Across the barren and now picked cottonfields on the outskirts of Atmore, where farms and trailers litter the green and brown landscape, there is a place that's better known as the 'House of Pain' to the incarcerated men that live there.

Hidden from view behind large trees about three-quarters of a mile from I-65, Holman Correctional Facility's has the appearance of an industrial slaughterhouse, while its gruesome and well deserved epithet describes a world that has steadily become a bastion of misery and violence in recent years.

And the rest of Alabama's prison system is no different.

Most of the near 25,000 prisoners inside Alabama's 15 state correctional facilities are crammed into open-plan dormitories, where hundreds of inmates sleep side-by-side on steel-framed bunk beds. Basic toilet and shower facilities are in short supply, while lack of air conditioning and personal space adds to an already difficult environment.

Holman Correctional Facilit near Atmore.





Frequent stabbings, riots, fires, and the murder of a prison guard in September last year have heaped pressure on lawmakers to do something during the new legislative session about a prison system that independent correctional experts have described as one of the worst and most violent in the country. And experts have told AL.com that four new mega prisons costing the state $800 million is not the answer, and could make things worse.

But how did Alabama's prisons get so out of control?

When Holman Prison was built in the late 1960s, the open-plan dormitories were designed to reduce violence and help build relationships between inmates and correctional staff, who would all be present on a daily basis within the large dorms. The idea was that staff could familiarize themselves with inmates and reduce tension before prisoners turned to violence. But over the last 15 years, this system has broken down and attacks are increasing, according to Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn and ADOC statistics.

Violent incidents have doubled over the last five years. Since 2011, incidents of inmate-on-inmate violence have increased from 1,108 in 2011 to 2,111 last year. Inmate-on-staff violent incidents rose from 289 in 2011 to 522 in 2016.



Adding to the problem is huge overcrowding and severe understaffing. Alabama's prisons have grown to nearly 180 percent of capacity, while the number of correctional officers needed to run the entire system has plummeted to below 50 percent. Without the required number of prison guards to monitor the cells correctly, inmates have been left largely unattended. The revolutionary design of the late 60s had backfired spectacularly.

"It is in part the design and it is also in part because of the tremendous levels of vacant positions. So, when you combine those two things, it's a pretty toxic mixture that makes it difficult to supervise inside of those living units and can lead to higher levels of violence," Eldon Vail, secretary of Washington State Department of Corrections between 2007 and 2011, told AL.com. "But in terms of the overcrowding and understaffing, Alabama is quite unique in this country."



Vail even said that Alabama has surpassed California's extreme overcrowding issue that first came became national news in the mid-1990s and continues to a lesser degree today. "The difference in California though is they weren't understaffed. They were robustly staffed," he said.

Between September 2011 and September 2016, the number of violent incidents at Alabama prisons increased as staffing levels fell. (Alabama Department of Corrections)

While Alabama's state prison population has slowly come down in recent years, from 25,000 in Jan 2015 to around 24,000 in September 2016, according to Alabama Department of Corrections Statistics, the state continues to keep around 987 people per 100,000 in prison, around 50 percent more than the national average of 693, according to a Prison Policy study from June 2016. That's more than all but five other states in the U.S. Alabama's prisons are only designed to hold a little over 13,000 people in total.

And this has taken a severe toll on inmates in many unexpected ways. During an inspection of Alabama's prisons in 2016, Vail noted in his expert report to the Middle District Court of Alabama that violence was being perpetuated by a lack of basic amenities. For example, Vail found that toilets per inmate were far below the standards set by the American Correctional Association. The regular ratio is supposed to be 12 inmates to 1 toilet, but Alabama's prisons had up to 22 to 1 in some of its institutions.

While this may seem like insignificant in the broad context of prison violence, adequate and operational amenities are extremely important to maintaining peace, explained Vail, especially when applied to the dormitory style cells.

"You're gonna have some competition for those few resources among inmates," he said. "And that can increase tension in the living unit, and all those kinds of things can, in my experience, lead to frequent episodes of violence."

Holman Prison entrance.

