Every time the call comes through, Alice Lister wrestles with the hardest question of her life: Pay the money she can't afford, or risk seeing her son bruised or bloodied, possibly dead.

The calls come from inside Alabama prison walls, where her son is incarcerated and where she, by extension, is being extorted. On the bad days, Lister wonders if her child might play a part in the ongoing blackmail, enabled by a prison system riddled with contraband cellphones and a black market drug trade fueled by corrupt correctional officers. Where drugs are involved, Josh has been known to take desperate measures.

But then he calls — pleading for his life, scared half to death by threatened violence or sexual assault — so she sends another $25 through PayPal to the number given to her.

"What do you do?" Lister asked from her Bay Minette home in April, tears springing to her eyes when she considered the implications of not paying the money. "If something does happen, it’s the one time I didn’t believe him. What the hell do you do? ... It’s the worst thing in the world. I couldn’t stand it if anything were to happen to him. You do what you have to do to come up with the money.”

Lister's fears are justified.

On April 2, the U.S. Department of Justice released a chilling investigation into Alabama's male prisons, describing nothing short of torture occurring on a near-daily, sometimes hourly, basis inside prisons overcrowded, understaffed and teeming with corruption.

More:DOJ rips Alabama in graphic report for 'failing to protect' prisoners

In the days following the report, the Montgomery Advertiser authenticated a cache of photos provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center illustrating the bloody brutality in St. Clair Correctional Facility.

The photographs are chilling: dead men, flesh hacked down to bone, pools of blood smeared on floors and walls.

Alone, each photo is difficult to look at.

Together, they're stomach-churning. To look at one after the other is to look with bated breath, fearful of the human pain and suffering that may come next.

More:Why the Advertiser published dozens of brutal, bloody images from inside an Alabama prison

For many people in free society, prisoners are out of sight, out of mind. But imagine every time an unknown number pings your phone, notifying you of a new text message or video conference call, a picture could appear of your child — the victim of violence similar to what's captured in the whistle blower's photos.

"I can’t stand the anticipation of one of those Alabama numbers," said Terrell Britt, a Georgia woman whose son "Tall" has been incarcerated at Holman prison for a decade. Living with a chronic disease, Britt no longer answers the calls, fearful for her health. Her husband, a retired Army chief warrant officer, fields the calls instead.

In Fairhope, Lister's desperation has reached a boiling point.

She calls Alabama prison officials daily, recently securing her son a move to a separate facility when he was seriously threatened in March. She calls until the offices become familiar with her number and screen her calls. She borrows her daughter's phone and calls again. She hopes if prison officials understand that someone outside the system cares about Josh, they'll feel it's important enough to care for him inside.

Lister needs someone to care.

"I'm not advocating just for my son," said Britt. "My heart bleeds for my child. I carried him nine months and raised him. But it’s human decency. These are human beings. I feel like our society is getting too numb when it comes to human lives."

None claim their children are innocent of the crimes for which they are serving time. But all believe Alabama prisoners are being served poison in place of punishment, a leaching toxin of spiraling violence, which will spread out to Alabama communities and into their sons' futures, when they will likely be expected to reintegrate into society one day.

"The system says they're rehabilitating people," said Kita Moss, a former prisoner in the Alabama system. Moss, who was released last year, now works to mentor other men re-entering society.

"If anything, they're contaminating them."

The 56-page DOJ report — which outlines incidents of extreme sexual torture, a rampant internal drug trade and widespread use of makeshift weapons such as a lawn-edging blade "hatchet" — only covers prison living conditions and prisoner-on-prisoner violence. A probe into staff-on-inmate violence is ongoing, as a federal subpoena for documents related to the issue is currently pending.

In the past four months, a number of concerned family members, including Lister and the Britts, independently contacted Montgomery Advertiser reporters, desperate for information or assistance regarding their loved ones inside the system, many of whom were in mental health crises or fearful for their lives.

Their individual stories support the federal findings of ongoing extortion, a drug crisis and veritable war zones inside prison walls. One woman, who asked the Advertiser not to name her for fear of retaliation against her son, said her son returned home from his first ADOC term with a brutal drug addiction.

"He made his own choices. But he will never be the same," the woman said. "There are posters in there that say, 'If you need help, tell a guard.' But they don't do anything, except tell you to get out of their face. ... Maybe he does deserve to be there; he’s got to straighten his act out. But he doesn’t deserve to go through torture."

The DOJ report highlights systemic understaffing within prisons, with reports of some injured and assaulted prisoners going undiscovered for days. In other instances, officers punish men for rule infractions such as incurring debt, like Lister's son has, when the men are seeking protection from violent threats.

Federal investigators found that the extortion Lister is grappling with is "common." In December 2017, a woman reported her brother was being held captive inside a cell at Donaldson prison. A month later, a mother whose son was in Ventress reported extortion to federal investigators. Her son had been threatened with rape, and texted her that he would "chop her son into pieces and rape him if she did not send him $800." The prisoner had texted her from a cellphone photos of a prisoner's genitals.

