Earlier this week, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released a summary of its findings on the state of Alabama’s prisons. The accounts are stomach-churning: The New York Times noted that one prisoner had been lying dead for so long that “his face was flattened,” while another “was tied up and tortured for two days.” A dive into the 53-page report reveals yet more horror. One prisoner was doused with bleach and beaten with a broken mop handle. Another was attacked with shaving cream so hot that it caused chemical burns, requiring treatment from an outside hospital.



It’s hardly news that American prisons and jails can be dangerous places. But the Justice Department’s report mirrors other recent accounts of inmate deaths and violence across the country that, taken together, paint a grim picture of the brutality that occurs behind prison walls—and the horrifying consequences of America’s indifference to it.

Two years in the making, the federal investigation of men’s prisons in Alabama found them plagued with “severe, systemic, and exacerbated” violations of prisoners’ Eighth Amendment rights. Rates of prisoner-on-prisoner violence have roughly doubled in the state over the past five years, with a homicide rate eight times the national average. Guards told federal investigators that half to three-quarters of prisoners have some kind of improvised weapon. “A weapon that was essentially a small sword was recovered at St. Clair in 2017,” the report said.

Sexual violence is also ubiquitous. The report found that prison staff “accept the high level of violence and sexual abuse ... as a normal course of business, including acquiescence to the idea that prisoners will be subjected to sexual abuse as a way to pay debts accrued to other prisoners.” Alabama officials routinely declared reports of sexual violence as “unsubstantiated” if the survivor declined to press charges, even if he named his attacker and there was other evidence to support the allegation. The Justice Department also found that officials discouraged prisoner reports of sexual assault by regularly dismissing allegations as consensual “homosexual activity.”

The Justice Department attributes this violence to an ouroboros of understaffing and overcrowding. The report found that Alabama’s prison system is understaffed by more than two-thirds. Even the most well-staffed prison, with 75 percent of the necessary employees, was described as “dangerously understaffed.” To make up the shortfall, prison officials regularly force guards to work an additional four hours past their twelve-hour shifts. Meanwhile, investigators estimated that Alabama had a prison occupancy rate of 182 percent of its capacity. Though the state has taken some efforts to reduce the number of nonviolent prisoners in the system, facility closures kept the overall occupancy levels roughly the same.