state’s habitual offender law, an end to life without parole sentences, and the creation of a statewide conviction integrity unit to review the frightening number of valid innocence claims in US prisons.

Alabama governor Kay Ivey has called these demands “just unreasonable.”

The lawsuit from the DOJ against the Alabama prison system doesn’t head to trial until 2024.

In the mean time, families of those inside state facilities want to sit down with Governor Ivey and top officials to end the crisis.

“How can she say that our demands are unreasonable when she has not sat down with the people, the citizens, to allow us the opportunity to explain the demands that we’re proposing?” Diyawn Caldwell, an Alabama activist and founder of grassroots group Both Sides of the Wall, told HuffPost. “Instead she just calls them unreasonable off the top. She’s never given us the opportunity to sit down and explain what it is we’re asking for.”

The Independent has contacted the governor’s office and Alabama corrections department for comment.