Spectators gather before a meeting of the Alabama Legislature’s Joint Prison Oversight Committee on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025. The meeting was eventually moved to another larger room to accommodate the number of people attended. Those who remained heard of the violent and dangerous conditions within Alabama’s prisons. (Ralph Chapoco/Alabama Reflector)
Ministers and family members described the dangerous conditions that incarcerated people endure in Alabama correctional facilities at a legislative committee hearing Wednesday.
Speaking to a meeting of the Joint Prison Oversight Committee at the Alabama Statehouse that drew hundreds of people, relatives of incarcerated people and those who work with them described assaults, drug overdoses and extortion against inmates and their families, almost five years after the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit alleging the conditions in Alabama’s correctional facilities violate inmates’ Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Robert White, a pastor with the ministry Montgomery City of Refuge, told members of the committee on Tuesday that inmates were being “intimidated or extorted” from their bunks, creating what he described as homelessness even though they are in custody at the facility because they have no place to sleep or rest.
“They have to sleep on the floor, in very deplorable positions because someone has taken their bunk from them,” he said.
White also said that people who are incarcerated continue to live in violent conditions.
“The punishment of taking away their freedom has already been handed,” he said. “We don’t have to subject them to torture. We don’t have to do that to them; we don’t have to subject them to the horrific conditions they are facing. And if I could pick one issue that we have to address, it is sexual assaults. That destroys a man, and it reduces him to that of an animal.”
Speaking at a rally after the meeting, Tim Mathis, whose son Chase died in Elmore County Prison in 2014, said “enough is enough.”
“Too long now, the Alabama Department of Corrections has operated like a shadow, they are unaccountable, untouchable, or so they think,” he said. “They are built on cruelty.”
According to ADOC statistics, 1,600 assaults have been reported in state prisons since the beginning of 2025. ADOC does not categorize the incidents and it is not clear how many involved sexual violence. .
Limestone Correctional Facility in Limestone County has reported 247 assaults this year, the most of any prison in the state. Julia Tutweiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka was second, with 146 assaults reported this year.
Rev. Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow of The Ordinary People’s Society, an organization that advocates on behalf of people who are incarcerated, said that the violence remains a problem in Alabama’s prisons.
“People are getting beaten to death,” he said. “People are living in bad living conditions. There has been oversight, no citizen involvement, no citizens to help rehabilitate. In any other country, the family is involved.”
The Alabama Legislature in 2024 approved a law creating a “constituent services” department in the DOC to answer questions from the public about the status of people in ADOC custody or the status of the prison facilities.
Stephanie Johnson, constituent services coordinator for the ADOC, said the office fielded almost 2,400 inquiries from July to September of this year. Nearly half of the inquiries dealt with people currently incarcerated in prisons. More than 500 of the inquiries were wellness checks on a loved one incarcerated in prison. Another 284 calls pertained to safety, while 330 were related to health concerns for people who were incarcerated.
The meeting convened just amid the release of the documentary, “The Alabama Solution,” a documentary that details both the violence and the problems that have plagued the Alabama Department of Corrections.
Among the storylines is that of Corrections officer Roderick Gadson. Gadson was part of a group of corrections officers who beat Steven Davis to death in Donaldson Correctional Facility in 2019. The state, which denies that the officers used excessive force, later settled a lawsuit with Davis’ mother, Sondra Ray, for $250,000. Gadson was promoted to lieutenant after Davis’ death.
“I, first and foremost, question a system that allows like that to be employed by the Department of Corrections, but I also question a system that allows the same person, who clearly is escalating in his aggression, to go from assault to allegedly beating someone to death,” said Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, during the meeting,
John Hamm, the commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, said that “the culture that you mentioned is there, and that has been something that has been going on for quite some time.”
He said that the Department is soliciting the help of outside services to help address the problem, but that it will take time to solve.
“This is one of those things that makes you happy and sad at the same time, that we have arrested 111 staff,” Hamm said. “That is sad that it would tarnish the bad, but it makes me happy that we are doing that.”
