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At Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, in Wetumpka, Ala., the Justice Department described a "toxic, sexualized environment." Reporting by AL.com and its partners has shown that the abuse is a symptom of even larger problems across Alabama's corrections system.

(AL.com)

Corey Douglas spent his entire adult life in prison. This winter, at age 35, Douglas re-emerged into society, as most Alabama prisoners one day will, prepared only by

.

"For the most part, when people come out they become more crippled and more bitter," says Douglas, who devoted his years to prison ministry, helping to pass out tithes of deodorant and shower shoes to inmates. These gifts, he said, would prevent brutal fights over basic hygiene items.

He says men in prison are treated like animals, that there are too few officers. He talks about the lack of rehabilitation, the extreme isolation.

"People, especially people in the South, have a tender heart for humanitarian efforts," says Douglas of conditions inside. "If the public really knew then the public would be moved."

Three facts

Prisons are unpleasant. That's by design. They are meant to be unpleasant places for unpleasant people. But the Constitution says they are not meant to be cruel. Alabama has struggled with this distinction, repeatedly blurring the line between treatment of man and beast.

"It's a very serious problem that we have, and it's been going on for many years," said Gov. Robert Bentley. "I mean obviously we inherited a serious problem: When we have 190 percent capacity in our prisons that creates a tremendous amount of difficulties."

Bentley, who says he is ultimately responsible for remedies, points to two main challenges. Not enough space to house every convict safely. Not enough rehabilitation services in order to release convicts safely. In other words, nowhere to keep them. No good plan to let them out.

If you've never read a word about Alabama's prison problems, here are three key facts that explain the situation:

We're in the worst shape in the United States. It hasn't always been this way. The United States by far leads the world

The result? Tutwiler Prison for Women.

Inside Alabama's only prison for women, rampant sexual abuse is conspicuous as a national shame, yet it's only a smaller aspect of the larger crisis of an overcrowded, understaffed, violent penal system.

Alarm bells

At AL.com, we've spent the last three months exploring the problem in greater detail as part of the Alabama Investigative Journalism Lab, launched this year by Alabama Media Group. In the lab, we're collaborating with our partners at The Center for Investigative Reporting in California to find new ways to connect the public with our work.

We've teamed up with reporters at NPR station WBHM to turn out scores of news stories on conditions and costs, and staffing and criminality, interviewing hundreds of decision makers and former inmates and family members and prison employees.

Inmates in a dormitory at Julia Tutwiler Prison Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2013, in Elmore County near Wetumpka, Ala. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com)

We found plenty. At Tutwiler, we found what the feds found, and what nonprofit legal groups had found before them. Guards paying inmates for sex with hamburgers and makeup. Guards rarely convicted if caught, and lightly sentenced if prosecuted. Prison investigators threatening women who complained with lie detector tests and solitary confinement.

We found records of abuse and bullying and voyeurism. We found poor medical care, a woman diagnosed with heart condition left in solitary confinement to die, another left unable to walk. Eye infections left to fester. Chronic conditions untreated.

Systemwide, we found habitual offender laws crowding cells with low-level repeat offenders, with addicts and the mentally ill. We found prison wardens promoted or transferred despite evident failures of leadership, such as beating an inmate.

We found a system desperate to plug holes, as 262 corrections officers earned more than $20,000 in overtime last year to fill out the minimum staffing needs. A couple dozen earned over $40,000 in overtime.

As for the big picture, Alabama has two potential solutions. Raise (or redirect) taxes to pay to run the system that we built. Or release prisoners and shrink the system that we built.

But if you've never read a word about Alabama's prison problems, then this is where you might start: At the top.

Official explanation

Kim Thomas, the commissioner for the Department of Corrections, sits for a radio interview with Birmingham reporter Les Lovoy. To loosen up, they talk about what Thomas had for dinner. Then Lovoy begins: How did Alabama get into this mess?

"I think it's wrong to categorize it as a mess," answers Thomas, contradicting most of the leaders in Montgomery.

Yet from there, Thomas begins to explain what this "not a mess" looks like from inside the system. He starts with the habitual offender laws of the 1980s, which sent low-level repeat offenders to prison for lengthy stays.

