VIOLENT PRISONS
A Facebook friend (Bill Kissinger) recently posted a link to an Equal Justice Initiative article about violence in the Alabama prison system. The article (dated November 7, 2025) focused on a spate of inmate stabbing deaths at the Elmore Correctional Facility in Alabama over the past three years, including the October 26, 2025 killing of 28-year-old Mikheal Gilliam.
The Alabama prison system is one of the worst in the nation, plagued with inmate-on-inmate violence, predatory sexual assaults, gang-related extortion, corrupt prison guards, and incompetent prison administrators, particularly at the warden’s level.
In 2023, according to the Washington Post, there were 277 inmate deaths, including at least 12 homicides, in that system. That mortality rate was five times the national average while the homicide rate was eight times the national average.
Alabama is not alone with a violent and corrupt prison system. Tennessee owns the most violent prison in the nation with the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center which has the highest murder rate of all prisons in the country. UPS Big Sandy in Kentucky and the federal prison in Thomson, Illinois have more than their fair share of stabbings and murders but nothing compared to Alabama.
Most medium and maximum security prisons in the nation experience varying degrees of violence. The threat, and eventual reality, of violence is woven into the fabric of any prison environment.
But the kind of violence the Alabama prison system is experiencing cannot exist without corrupt guards (who smuggle in weapons, cell phones, drugs, and tobacco to the inmate power brokers) and spineless, incompetent wardens who know as much about running a prison as I know about archeology. These wardens cannot trust their security staffs and the security staffs, cowards as most are, dare not challenge the inmate power brokers who own them.
But even more responsible for a lawless prison system are irresponsible legislatures and do-nothing governors too afraid to do anything that might make them “appear” soft on crime. When you have a political system that is predominantly white and racist and a prison system whose inmates are overwhelmingly Black and marginalized, you will have a corrupt, lawless system because the guards and wardens believe they have a political license to run their prisons as they damn well please and to line their money pockets in the process.
There is no humanity in a prison ruled by violence and insulated with corruption. There is only one objective for each new inmate entering the prison and for all those already there: survival—a process of finding a niche that allows them to not only endure but somehow remain human in the process.