On December 2, 2025, a grassroots organizing movement made up of incarcerated people called the Free Alabama Movement, announced their plan for a statewide shutdown of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC). This was in response to decades of unlivable, cruel, and inhumane living conditions and treatment of incarcerated people in Alabama prisons. The Free Alabama Movement illustrates how Alabama prisons are a public health and humanitarian crisis that demand our attention.
Alabama’s state violence begins with settler colonialism, when colonial forces murdered, tortured, and displaced Indigenous peoples. This land was originally stewarded and cared for by many Indigenous nations that have been written out of history by settlers. Alabama’s name itself comes from an Indigenous tribe, called the Alabama. The United States, a settler colony, continues to commit epistemological violence against Indigenous peoples by erasing the precolonial history of Turtle Island, making it hard to identify all of the nations that once stewarded what we now know as Alabama. Regardless of this, some of the known nations that have been displaced or occupied by the state of Alabama are the Cherokee Nation, Creek Nation, Chickasaw Nation, Choctaw Nation, and the Piqua Shawnee Nation. With the elimination and removal of Indigenous nations from resource-rich lands, colonial settlements were built and held together by the forced labor of Black people who were stolen from their homes and enslaved. Prisons continue to occupy Indigenous land and Black people are disproportionately incarcerated; the same oppressions continue, under “legal,” and therefore justified, conditions. White supremacist and colonial ideology is entrenched in this country’s history and is foundational to many of our current social systems, including prisons and policing.
In the past five years, the Alabama carceral system has employed new mechanisms of state sanctioned violence that threaten our incarcerated communities. A year after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and demands to end police brutality, the Alabama legislature approved the construction of two new megaprisons. This project is ongoing and continues to cost billions of dollars, even using $400 million from the federally allotted coronavirus relief bill, the American Rescue Plan Act. The money was supposed to support public health initiatives, reduce the negative economic impacts of the pandemic, improve water/sewer infrastructure, and financially support small businesses and frontline workers. Instead, it is now being used to expand unnecessary and tortuous prison infrastructure. Four years after the megaprison project was approved, Alabama became the first state to use nitrogen gas execution, ignoring criticism about its cruelty from humanitarian leaders. Anthony Boyd, the fourth person in Alabama to be murdered with nitrogen gas in 2025, was murdered on October 23, 2025. It was recorded that this was the longest nitrogen gas execution, and he was gasping for air for almost forty minutes before being pronounced dead.
The Alabama prison system soaks up billions of dollars that could be used in our schools, healthcare systems, and welfare programs. Instead, our state chooses torture and legalized murder over us.
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From chattel slavery to now, the Alabama government and elite are notorious for their public assertions of discriminatory beliefs and subsequent violence. Yet, the ongoing violence in prisons is hidden. Prisons are intentionally separated from our living spaces, eyesight, and mainstream media. This makes it easier for people on the outside to be oblivious to the conditions of prison, leading to a lack of large, local, and sustained community movement against prisons. There is also a general erasure and homogenization of violence that happens in the South that minimizes the specific violence of prisons in states like Alabama. Even within anti-prison communities in Northern and Western states, people have abandoned solidarity with the unique struggles of our incarcerated people in Southern states because our homes have been written off as unfixable places of oppression.
The combination of the structural isolation of prisons and the political isolation of Southern states poses an urgent problem for incarcerated people in Alabama prisons. We must resist the State’s attempts to silence the realities of prisons and build local, national, and international solidarity within the prison abolition and/or reform movement. In an effort to do exactly this and bring attention to the realities of life in Alabama prison, please explore the following three lawsuits against the Alabama Department of Corrections.
Lawsuit #1. In 2014, 50+ incarcerated people sued the Alabama Department of Corrections for a fatal lack of healthcare and inaccessibility to services. The incarcerated plaintiffs attested to not being able to access necessary surgery, medication, and appointments with medical professionals. Below are two specific plaintiffs’ experiences, and I recommend looking through the full legal complaint.
