
Image by Ye Jinghan.
(I)
The weekend after Christmas, one of my sources was stabbed in Bullock Prison. He and several witnesses to the stabbing described the incident to me in interviews over the weeks since.
While accompanying another prisoner to the medical ward, the source referred to as “Jordan” in these stories encountered an officer and told the officer about prisoners who are consistently assaulting other prisoners in his dorm, and the officer “came right back down here and told these guys what I said,” says Jordan, “and he should not have done that.” Other prisoners who witnessed the event have backed up those claims.
After the officer told the prisoners what Jordan told him, say multiple witnesses, another prisoner confronted Jordan and a yelling match began. The prisoner rushed toward Jordan and the fight became physical. Jordan didn’t know that the man had an ice pick. The man stabbed Jordan in the back.
Jordan was taken to a free world hospital, released in the early evening of the same day, and brought back to the same dorm in the same prison.
Jordan says he was told at the free world hospital that the ice pick missed his lung by an inch. The next day, Jordan was written up with a disciplinary slip for fighting. The other prisoner was transferred.
This all capped off a Christmas week in which a backed up plumbing system created disastrously unsanitary living conditions in the dorm, which multiple prisoners have described throughout this series, and Jordan and another prisoner were reaching their hands into the toilets with garbage bags over their arms, down the drain, trying to pull toilet paper and shit out to relieve the system, and spent hours upon hours trying to manage the sewage water coming up through the drains and into the dorms by using their blankets to mop the floor in a Sisyphean kind of struggle. (See here and here, two of my shorter pieces on that.)
In this and upcoming stories from the many interviews I’ve done in the past couple of weeks with prisoners in Bullock, the stabbing of Jordan is referred to and discussed by multiple witnesses.
(II)
I recently interviewed a prisoner in Bullock who I’d not interviewed before. I’ll call him “Seth.” He discusses living conditions, health issues, violence, and other aspects of Bullock and the Alabama prison system. He is also one of the multiple prisoners I interviewed who witnessed the stabbing.
Seth has been in prison in Alabama for over 15 years, this time around. He was also in prison for a few years in the late 90s. He is now serving a life sentence. He’s been in Bullock for just the last couple months. He was transferred there from a work camp after a disciplinary. He beat the disciplinary charge but still has to remain in Bullock for a few months before he can go back.
At the work camp he was in previously, his job was garbage picking. He was assigned that job, not paid for it, and could be punished for refusing to work. He is in his late 50s.
Seth says some of the biggest problems in Alabama prisons are overcrowding, extortion, racism, sexual assaults, and other assaults.
Bullock, in particular, is “one of the worst places I’ve ever been, man, especially the dorm that I’m in.” He said he was already cludged out once since arriving at Bullock.1 He was slapped by another prisoner, hit him back, then was jumped on by multiple other prisoners, “took me off the bed, slammed me on the floor and stuff,” says Seth.
“I’m trying to do the best I can to keep from using a weapon and stabbing one of them up,” he adds, “and not being able to go home to my mother, because I’ve been gone so long, but you can only bite your tongue for so long. Pressure bursts the pipe.”
He adds, “We had a stabbing in here yesterday, man,” referring to the stabbing of Jordan. “It’s awful in here, man.”
During his single sentence, Seth has done time in every male prison in Alabama. “Most of the times” he’s been transferred, he explains, are “because of being cludged out and jumped on, sexually assaulted. You name it, and it’s been done to me… I got stabbed up 30 times over at Kilby. They tried to force me to run the tattoo spot. I told them I wasn’t going to run it. They said, ‘You’re either going to run it or get off the dorm.’ I told them they need to go get them some help. They came back and stomped me out. About 30 minutes to an hour later, they dragged me out of the bed again, stabbed me up over 30 times, life flighted me up out of there. So, it’s a blessing I even got breath in my body to talk to you.”
He also had his ribs broken and a nerve in his lower back damaged after being beaten in Ventress Prison, and his “leg twitches by itself at night, and it hurts real bad. There’s nothing they can do about it,” he says. He’s had all of his top teeth pulled while in prison. His bottom dentures were left behind by a guard when Seth was being transferred, and he says he has to wait five years to have them replaced. He also got hep C while in prison.
(III)
Like the other sources I’ve interviewed, Seth also experienced the plumbing issues wreaking havoc in Bullock Christmas week. The plumbing is “backing up,” he says. “It smells like raw sewage in our dorm. We’ve got roaches crawling all around our beds, all on your body at night. I mean, it’s bad. It’s real bad. Doo-doo all around the shower area and stuff,” he says.
In Bullock, says Seth, “Most of the guys here just stay stressed out. With all the stuff going on, you have to stay on needles and pins. You don’t know what’s going to happen to you.”
The food is “real nasty” in Bullock as well, he says, claims to have once found “a salamander-type thing” in his food, and has found hair in his food many times. Further, again confirming what the others have told me, he adds, “You go in the chow hall and it smells like sewage in the chow hall. And it’s cold in the chow hall. It seems like there’d be some heat in there when we go in to eat, this being an all inside place, but there’s not. And it’s cold in here at night… A lot of us have trouble sleeping.”
He continues, “But it’s just a corrupt place, man. It’s somewhere that they shouldn’t even be able to house humans.”
Seth sees “a lot of different health issues in the prisons,” he says. “Some of the guys are limping around. Some of them are in wheelchairs.” Many prisoners are “walking around with both eyes black, face beat up and stuff.” He knows a prisoner who lost his eye when it was stabbed out by another prisoner with a broken broomstick a few years ago. (I interviewed that prisoner last week as well and am working on a story about him that will also be out in the coming weeks.)
Seth was a close firsthand witness to Jordan being stabbed the day before our interview. “It happened right by my bed,” he says. “The two got into it. One of them swung and the other one stabbed him in his back.”
Asked how it impacts him to see things of that nature happen in front of him, he answers, “It puts me in a state of shock, from all the stuff that I done been through. It puts me as a nervous wreck.”
Seth estimates that he’s witnessed over 25 stabbings firsthand while doing time in Alabama, “throughout all the prisons I’ve been to,” he says.
“It’s dangerous. I mean, this new generation, that’s all they know is to stab. You don’t see one on one fights where you’ve got two men just fighting each other and the best man wins, knuckles to knuckles. There is none of that going on. Most of the time, it’s either four or five on one, and sometimes more than that,” and often weapons are involved, he says.
NOTES
1. “Cludging” is a regional slang term for when a group of prisoners assault one prisoner, typically but not always by jumping into a fight that started with one person against another.
This piece first appeared at Hard Times Reviewer.