2019 was a deadly year for inmates in Alabama’s prisons by several counts.

Looking at available Alabama Department of Corrections internal reports, as of Sept. 30, ADOC listed 119 inmate deaths for 2019, which includes natural deaths and otherwise. Of those, there were 11 inmate homicides for 2019. That’s in addition to nine suicides through the first nine months of the year. Those figures are only through the last available monthly report.

Alabama reported 10 inmate homicides in all of 2018, when the Equal Justice Initiative announced that Alabama’s prisons had the highest homicide rate in the country, with 19 for 2017 and 2018 combined.

Add to that several deaths in the last three months, some of them suicides, and some that are still under investigation. That’s why advocacy groups say the year’s final number could be much higher. And all of this comes in a year when a federal investigation documented a climate in Alabama’s men’s prisons of horrific violence and sexual abuse where deaths are sometimes undercounted.

Department of Corrections officials had not responded to AL.com’s request for comment on the number of inmate deaths prior to publication of this story.

Several incidents since the end of September show that a climate of violence in Alabama’s prisons persists.

For example, there’s the Oct. 5 death of Steven Edward Davis, 35, at Donaldson Correctional Facility. His death came after some kind of altercation with corrections officers that is under investigation.

At the time, ADOC said that, according to correctional officers, Davis "rushed out of his cell brandishing one prison-made weapon in each hand and attempted to strike an officer. After repeated verbal commands and the use of standard methods to disarm the inmate, Davis refused to comply. At that time, correctional officers applied physical measures to diffuse the threat in order to remove the weapons from the scene and secure the inmate.”

Then on Oct. 17, William Stanley Warren, 52, an inmate at Ventress Correctional Facility, died after being stabbed in the eye. Robert Green, 51, of Pinson, an Elmore County Correctional Facility inmate, also died in October at a hospital after being found with a head injury in his cell.

Just this month, ADOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn announced immediate steps to “significantly mitigate violence in Alabama’s correctional facilities" after two deaths within a day of each other : Willie Leon Scott, a 48-year-old man from Birmingham, was pronounced dead Dec. 6 at a hospital; and Michael Smith, a 55-year-old Fairfield man, died Dec. 5 after an alleged use of force incident that happened on Nov. 30.

Scott died at Baptist Medical Center South in Montgomery. Details of his death also were not released, but prison officials said his injuries occurred Dec. 4 at Holman Correctional Facility. Smith was an inmate at Ventress Correctional Facility when he was injured in an undisclosed incident that eventually resulted in two corrections officers being placed on mandatory leave.

The Equal Justice Initiative also lists 14 deaths it designates as suspicious, with seven of them occurring just since October. These are deaths that could be homicides, overdoses or suicides. Among the homicides, the group lists an unnamed inmate homicide listed at Kilby that was reported in ADOC statistical reports last January.

The Department of Justice report, released in April, concluded that violence in Alabama’s men’s prisons has increased dramatically in the last five-and-a-half years. From 2010 through 2013, Alabama listed 11 homicides. Then there were five in both 2013 and 2014, eight in 2015, and three in 2016.

For perspective, the national average for homicides among the incarcerated is 7 per 100,000. As of September, Alabama reported an in-house prison population of 20,087.

The DOJ report stated there is “reasonable cause to believe that ADOC’s homicide rate is higher than what ADOC has publicly reported. There are numerous instances where ADOC incident reports classified deaths as due to ‘natural’ causes when, in actuality, the deaths were likely caused by prisoner-on-prisoner violence. This is especially concerning given that these incident reports are used for public statistical reporting as required by law.”

ADOC has taken several steps since the report to diminish prisoner weapons and contraband after the report said it “does not protect prisoners in its custody from death caused by prisoner-on-prisoner violence.”

Alabama’s prison system is in the midst of several initiatives related to reform. Gov. Kay Ivey this year announced a $900 million plan to finance, design, build, and maintain three new men’s prisons that the state would lease and operate.

She also appointed a Study Group on Criminal Justice Policy after the DOJ report. The group, chaired by former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Champ Lyons, will make recommendations to the governor and the Legislature before the next legislative session in February.

And this month, Dunn announced an internal task force to examine inmate-on-inmate violence as well as alleged excessive use of force by staff.

The task force will assess measures including “Tactics and Techniques” reinforcement training programs, health and wellness interventions for correctional officers and staff, additional inmate rehabilitation programs and resources, and the reexamination of enhanced surveillance measures such as use of body cameras by on-duty correctional officers.

But other groups, such as Alabamians for Fair Justice, an organization including several advocacy groups, say any internal examination should include outside observers for transparency and full disclosure. It says observers should include legislators with experience on the prison oversight committee, advocates who have served time in ADOC prisons, lawyers who represent inmates, family members of people who have been victims of prison violence, and currently incarcerated advocates.

“If ADOC wants to invite real oversight of its violent prisons, it must include independent, external observers in its new task force,” the group wrote in a letter this month. “The people of Alabama do not trust prison officials to provide meaningful oversight of the violence in their prisons and amidst their correctional officers’ ranks. They have had that option for the last several years and they have failed.”