1. “PLAINTIFF BRIAN SELLERS has been in custody of DEFENDANT ADOC since 2001. He is currently housed at St. Clair, but has also been housed at Donaldson, Holman, Ventress, Draper, Easterling, and Kilby. He suffers from high blood pressure and heart disease, hepatitis C and has recently had surgery for kidney stones. PLAINTIFF SELLERS was taken off of his blood pressure medication, resulting in a heart attack. Also, DEFENDANTS delayed more than three years before approving a PLAINTIFF SELLERS’s surgery for kidney stones. Also, despite being pre-diabetic, and having recently passed out repeatedly, PLAINTIFF SELLERS is not receiving appropriate treatment. PLAINTIFF SELLERS is being denied adequate medical care.” (page 18)
2. “PLAINTIFF MATHEW MORK has been in custody of DEFENDANT ADOC since 2010. He is currently housed in Holman. He has also been housed at Kilby, Limestone, and Ventress. PLAINTIFF MORK has hepatitis C and is not being treated for it because DEFENDANTS refuse to provide the medication PLAINTIFF MORK requires. PLAINTIFF MORK also suffered serious injury to his arm due to the actions of employees of DEFENDANT ADOC and received inadequate treatment for this injury. PLAINTIFF MORK is being denied adequate medical care.” (page 15)
Each horrifying testimony in this case offers a small window into the lives of people attempting to survive in Alabama prisons. Incarceration strips away a person’s autonomy and their health becomes dependent on the prison facilities, management, and employees. The carceral system is able to leverage a person’s access to health as a means of punishment; one could argue this is unconstitutional via the Eighth Amendment. Incarcerated people in Alabama have been abandoned to an agency that is theoretically charged with their care yet does not care if they live or die. For this reason alone, it is essential that we see prisons as a public health crisis.
Lawsuit #2. After soaring rates of homocide, suicide, and drug overdose deaths in Alabama prisons, the Department of Justice filed a complaint against the Alabama Department of Corrections for violating incarcerated men’s Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment. This 2020 lawsuit documents overcrowding, physical and sexual violence, substance use, and abuse from prison staff. Prison staff were documented using chemicals, excessive force, and antagonizing incarcerated people, even to the point of death. And, according to the data records in the initial legal complaint, over 15,200 men were living in dilapidated facilities that were built to house just 9,882 men. The overcrowding of prisons is imagined to be an important contributor to frequent incarcerated interpersonal violence. People live with minimal resources to toilets, showers, and beds, and experience many sanitary issues such as insufficient plumbing and flooding toilets.
Every aspect of incarceration undermines one’s ability to live a healthy life, creating a unique form of health violence. I use this term to describe the distinct violence within the oppressor and the oppressed relationship where one person/institution is able to control the other person/community’s health. This cruel power can be wielded in many ways, from Israel bombing hospitals in Palestine to Alabama prison officials purposefully withholding medical care from incarcerated people. Beyond healthcare itself, incarceration necessitates that the incarcerated person loses their rights and autonomy, including the ability to make decisions about how their bodies move, experience, and survive.
Our silence about the targeted health violence within prisons fuels the carceral system to destroy the most marginalized people in our communities who are disproportionately policed and incarcerated. This case being led by the Department of Justice is both ironic and sobering; the conditions are so horrific that the very leaders of this carceral system had to publicly denounce their co-conspirators.
Lawsuit #3. Beginning in 2024, six incarcerated people sued the Governor of Alabama and the Commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections for violating anti-slavery laws. Since then, plaintiff Dexter Avery has died during incarceration and before the end of the case. The lawsuit was thoughtfully written to include the history of prisons, citing the Black Codes. These policies legalized the second-class citizenship of free Black people and were used to re-enslave Black people through corrupt laws and racist policing. The lawsuit also provides historical context about Alabama’s use of convict leasing, a practice where corporations pay to “lease” incarcerated people to complete their work. Plaintiffs working for Alabama Correctional Industries only make $2 a day doing public service work such as road maintenance (ex: filling potholes) and working at manufacturing companies (ex: making cleaning supplies and furniture). For plaintiffs who worked for free-world private employers, ADOC took away 40% or more of their pay. Cheap prison labor is used by many staple companies and fast food restaurants, and there is growing conversation about the connections between prison labor and slavery. Slavery’s historic and modern relationship with capitalism, racial capitalism specifically, cannot be understated. Neoliberalism enables slavery to continue because the government and conspirating companies profit millions of dollars from prison labor each year.
