This is an opinion column.
If you spot Alabama’s Limestone Correctional Facility from space – the way Google does – it looks a lot like a human skull.
Like in the old Phantom comic strip, or Marvel’s The Punisher. I don’t know if it’s a bad architectural joke or a pirate flag with an ominous warning: Beware, all ye who enter here.
Maybe that design, that skull and its message, is the closest thing to honest this Alabama Department of Corrections has ever been. Because you better beware when you step inside. Inmate and staff alike.
Limestone, like most of Alabama’s highest-security prisons – is a meat grinder. Spending time in the sockets of that skull can be a life sentence, no matter how many years a guy is supposed to serve.
Two Limestone inmates, Clarence Jackson and Kenyon Arrington – both of whom were serving time for terrible crimes – died in recent days. The cause of Jackson’s Sunday death has not been clarified, and Arrington was beaten to death by a fellow inmate, according to the prison system.
It’s tough all the way around. Limestone had 169 assaults – 48 of them on staff – from January through August, the last month available. Overall in Alabama’s six overcrowded high security prisons, where 6,800 inmates are crammed into space designed for 4,800, at least 505 people were assaulted and 117 — not including Jackson and Arrington — died from various causes in the first eight months.
The safest place to be, statistically, is death row. That about sums it up.
It has been three-and-a-half years now since Jeff Sessions’ U.S. Department of Justice blasted the Alabama prison system, calling them extremely dangerous, overcrowded, under-staffed and filled with drugs. That report, mailed then to Gov. Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall, among others, concluded Alabama prisons are a constitutional disaster.
“In particular, we have reasonable cause to believe that Alabama routinely violates the constitutional rights of prisoners housed in the Alabama’s prisons by failing to protect them from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, and by failing to provide safe conditions,” the report said.
Toss ‘em into The Skull and see who survives. It’s a dystopian movie, not a system of justice.
And it’s not getting better. That 2019 report blistered Alabama for having the highest prison homicide rate in the country in 2017. It had nine homicides all that year. This year it reached nine by August.
Drug deaths and homicides inside prison walls are on the rise, and inmates’ aspirations of one day getting out to live productive lives fades. The parole board this year has rejected more than nine out of every 10 people who thought themselves eligible for release.
From January through August this year, 204 inmates died in Alabama prisons.During that same period, just 229 inmates were granted parole. Meanwhile, the number of inmates in custody rose 12 percent from last August to this one.
It’s easy to get in. It’s hard to get out on two feet.
Almost weekly the skeletal reports come out. Somebody is dead, and the details are sketchy, with only the word of the prison system to rely on. Sorry, Alabama, but that has not been an historically accurate source. Alabama prisons are as dark and opaque as – well – dungeons.
One thing is clear. Alabama is not now and has never been up to the task of making its prisons habitable or humane or constitutional. Marshall is interested only in headlines, in seeming tough on crime and fighting culture wars with blue states. Ivey would rather pass the buck, or spend a billion on the hope that new prison buildings can solve what our people won’t.
The Alabama Legislature seems happier to make laws to put people in prison than to make sure they are treated justly along the way. And the parole board is essentially an arm of law enforcement. All of them know the average Alabama voter would just as soon throw away the keys to all those prisons. Constitutional rights be damned.
So we have no choice.
Dear DOJ,
We’re still down here. You had to keep male guards from wandering through the showers (among other things) at our womens’ prison, if you recall. You know our problems better than just about anybody. So it’s on you, too. Do something. Quick.
Dear Merrick Garland,
Even Jeff Sessions’ DOJ recognized this inhumanity, and he’s not a touchy-feely kind of guy. Can you see it? Then shouldn’t you do something?
We need help. We need intervention. We all need to get this through our skulls.
John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for AL.com.