"Every single year the Legislature comes to town they generate more crimes that are felonies," says Thomas, adding that the system has long been "strained" by sheer volume. And he knows the stats.

Alabama has the third-highest imprisonment rate in the United States. Said another way, there are only two states that create more inmates per capita, only two states where when you walk down the street you are more likely to pass a future prisoner.

"We're in a state that is very pro law enforcement, that very much had a 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' mentality for a number of years and not much foresight into what that creates," Thomas tells the radio host.

The prisons may be the last tier in a towering industry of law enforcement and politics and justice, but that doesn't explain or excuse guard-on-inmate rape at Tutwiler.

"We're the legislative branch, which means we don't run the prisons. We fund them," state Rep. Mike Ball, R-Madison, told AL.com. "A lot of the stuff that is going on there is illegal."

Alabama's disgrace

On Jan. 14, Alabama received a threatening letter from the U.S. Department of Justice. The federal inspectors were able to name more than 20 staff members who'd had sex with Tutwiler inmates. They identified strip shows held with help from guards. Federal inspectors during a visit in 2013 watched men wander into the showers unannounced.

One of the inmate bathrooms Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2013, in Elmore County near Wetumpka, Ala. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com)

This is how it would go. The guard would stare, maybe slow stroll through the showers when certain inmates were in there, maybe call a prisoner over to the desk. "Say 'I've just been looking at you, you know you're a pretty girl,'" recalled Perrion Roberts, who served time at Tutwiler for drugs.

"When I was there a lot of the women trade sex to get privileges with the guards," said Roberts, 49. "If they approach you and you turn them down, they make it difficult for you."

The Justice Department, citing "catastrophically low staffing and supervision levels," has threatened a lawsuit which could lead to the courts giving the federal government control over Tutwiler, much as Alabama lost control of many of its schools two generations ago.

Alabama is paying The Moss Group, a consulting firm run by a former prison employee from Georgia, $500,000 to come in and help sort out the issues at Tutwiler. The Moss Group did a similar service in Kansas. Its previous suggestions? Hire more female guards. Install cameras. Keep male guards from watching women shower. All are suggestions that Alabama has already heard.

In fact, the Justice Department says Alabama has failed since 1995 to do anything other than ignore the problems.

Instead, the federal inspectors found that an unnamed "Officer B" trades underwear for oral sex, Sergeant C forces women to touch his penis, Officer D swapped romantic letters and then had sex with a prisoner, Officer E raped a prisoner who later gave birth.

The list stretched to Officer T. And the federal letter warned that Tutwiler "vastly understates" the problem.

'On the verge'

The obstacles to change are many.

"First of all, no one's ever run for election or re-election on the issue of how to solve prisons," said state Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, who heads the Legislature's prison oversight committee. "I can tell you it's not a big issue in the minds of voters, but it should be."

Federal intervention is a real possibility. One civil rights attorney, speaking anonymously, described Alabama prisons as the next "frontier for litigation" for the Justice Department.

"I think the Tutwiler situation got some people's attention," said state Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, who has worked to streamline prison and parole processes and find new funding for corrections.

In fact, reform appears to be taking root.

While Moss consultants look at Tutwiler, Alabama also brought in the Council for State Governments to review the entire justice system. Alabama created the Alabama Prison Task Force. Even the Association of County Commissions of Alabama has built its summer conference around prison reform.

All boxed in

"They battle hopelessness at Draper," said Corey Douglas, the prison minister, referring to Draper Correctional Center in Elmore County.

Douglas was still in his teens when he was arrested in 1998 in the shooting death of a young man in north Huntsville. Douglas pleaded guilty. He said he drove, another guy had the gun and had the disagreement, that "nothing was planned," that nothing could be taken back.

Corey Douglas, who spent his years behind bars as prison minister, talks about the benefit of programs that prepare inmates to re-enter society. "The mentality of DOC is not to correct because they are understaffed." (Eric Schultz/eschultz@al.com)

Douglas said he was reborn in the county jail when "God said he needed to work in me and work through me."