This case is groundbreaking, as it explicitly positions prisons as inherently racist and capitalist. By legally naming the conditions in Alabama prisons as slavery we are called to acknowledge this horror as a public health crisis. In this case, the state is participating in health violence through forcing incarcerated people to work in harsh conditions, with little to no pay, and for long hours. They are forced to work while they are malnourished, exhausted, and battling physical and mental deterioration. While the whole case file proves important, there are two sections from the lawsuit to highlight:
1. “In Alabama, slavery and involuntary servitude did not end with the Civil War. A century and a half ago, these practices simply moved from the plantation to the penitentiary. For generations, state officials have maintained a system of forced labor intended to extract profits off the backs of Black and poor Alabamians and maintain them in a state of subjugation” (pg 2).
2. “Despite the recent change to the constitution, incarcerated people in Alabama continue to labor against their will every day, knowing that if they decline to toil, ADOC officials will subject them to a variety of legal and extra-legal sanctions, including extending their time in prison by taking away good-time credit, subjecting them to additional underpaid forced work, ordering them to solitary confinement, transferring them from their work-release centers to higher-security prisons, and making it far more difficult for them to be considered for parole” (pg 2).
On December 19, 2025 the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals upheld a previous dismissal of this case. It is alarming to see this case be continuously dismissed despite the overwhelming evidence.
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These three legal documents provide us with copious amounts of evidence that prove that Alabama prisons neglect incarcerated people’s health, operate inhumane conditions, and practice slavery. Each lawsuit explains a specific way that prisons are a public health crisis, but all together they highlight that prisons function as an institution of health violence. Therefore, prisons are inherently a public health crisis.
These cases also show us that reform is not the answer, and it will always fall short of the urgent need for enormous change. If the Alabama Department of Corrections will not comply with orders from the Department of Justice, we must realize that these prisons will not make sustainable reforms because they are functioning exactly how they were made to. The incarcerated plaintiffs have faced retribution for their lawsuits and some have even died before a final decision was made. As people concerned about public health, we must adopt the political ideology of abolition. It is a natural part of ensuring that everyone has their needs met: clean water, safe shelter, access to nutritious food, access to mental and physical care, and support networks. Prisons violate each of these fundamental human needs.
Incarcerated people live in an environment where exploitation, violence, and resource scarcity is the norm. Public health must interrogate what goes on behind prison walls, who is contained in them, and who gets to leave alive. Prison facilities are often strategically located in remote areas, out of sight and out of mind for free people. Forced prison labor, destitute living conditions, and inaccessible healthcare in prisons is not uniquely an Alabama problem. Prisons and the larger carceral complex target our Black, Brown, disabled, queer, trans, and lower income communities all over the world. We must wake up and fight against this public health crisis. To begin, we must listen to our incarcerated community members. Prisons have been and continue to be sites of resistance and strikes, yet their victories are ignored by the mainstream news radar. We must intentionally seek out updates, information, and organize efforts to fight against prisons. Stay up to date with your local prison movements and become penpals with incarcerated people.
“Many people say it is insane to resist the system, but actually, it is insane not to.” –Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms, pg 11
This article was written by a queer abolitionist who grew up in the southeastern region of occupied Turtle Island, on land that has been stewarded by the Tensaws, the Alabamas, and later the Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Nations. May this piece honor and respect the land, communities, and people who have died/suffered at the hands of state violence.
In memory of Dexter Avery who died in 2024 resisting ADOC’s violence, Jabari Peoples who was murdered in June 2025 by a Homewood Police officer, and Anthony Boyd, Geoffrey Todd West, Gregory Hunt, James Osgood, and Demetrius Terrence Frazier whose deaths and suffering was broadcasted in 2025 under the death penalty.
Image credit: created by the author, a collage of news articles about prisons or letters from prisons, including Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.
To learn more about Alabama prison conditions and hear directly from incarcerated men, please watch the new documentary Alabama Solution, which can be found on HBO.
