'Am I next?': Prison laborers strike as activists deliver demands to corrections department
Evan Mealins
A protest and labor strike on opposite sides of Alabama’s prison walls began Monday morning to denounce what activists call “inhumane treatment” of Alabama’s nearly 20,000 incarcerated people.
Protesters gathered outside the Alabama Department of Corrections’ central office in Montgomery at 9 a.m. with a list of demands for prison and criminal justice changes, including a repeal of the state’s habitual offender law and additional oversight of the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles.
Individuals incarcerated at all of Alabama’s major prisons began a labor strike the same day, and activists in contact with people in prison said that strike will continue until demands are met.
ADOC confirmed the worker stoppages in an email to the Montgomery Advertiser on Monday afternoon and said, “Controlled movement and other security measures have been deployed." They didn't elaborate, citing safety concerns.
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Alabama prisons rely on the labor of those they incarcerate, using cheap or unpaid inmate labor for cooking, cleaning, maintenance and manufacturing products like license plates and furniture for Alabama Correctional Industries.
Despite the strike, ADOC Commissioner John Hamm said the prisons remained operational.
“All facilities are operational and there have been no disruption of critical services,” Hamm said in a statement provided to the Advertiser.
ADOC hasn’t responded to Advertiser’s requests for clarification. Organizers in contact with inmates said nearly all prisons have denied recreation time, education and substance abuse classes, meals and movement around the prisons in response to the strike.
The protest — organizers called it the “Break Every Chain Rally” — featured testimony from activists, formerly incarcerated individuals and those with loved ones in prison. Independent gubernatorial candidate Jared Budlong, who has focused much of his platform on criminal justice and prison reform, also spoke.
Eric Buchannon, a contract painter in Birmingham who was released in 2018 after seven years in prison, shared the group’s platform via a megaphone.
The group made the following demands to the state:
- Establish mandatory parole criteria to guarantee parole to all eligible who meet the criteria
- Repeal Alabama’s Habitual Felony Offender Act, which requires stricter punishment for those with prior felony convictions, among other mandates
- Eliminate life-without-parole sentences
- Reduce the 30-year minimum for juvenile offenders to no more than 15 before they are eligible for parole
- Create a review board to oversee the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles
- Streamline the review process for medical furlough
- Ensure eligible persons receive “good time” — incentive time shaved off a sentence earned through good behavior
- Create a statewide conviction integrity unit to investigate possible wrongful convictions
“The state of Alabama is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis due to 8th Amendment violations. This crisis has occurred as a result of antiquated sentencing laws that led to overcrowding, numerous deaths, severe physical injury, as well as mental anguish to incarcerated individuals,” the protest’s organizers wrote on a flyer delivered to the ADOC office. “This humanitarian crisis led to the Department of Justice filing suit against (Gov.) Kay Ivey and ADOC yet, nothing has changed or gotten better only worse.”
Protesters objected to the state’s plans to open two new 4,000-bed men’s prisons.
“A building is an inanimate object. It does not correct. It does not reform,” said Tracy Eason, a healthcare worker who traveled from Deatsville for the protest. “As long as you’ve got a lack of heart, new prisons will not fix it. The abuses will continue.”
Alabama’s prison system, plagued by violence, sexual assault, drug use and death and suffering from severe understaffing and overcrowding, was deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2020.
“DOC can’t build itself away from sexual assault,” said Travis Jackson of Montgomery.
From October 2021 to July 2022, 179 people died in Alabama prisons, according to ADOC’s most recent monthly report.
As Buchannon spoke, Jackson held up a sign.
“Am I next?"
Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser. Contact him at emealins@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanMealins.
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