Tomorrow, Wednesday, July 23, the Alabama Legislature’s Joint Prison Oversight Committee will hold its quarterly public hearing.
As you plan your coverage of this event, we wanted to remind you of the Death Capital Report that was produced by the ACLU of Alabama and the ACLU’s national office earlier this year. This report details how the Alabama Department of Corrections is failing to provide full information on how Alabamians are dying in its custody, making it harder to assess how dangerous conditions inside Alabama’s state prisons are.
The report was put together following thousands of hours of researching and documenting the deaths of incarcerated people in ADOC custody during the 2024 calendar year. To read the full report, visit: https://www.alabamasmartjustice.org/reports/death-capital-report. For your convenience, we’ve also included highlights from the report below.
To learn more about the ACLU of Alabama’s criminal legal reform work, please visit Smart Justice Hub at https://www.alabamasmartjustice.org/.
In the 2024 calendar year, 277 people died, and in more than one-third of those cases, ADOC listed the cause of death as “unknown” or “under investigation.” The Alabama Department of Corrections classifies incarcerated people’s deaths into one of eight categories: Accidental; Accidental/Overdose; Autopsy Not Authorized; Inmate-on-Inmate Homicide; Judicial Homicide; Natural Causes; Suicide; or Undetermined. However, the ACLU’s report found that there are no definitions to these broad classifications.
ADOC’s official classifications obscure, rather than clarify, how people are dying in custody. Terms like “natural,” “accidental,” and “undetermined” are used without any public definitions or methodology, making it difficult to assess what happened in many cases. In some instances, deaths caused by violence were labeled as “natural.” Others were marked “Autopsy Not Authorized,” a term that suggests family refusal but instead reflects current state law, which does not require autopsies for every death in custody.
The Alabama Department of Corrections stopped its monthly reporting on in-custody deaths in 2019. Since then, it has only provided quarterly updates; however, those quarterly reports do not include demographic data for those who have died in custody.
Additional findings from the ACLU’s research include:
72% of individuals who died by homicide in ADOC custody were Black. Although Black Alabamians make up just over a quarter of the state’s population, they comprised more than 72 percent of those killed by homicide in Alabama’s prisons in 2024. Nearly half of all individuals who died in custody were Black.
46 of 277 (17%) of deaths were classified as accidental or due to overdose. The report documents the continued availability of drugs in ADOC facilities and notes that incarcerated individuals continued to access illegal substances even when visitation was suspended due to COVID-19. In one three-month period alone, over 50,000 grams of drugs were found inside state prisons.
At least 38 ADOC staff members were arrested for contraband-related offenses from January 2024 through November 2024. The report details arrests across multiple facilities, including the indictment of a warden on drug charges and several staff charged with using their positions for personal gain. ADOC staff previously told the U.S. Department of Justice that “without a doubt,” the number one way contraband enters prisons is through staff.
The ACLU of Alabama is encouraging the Joint Prison Oversight Committee to consider:
- Requiring autopsies for all who die in custody.
- Updating definitions of death - categorization and the methodology utilized to categorize deaths publicly on their website.
- Returning to monthly reporting.
- Providing an annual report on deaths. This must include the total number of deaths for each calendar year, the causes of death, the number of open investigations, the average time of investigation, and accompanying demographic information for those who died in custody.