When asked, he talked about the treatment of men in prison. He gave an example, of riot drills, where prisoners lie naked facedown for six or seven hours. Long after dinner time rolls past, he said, guards place a trash bag filled with peanut butter sandwiches into the cell with the naked men.

But he offered perspective, too, saying some of the corrections officers are upstanding, God-fearing men in a difficult environment.

His is not the typical story of emerging jobless, penniless, angry and returning to crime. Douglas earned an associate's degree in drafting while imprisoned. He starts regular college classes in business administration in August. He already has a full-time job in a warehouse. He works as a youth minister. He is quiet, seeking of forgiveness.

"The public thinks everybody is criminal-minded in prison. I thought that at one time," said Douglas. "But that's not the totality of it. There are good men in there that need to be out."

One of the guard towers at Staton Correctional Facility Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2013, in Elmore, Ala. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com)

The days pass slowly in prison. The showers are moldy. The place is so crowded that new inmates often sleep without mattresses for a time. There is idleness. There is no rehabilitation or trade courses for anyone with more than five years left on his or her sentence.

But prison is supposed to be punishment.

Why should you care? Perhaps because most everybody gets out eventually.

They re-emerge dragging debts for restitution and court fees and drug screenings, dragging a black mark that blocks opportunities to find work that might enable them to pay those debts and stay out of trouble. If they don't find work, if they are unprepared for society, what happens next?

196 percent

Alabama has a dismal, repetitious history when it comes to crime and punishment, continually waiting to be told by a federal judge that its practices are cruel. And it's not an ancient history.

In 1995, Alabama became the first state in 30 years to re-introduce the chain gang. The state soon agreed in court to drop the practice.

It was just in 2002 that the U.S. Supreme Court said Alabama can't chain prisoners to a hitching post. It was 2004 when a class-action settlement required that Alabama hire full-time prison doctors and that inmates receive treatment for life-threatening diseases.

But Alabama is not entirely alone in its prison crisis.

In 2011, the Supreme Court forced California to reduce its jammed-packed prisons to 137.5 percent of its capacity. "A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy.

The ruling set free 30,000 inmates. Now comes Alabama, a system at 196 percent capacity.

"It is significantly worse than this place that was found to be unconstitutional," noted Maria Morris, managing attorney for the Montgomery office of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a federal lawsuit against the DOC after it presented a report listing grisly anecdotes of inadequate medical care in Alabama's prisons. Among those: A prisoner twice given new pants due to severe bleeding but no treatment. A stroke victim left on a cell floor for days. AL.com has reported similar stories, including a lawsuit settled after Tutwiler staff treated a heart attack with ice chips and Maalox.

Plea for relief

Perrion Roberts served time in Tutwiler from 2004 to 2006. She sued for medical treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. She got lucky. A judge took an interest in her handwritten complaints. Most prisoner suits are tossed on technicalities, many within days.

But when Roberts wrote the judge to say prison officials were keeping her from transferring her money to pay court fees, she got some attention. U.S. Magistrate Judge Vanzetta McPherson demanded information from the prison officers, leading to depositions of staff, wardens, doctors and nurses.

"The warden asked me one day, was I trying to get him fired," recalled Roberts of former Warden Frank Albright.

But AL.com discovered that such firings don't happen, not even with an inquisitive judge looking on. AL.com's Casey Toner reported on wardens who kept their jobs, were promoted even, after seeming criminal assaults of inmates.

Perrion Roberts served time in Tutwiler Prison from 2004 to 2006.

Roberts' suit was dropped after she was released. She's been out eight years now. This year, she received a rare pardon from the state of Alabama. She said she is pursuing a law degree.

Roberts said she was never abused by guards, but she complained of the larger problem. "I think it's inhumane to have 600 women in one room and no air, just two fans," Roberts said.

Guards also struggle in these overcrowded conditions. "It's just like you're locked up, too," Herman Boleware told AL.com. "Like you're in jail with them."

Boleware was one of six guards at Tutwiler to be successfully prosecuted for employee-on-inmate crimes including sexual misconduct and abuse from 2009 to 2011. AL.com identified a total of 18 cases involving 30 corrections employees that were referred to the Elmore County district attorney's office over five years. But only six employees were found guilty, and most did no time. Boleware denied doing anything wrong.