Physical infrastructure also compounds the issue. The DOJ report outlines a number of prisoners who bled freely after stabbing incidents while waiting for staff to find keys to security gates. Sight lines in large dorms were also cited as a concern, with a "large number" of violent incidents occurring out of sight of officers.

"They can be killed, or paralyzed for life, before a guard knows what’s going on," Lister said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center shared more than 2,500 photos with the Advertiser. They believe the photos were taken from inside St. Clair.

"The photos show a prison that is out of control," said SPLC senior supervising attorney Maria Morris. "They are pictures of extraordinary violence and suffering — men stabbed, beaten, bloodied and, in some photos, dead. The photos also showing the shocking filth and dilapidation of some of the housing units where people live."

The Advertiser found most of the photos too graphic to publish or decided not to publish because of privacy concerns of the prisoners and staff members pictured. However, given the lack of access the public has into the Alabama prison system, the Advertiser believes the photos expose what is often out of sight and are necessary to understand the ongoing crisis.

Carlos Blocker, a former Alabama inmate, authenticated several of the photos for an Advertiser reporter. Blocker, who spent 23 years inside Alabama prisons after he was incarcerated as a teenager, identified the facility pictured as St. Clair.

Blocker, who said he worked with Alabama prisoners in hospice care for about two years, said several of the photos clearly depicted the St. Clair infirmary.

The photo cache includes images of men who are likely dead, including one man lying face down on a prison cot. In another photo, it appears numbers were carved into the flesh of a man's torso.

In the most chilling photographs, a flashlight beam illuminates a man who apparently hanged himself with a swath of white fabric.

"Working on a case about prison conditions, we hear every day from our clients of the horrors that go on in the prisons," said SPLC's Morris in an email. "Most people in our communities usually have no reason to think about what we are doing to men and women in our prisons, and no way to understand what the conditions really are. These pictures give us all view inside. They should make us all think about whether we can accept that our state is allowing this carnage to continue in our prisons, year after year, stabbing after stabbing, death after death."

The majority of the photos appear evidentiary in nature, with homemade weapons photographed against rulers and dozens of photographs taken from what appears to be the same medical bay, where medical staff and correctional officers are clearly present. While the majority of the photos feature injured prisoners, several apparent correctional officers appear as well with bruised and bloodied faces.

Despite recurring environments and identifying physical features, ADOC said they could not authenticate the photos or even confirm where they came from. Prisons spokesperson Bob Horton did not respond to a specific query regarding ADOC’s prison investigation protocol, including whether or not they photograph all injuries and where they store investigative evidence.

“The Alabama Department of Corrections cannot authenticate the photographs nor does the department know their origin, when or where they were taken, or whether, once taken, they were Photoshopped or altered,” Horton said via email. “For the privacy, security, and safety of those appearing in the photographs and their families, (ADOC) requests that you exercise your journalistic discretion.”

The department now faces a looming deadline. Alabama has until May 22 to show steps toward improvement or face a possible federal lawsuit.

ADOC has set a goal of hiring 500 corrections officers this year to meet a court-ordered requirement of bringing in about 2,000 more officers by 2022, with plans to create a new classification of officer who would not need certain training requirements. Sentencing reforms, including changes to marijuana laws and the thresholds for certain property crimes, are also being considered by legislators as a means to reduce the prison pipeline.

“I think increasing compensation, a meaningful increase of it, will help us retain and attract new officers,” said Rep. Christopher England, D-Tuscaloosa, on Thursday after a prison oversight committee meeting. “But as was pointed out this morning, 500 officers is quite optimistic. But it’s something we need to shoot for, at least.”

Meanwhile, a third tier of the federal investigation is ongoing. The April 2 report only covered prison living conditions and inmate-on-inmate violence. A probe into staff-on-inmate violence is ongoing, as investigators work to get relevant documents from Alabama. In court filings on Thursday, the DOJ asked for a status conference on May 17.

Former prisoners are not optimistic Alabama can take the necessary steps in the coming weeks to stave off further lawsuits. Kita Moss said Alabama leaders have been aware of issues plaguing the system for far too long.

"They've had more than enough to reconcile the problem, " Moss said. "This system has been plagued with corruption. I think giving them more time is just giving them more time to be corrupt. If the state of Alabama was going to fix, they would have already fixed it. ... It seems like people who don't have family members involved, they turn a deaf ear and blind eye to these issues. The system said for far too long, 'We're going to fix it.' But they didn't plan on fixing it. They just wanted to put a Band-aid on it. The only way to get this truly rectified, is for the Department of Justice to come in and restructure the entire system. We've had too many complaints. Too many suicides. It's too much."

More:Prison staffing first focus of state response to damning DOJ report

Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Melissa Brown at 334-240-0132 or mabrown@gannett.com.

Andrew Yawn and Brian Lyman contributed to this report.