prisoner image

An Alabama Department of Corrections inmate. (AP Photo)

Audits of the prison rape elimination practices of 11 of Alabama's 14 men's prisons and its sole women's prison conducted over the past several months report that the facilities are doing a stellar job of enacting policies aimed at reducing sexual violence.

That picture of the state's prisons seems to contradict a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announcement on Thursday that it is launching an investigation into a number of persistent problems at Alabama's 14 men's prisons, with sexual violence and rape near the top of its priority list.

The Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC) says the audits are final versions of preliminary reports that identified "deficiencies" in all but one of the state's prisons for men. But DOC spokesman Bob Horton said the preliminary reports are not available to the public except via records requests, and the DOJ had access to many of the final reports when it announced its new investigation.

As part of a concerted effort to reduce sexual violence in its correctional facilities, the DOC hired two companies - Texas-based PREA Auditors of America (PAA) and Diversified Correctional Services (DCS) of Georgia - earlier this year to audit state prisons' compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA.)

"The Alabama Department of Corrections appointed a PREA Director in 2015, and each correctional facility has an assigned PREA manager to oversee the PREA program in accordance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act," Horton told AL.com via email. "The ADOC PREA audits began in May 2016."

Passed in 2003, PREA requires the Justice Department to "make the prevention of prison rape a top priority." Its passage was followed in 2014 by commitments by 48 states including Alabama to take steps to reduce prison rape. It's a process that typically includes audits of correctional facilities by independent companies like the ones who contracted with Alabama.

As such, PAA and DCS began auditing Alabama's prisons for compliance with the PREA earlier this year, a process that includes on-site visits, reviews of documentation and procedures, and other investigative measures, according to PAA.

"The auditor will also be responsible for developing a corrective action plan for the facility, in the event the facility does not meet all standards of compliance," PAA's website states.

PAA issued what appears to be its first final PREA audit report in Alabama - of Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women - on June 8, and it has since completed at least eight more.

The audits are in-depth documents dozens of pages long, detailing each individual prison's level of compliance with more than 40 standards. They found that the audited prisons "met" or "exceeded" all of the standards that the auditors found applicable to the institutions, with none failing to meet even a single standard.

The audits of 11 Alabama men's prisons are posted on a state website, and "audits are in progress for St. Clair, Staton and Bibb County Correctional Facilities," according to Horton.

Horton noted that "[w]hat you see posted online is the final audit reports after deficiencies are corrected," and that they fail to reflect the fact that many of the state's correctional facilities were initially found to have "deficiencies" related to PREA. But the DOC did not make the initial reports public, meaning the public only sees the final reports showing that the prisons are in compliance. And the DOJ launched an investigation despite the public availability of the final versions of the majority of the documents.

PAA declined to respond to specific questions about its auditing process, its contract with the state, and other issues, but Kathy Brownfield, the company's co-director, spoke briefly via phone with AL.com.

"We have a confidentiality agreement with Alabama so what we can say would be very limited," she said. "I'm not really qualified to answer that, I just manage the business. I wouldn't know anything about comparisons between the states."

Brownfield added that as far as how or why the Alabama facilities met or exceeded all applicable PREA standards in the company's audits, "[i]t just fluctuates from what I understand. It depends - the facilities are all different."

No other PAA employee or executive responded to inquiries about the company, and DCS did not respond to a request seeking comment Friday.

The DOC paid PAA $27,625 between July 28 and Sept. 6, and the company received $3,800 in "federal grants or awards" via the department on June 15, according to state spending records. The records do not show that the state has made any payments to DCS, but Horton said that the DOC paid the company $8,400 on Oct. 3.

State Sen. Cam Ward, a Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and has led the Legislature's prison reform efforts, told AL.com Friday that he has "not heard about the sexual abuse" in Alabama's men's prisons.

But Alabama prisons are "notorious" for sexual violence, according to Lisa Graybill, deputy legal director of the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center.

"The PREA audits are important because it's important to have the appropriate policies. But unfortunately there can be a world of difference between policy and practice, and I think this speaks to that issue," she said.

"The endemic, the systemic concern, is when [sexual violence] is used as a tool to control a facility in lieu of all the other tools that are supposed to exist, as far as staffing and training and working cell doors and all these things."

DOJ spokesman David F. Jacobs declined to comment on the specific details of how its newly announced investigation will tackle the issue of prison rape and sexual assault. But the department's statistics show that Alabama has one of the worst prison sexual violence problems in the nation.

According to data released by the DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2011 - which is the latest available, a bureau employee told AL.com - there were 32 reported instances of alleged staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct in Alabama prisons that year, 12 of which were substantiated.

That's the fifth-highest number of substantiated instances of staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct of any state in the country. And it reflects a significant increase in staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct over 2010, when 23 such incidents were reported, only five of which were substantiated.