Alabama Prisons “Will Turn You Violent” (Bullock Prison)

This week, I reached out to the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) for comment on the problems with the heating system in Bullock Prison. ADOC did not respond to multiple requests for comment on various aspects of this story.

The ADOC has not responded to my requests for comment in the years since my book Doing Time was published. To be clear, I don’t believe that is personal, or has anything to do with my work. It seems the two main sources who were in touch with me when I wrote the book no longer work there. And of course, I assume the Department is quite busy. I’m running a small operation here, and there are no doubt more important emails than mine to respond to. In any event, I’m just saying, it’s been a while.

By early March, though the heating system is still not fixed, the weather has warmed up a bit outside and prisoners say the administration has at least tried to improve the hot water with modest results, but that after a few people shower consecutively (in a dorm of over 80 people) the water goes cold again.

As reported in the first three parts of this series, January and February were brutal months in the prison. By the end of February, prisoners had reportedly started fires in a couple of dorms. Others were considering it throughout the prison, discussed whether or not to start rioting, filled out complaint slips, appealed to all levels of employees from officers to the warden.

As mentioned one of my recent articles, it’s worth bearing in mind as you read this series that the Department of Justice reported in its 2019 Notice Regarding Investigation of Alabama’s State Prisons for Men that a “February 2017 inspection by engineering consultants hired by ADOC noted that not a single facility has a working fire alarm.”1

Many prisoners have gotten sick. It seems the ADOC’s strategy has been to ride out the unusually cold weather for the region rather than pay to fix the problem.

At the end of February, in the midst of all this, as the conditions grow increasingly inhumane and the prisoners increasingly agitated and unwell, as tension builds between them and the guards, I interview a Bullock prisoner for the first time who I’ll call “Cecil” in these articles. She’s been in Alabama prison for over 15 years, mostly in maximum security prisons, transferred to many prisons in the state during her single sentence, as most Alabama prisoners are, and has been in Bullock under a year.

She spent a lot of time in Holman and participated in the riot there in 2016, in which fires were started and the warden and an officer were stabbed, probably the most significant Alabama prison riot in recent history. (See the video below made by prisoners and published by AL.com at the time.)

The events went on for a couple of days.2

I interview Cecil about her previous experiences and her thoughts on what is happening now in Bullock. Cecil is transgender and uses she/her pronouns.

Of all the prisons she’s done time in, she spent the most in Holman. “I’ve been to Holman five different times,” she says. “Holman is wild. You remember back in 2016 when they had riots and they had all the stuff on the news about the cubes getting set on fire and the warden getting stabbed and all that, the police getting stabbed? Yeah, I was one of the ones involved in that.”

She reflects, “It was crazy. They was oppressing us. They was coming in, putting their hands on us, taking our stuff, and just handling us wrong. They have the standard operating procedures they have to go by too, and they wasn’t going by it. So, we bucked on them, and it got a little wild, and the warden got stabbed. The police got stabbed. It was crazy.”

According to the ADOC’s spokesperson at the time, “About 100 inmates [were] believed to have been involved in the riot.”3

Asked what that experience was like for her, “It was wild,” Cecil answers, “because I did two years in lockup, almost got a free world case behind it too, but they dropped the free world case and they just gave me a disciplinary and made me do two years in segregation. It was wild, because my family was looking at me like I didn’t want to come home, like I didn’t love them anymore, and all type of stuff.”

Asked to elaborate on the motivations of the riot and how prisoners got organized to do it, “Well, we was in a dormitory setup where there’s like 180 people to a dorm, and the dorms are separated between A, B, C, D, and E dorms. E is in a trailer outside the camp. And we all was getting on some shit where we were going to come together and stand up against our oppressors and not continue to let them handle us and put down on us,” says Cecil.

“So, when the officers came into the dorm, they tried to spray us with the mace and all that,” she continues. “That’s why they ended up getting stabbed. And the warden came in and tried to push one dude. That’s how he ended up getting stabbed, because we all came together as one, and unified, and tried to fight against them and try to make the situation and the conditions better for ourselves. And they did shut Holman down, kind of sort of, a couple of years later behind that. They’ve still got E dorm open…. But they condemned…. the main camp. They shut that down.”

The Montgomery Advertiser reported on the announcement at the time:

The Alabama Department of Corrections will close the main building and dormitory at Holman prison, relocating more than 600 prisoners to other facilities around the state in a move Commissioner Jeff Dunn called ‘the culmination of years of neglect’ of Alabama prison facilities.4

They of course kept the State’s only death chamber there, however. As Dunn told The Advertiser, “[C]urrent plans are to maintain the execution facility which will ‘require basic utilities,’ and the department is currently in discussions with engineers and other experts about how to do that.”

Holman has a notoriously problematic sewage system in one of its tunnels.5 Plumbing and sewage disasters are another theme throughout the system, as HTR readers know.6

Looking back now on her experience with the 2016 Holman riot, “I wish I could change it,” says Cecil, “because it’s really what’s still keeping me in prison. What I done to come to prison is not what’s keeping me in prison. It’s what I’ve been doing since I’ve been in prison that’s keeping me in prison. So, it’s kind of like, I regret it, but it happened, so I can’t take it back. So, it’s something that I’ve got to live with. You know what I’m saying?”