And the acute overcapacity at Holman, which is designed to hold 581 men but currently has 835, according to September records, meant that some dorms were so packed that it was difficult for officers to see inside, according to one former guard who spoke with AL.com. "I couldn't see all the way to the back of the room because it was so full, and because prisoners would put up sheets to obscure my view," said John Hendry, who quit his job as a correctional officer at Holman prison in October 2016. "And the escape hatch that helps guards escape the block in the event of an emergency are not big enough for normal people, especially not me. I never felt safe or in control."

Holman's death row, the only one in the state, is supposed to hold 56 men, but has nearly 200 men, according to records.

Hendry also said that without the correct amount of guards, the prison was forced to take short cuts and often unable to action when major violent events occurred in cells. "We couldn't easily enter a dorm to protect someone that was being attacked, or break up a riot," he said.

Hendry added the recent murder of correctional officer Kenneth Bettis in September last year was partially due to poor design and understaffing. After an inmate lined up for the fourth time at dinner one evening, Bettis told him that he'd had enough to eat and instructed him to sit down. The prisoner fatally wounded him. "The layout of the kitchen is pretty standard among prisons but it's too open and makes it easier for attacks to take place."

But poor design leading to violence is nothing new in Alabama's prisons, and inmates have been telling officials about issues since at least the mid-1980s. During a riot at St. Clair Correctional Facility in April 1985, hostages were taken by inmates, people were beaten and a woman was raped. One inmate told a Birmingham News reporter who was in the prison at the time of the riot that inmates had been able to access secured rooms by crawling through the ceiling space, bypassing the walls beneath. The inmate said during the riot that it was easy to get around the prison. "You can go anywhere inside it just by busting glass," he said.

However, 32 years later, the state is still trying to fix the problems with its prisons.



New prisons versus old.

In 2016, Governor Robert Bentley put forth what's known as the Alabama Prison Transformation Initiative (APTI), a plan to build four mega prisons at a cost of $800 million. While the initiative passed through both the House and the Senate, it did not gain final approval. In the coming session this year it's expected that Bentley will raise the issue again with some amendments to help it pass.



However, detractors of the governor's plan don't believe that building new mega prisons will address the violence, overcrowding, understaffing and unrest that exists today.

"The ADOC's struggle to hire and retain correctional officers has resulted in one of the highest inmate-to-staff ratios in the country," said the Southern Poverty Law Center in a press release last year. "This puts both prisoners and ADOC staff at risk of violence. The APTI does nothing to resolve the immediate crisis, putting both prisoners and correctional officers at continued risk as the state embarks on a years-long project with no guarantees that new buildings will ensure a safer environment."

Echoing the SPLC's comments is Marayca Lopez, a senior corrections analyst and planner with CGL Companies, a New York-based company that focuses on the planning and design of justice facilities. She told AL.com that following through on the governor's proposals would be detrimental to the state's efforts to resolve it prison issues.

"Creating four large prisons is a very misguided and bad idea" she said. "Studies have shown that large facilities are harder to manage and are more prone to violence, so although it might make economic sense for Alabama to consolidate its current prisons, it would not necessarily make staff and prisons safer."

She added that the best way to bring down the prison population, while also alleviating violence, was to view prisons not as places of punishment, but as institutions of reform and rehabilitation. "These political reforms have to come together with better designed facilities or it won't make much difference."

Such a high incarceration rate has inevitably led to discussions among architects about striking the right ethical considerations that go in to designing and planning correctional facilities. Raphael Sperry, president of Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) told AL.com that it is not the job of an architect to solve the problem of mass incarceration created by harsh sentencing laws in state.

"The context that we talk about prison design in is in the context of mass incarceration, and Alabama is participating in that," said Sperry of ADPSR, a Berkley, California-based advocacy group that works for peace, environmental protection, ecological building, social justice, and the development of healthy communities. "And it's not a good system, it's actually really bad. It's not the approach one would take when designing a criminal justice system, so asking architects to clean up a problem that's arising from state legislature is not something we really ask professional architects to do."