C.J. Robinson, chief deputy district attorney in Elmore County, where the state runs six prisons, said that grand jurors often won't believe inmate testimony. "For us, it comes down to the question of, 'Can we prove the charge we are going with?' And if we can't prove it, it's my duty as a prosecutor to get rid of it."

Old, old story

Bryan Stevenson finds no cause for surprise about Tutwiler. "Everything they were documenting was stuff we had seen," said Stevenson, whose Montgomery-based group Equal Justice Initiative had reported the same abuses in 2012.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which is based in Montgomery.

"I frankly don't understand why a year ago we didn't install comprehensive video equipment in every prison."

The state says that it installed mirrors this spring and hopes to install cameras by July. State law already requires female guards for female prisoners. Alabama is now working on recruitment of women officers, with strategies such as reducing time away from home for training.

Alabama prison officials say after the federal inspection last year they added saloon-style doors to provide privacy in the showers.

While Alabama struggles to pay for cameras and guards, some call for the state to build more cells and more prisons. "I would say instead of hiring that consulting firm, let's hire a contractor that has bricks and mortar," said District Attorney Walt Merrell in March.

Merrell is the district attorney in Covington County, which generates more inmates per capita among its citizenry than any other county. Covington created one new prisoner for every 55 residents over a period of just three years.

But prison officials don't merely want more beds. They want more money.

The system has less than 60 percent of the staff that the state has authorized. And even that is shrinking, as the number of prison employees dropped 3 percent from March 2013 to March of this year. Some prisons, including Tutwiler, operate at half-strength.

"Regardless of where we ultimately expand, we'll have to address our ability to staff new facilities," wrote Kristi Gates, spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections.

Changing times

In 1977, Alabama had fewer than 3,500 inmates. Then something changed during the Jimmy Carter years, as the country cracked down on street crime, then illegal drugs, then crack itself. The trajectory in Alabama never reversed itself.

In 2013, Alabama counted 32,500 inmates under its purview, whether in state prison or elsewhere, nearly 10 times as many as 1977. But that's not the case everywhere.

"We're starting to see a reversal overall nationwide," said Jeanne Flavin, a professor at Fordham University in New York who has written extensively about justice issues. "But this is like trying to turn around a prison barge."

According to Flavin, concern about street crime faded as the public became riveted by the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

By 2009, the number of state and federal prisoners fell for the first time in three decades. And it happened across the South, too. South Carolina dropped some mandatory minimum sentences in 2010. North Carolina last year reduced prison beds.

The Economist magazine said it simply enough in March: "America locks up too many people for too many things." But more meaningful and more practical for Alabama is this paragraph from last summer in the newspaper in Austin, Texas, the American-Statesman:

"The closure of the two lockups by August 31 will reduce Texas' prison capacity by 4,300 beds, at a time when the state has upward of 12,000 empty prison bunks — thanks to a declining crime rate and successful treatment and rehabilitation programs that have cut recidivism in recent years."

A burden shared

Prison officials ask for money, for more officers. Politicians have little incentive to raise the issue with voters.

Corrections administrators say there are too many laws criminalizing too many acts. Prosecutors say the problem is that there aren't enough prison cells. Alabama stuck a toe in the water last fall, modifying rules to reduce sentences for repeat drug offenders and thieves. District attorneys balked.

"Every defendant who commits a felony should serve some time ... They need to see the inside," said Jefferson County District Attorney Brandon Falls.

He said, "They have to have real punishment."

We Alabamians built this system, whether through fear or retribution or ignorance or indifference. In the end, there are no clear villains behind this system, rather a shambles of our own design. So who is responsible for fixing the problems?

"Nobody and everybody," answered Stan Brodsky, psychology-law professor at the University of Alabama. "No single person is responsible for the accumulated problems and limited funding of the prison system. It has built up over time so that the rolling momentum of difficulties is difficult to halt.

"Everybody, because it is the responsibility of each of us to have a humane, meaningful, effective prison system."