News & Commentary

A trove of photographs depicting brutalized and murdered prisoners in Alabama’s St. Clair Correctional Facility has thrust the treatment of our nation’s 2.3 million incarcerated people into public view. The first horror is what these people have endured in prison. The second horror is that while shocking, it is not a surprise. 

Domineque Ray was pronounced dead last night at 10:12 p.m. Thirty minutes prior, his execution by lethal injection began.

The ACLU of Alabama, Alabama Civic Engagement Coalition, Alabama Justice Initiative, Faith in Action, and Greater Birmingham Ministries came together to engage in your race because the stakes are high for all Jefferson County residents.

America has spent the last 50 years becoming the world’s largest incarcerator. It’s gotten there with substantial help from elected local prosecutors, who have used their extraordinary power to lock people up in jails and prisons at unprecedented rates and for unconscionably long amounts of time.

The ACLU and ACLU of Alabama, alongside the Cato Institute and the Constitutional Accountability Center, filed an amicus brief in Gamble v. United States urging the Supreme Court to end the “dual-sovereignty” loophole for good.

Alabama’s prisons are notoriously some of the worst in the country. They’re violent. They’re underfunded. They’re unable to handle the mental health care needs of those incarcerated. And they’re also overcrowded.

Roy Johnson’s “Alabama's violent criminal sweeps extract cancers among us; what happens next?” column was troubling. Calling people accused of crimes a “cancer” is grossly dehumanizing.

Like millions of others in this country, my experience didn’t involve expensive defense lawyers, just overworked and underpaid public defenders.

On the heels of the arrest of two Black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks comes the unsettling story of Chikesia Clemons. According to Clemons, her request for plastic utensils turned into a disagreement between her and the server, and the server called the police.