Killings, sex abuse and drug use among inmates are detailed in a warning letter to state officials.
By Devlin Barrett Devlin Barrett Reporter focusing on national security and law enforcement Email Bio Follow April 3 at 5:49 PM Alabama’s understaffed and overcrowded prisons have for years allowed killings, sex abuse and other violence to go largely unchecked , according to a scathing set of findings issued Wednesday by Justice Department investigators.
To highlight the problem, investigators cited as an example a single week in September 2017 in which Alabama’s prisons saw a killing, three stabbings, a half-dozen severe beatings, two drug cases, four sex-abuse incidents, and a fatal drug overdose. According to public reports from the Alabama Department of Corrections, 24 prisoners were killed between January 2015 and June 2018, but federal investigators concluded at least three additional homicides had gone unreported as such.
The Alabama prison system “has a tendency to dismiss claims of sexual abuse by gay prisoners as consensual ‘homosexual activity’ without further investigation, implying that a gay man cannot be raped,” the report found, adding that some inmates who reported being assaulted were asked to sign a release of liability document by prison officials.
The investigation began in October 2016, a time when the Obama administration was a proponent of such “pattern and practice” investigations into law enforcement agencies with troubling track records of civil rights violations or mistreatment.
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