by Paul Wright

This month’s cover story on the ongoing implosion of the Alabama prison system is just the latest installment of a long running saga of death, brutality, corruption and neglect that typifies the Alabama criminal justice system, coupled with the indifference and incompetence of the political establishment.

The Alabama prison system was sued for its blatantly unconstitutional conditions back in 1976 when a federal district court in Pugh v. Locke found conditions of confinement were unconstitutional. To resolve this state of affairs, the prison system was placed under court supervision. That order lasted until 1999, when it was dissolved not because conditions improved, but because the newly enacted Prison Litigation Reform Act mandated it.

Freed from court supervision, the executive and legislative branches in Alabama quickly allowed prisons to revert to their prior barbaric conditions and over the years the prisons steadily got worse. In some ways, Alabama’s prison problems reflect the bankruptcy of its political establishment, with neither the executive nor the legislative branches being able or willing to ensure minimally civilized conditions for the citizens it chooses to cage. The death rate in Alabama prisons is among the highest in the country, with 300 to 400 prisoners per year dying from causes like murder, medical neglect, suicides and drug overdoses.

The documentary film The Alabama Solution has helped bring wider attention to the many problems of the Alabama prison system, but attention alone does not result in positive change, given that the people capable of improving the situation are well aware of the problems and choose to do nothing.

Speaking of political incompetence, the Trump administration has announced plans, which we will cover in more detail in an upcoming issue of PLN, to reopen the federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco for $152 million to start with. Having visited Alcatraz, which is now a hugely popular national park, it is going to take a lot more money than that to get a functioning prison open on the island. The federal government closed the prison on Alcatraz in 1963, following 29 years of operation, because it was too expensive to operate.

Since the San Francisco Bay area is among the most expensive living areas in the United States, if not the world, it is highly unlikely the government will be able to staff the prison, even if they somehow manage to reopen it sometime in the next decade. Given the many problems afflicting the Federal Bureau of Prisons, including staff shortages, aging facilities, medical neglect, systemic rapes by staff, and more, reopening Alcatraz is the organizational equivalent of opening a new ballroom on the Titanic—after it hit the iceberg. We will see if anything comes of the proposal.

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We continue seeing a lot of censorship of PLN and other HRDC publications and are in active litigation challenging it in New Mexico, Missouri, Hawaii, Minnesota and Illinois. If you are a prisoner subscriber to PLN and your subscription is censored, please let us know as we usually do not receive notice of censorship from prison or jail officials. 

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