Asked if the riot brought prisoners together in any way, “Yeah, it did. It brought people together, but it was more of a violent stand than anything, than a peaceful stand,” she says.

Cecil says other longstanding problems with the prison system in general, which prisoners are dealing with now in Bullock, are “the food, and the temperatures in the dorms, as far as the heat and the air or whatever. The food is just horrible. You wouldn’t feed a dog some of the stuff that we eat in here.”

She reiterates something that many prisoners have told me over the years, that there are boxes of food in the kitchens that say “not fit for human consumption,” but, “They still feed it to us though,” she says.

“And the temperatures are kind of up and down, for real, because there’s no heat really in the dorms. It’s really just like living outside, for real,” she continues. “That’s why a lot of us are sick with runny noses, coughing, cold chills, and fevers and all type of stuff. They really don’t have enough medical assistance and stuff to tend to everybody’s problems. So, they’re really just overlooking it, for real, and it’s contagious, so you will really get other people sick off you being sick. So, it’s really starting to be an epidemic, for real.”

She says illness is “going around in every dorm, for real. Every dorm in the camp, you’ve got people that are sick…. To go to the infirmary, or the healthcare [ward], to get medical assistance, they make you fill out a sick call slip, and it really takes two or three days before they even screen you for the sick call for your medical problem. So, it’s not like you can go to the emergency room like on the street, like in the free world, like in society.”

Cecil might have come up for parole earlier, she tells me, but while in prison has gotten “violent disciplinaries like stabbing cases and some things that I’m really not proud of, because they’re violent, but there are things that I was pushed, that I was coerced to do, because I have to stand my ground. I have to stand up for myself in here, because I really don’t have nobody but myself in here. By me being transgender and by me being gay, it’s like I’m outcasted. And nobody sticks up for me. Nobody stands up for me. Nobody speaks up for me. So, I have to do it for myself.”

Asked if she’d ever done anything like that in the free world, “No, I’d never stabbed a person, never,” she says, adding that Alabama prisons “will turn you violent, just because you have to stand up for yourself and stand your ground.”

Focusing on Bullock specifically, Cecil feels “the staff members, they don’t respect us. They don’t respect us as much as they do at the maximum security prisons,” she says. “They respect level is totally different. They talk to you crazy here. They put their hands on you. Officers jump on you. They smack you around. They spray you. They do all type of stuff.”

Further, the overcrowding “causes a lot of stress and depression on us,” says Cecil, “because it’s an open bay dormitory, and it’s not a cell block, so you really don’t have privacy. Everything is out in the open.”

Discussing the heating problems and the recent cold weather, “I went to the window and looked outside and seen all the snow on the ground,” she says. “I haven’t seen snow like that in my whole life other than when I had went up North, when I went up to Boston, Massachusetts one year when I was like 13.”

Confirming what others have said in previous interviews, Cecil reiterates that the heat still not working “and they came in and took some lights out the ceiling, and the part where the lights go, there are holes in the ceiling, and there’s air coming through the ceiling from where the lights are supposed to go. They took like 20 lights out the ceiling and there’s air coming through the ceiling, and it’s blowing right down on our bunks. There’s no heat in the dorms. It feels like we’re outside in the freezing cold.”
She and other prisoners she knows have complained, “but there haven’t been any changes,” she says.

Beatings, Bonfires, Floods (Bullock Prison, Alabama)

From late February through March, I continue interviewing prisoners in Bullock Prison in Union Springs, Alabama, about the cold, the heating and hot water systems not working, fires started, riots contemplated, and other topics.

For those who missed the previous articles in this series: Prisoners have reported on the topics mentioned above throughout the past four articles on Bullock Prison. In Part Two, one source in late February even reported that prisoners were contemplating beating up guards and taking their winter clothing. In Part Four, I interviewed a prisoner, now in Bullock, who participated in the 2016 riot in Holman Prison in Atmore, in which an officer and the warden were stabbed and violence continued in the prison for a couple of days.

I continue interviewing her through late February and March about the situation now in Bullock. I refer to her as “Cecil” in these articles. She is transgender and uses she/her pronouns.

Asked if, based on her experience, there’s been any risk of a riot happening in the prison at any point in the past couple of months, she’s says it’s been relatively quiet compared to her previous experience in Holman, but that, “Just the other day, a white guy got into it with an officer in the chow hall, and they got to fighting and the dude took the police’s night stick from him and beat him with it. That happened the other day, the other morning, in the chow hall with [an] officer.”

Cecil continues, “The officers have just been over edge ever since, been putting their hands on people, jumping on folks, just out of retaliation over what happened to their co-worker. So, it’s kind of crazy in here right now. They took our snack line from us today,” and, “Even though we didn’t have anything to do with it, we’re still being punished for it,” she adds.

With the lockdown comes “controlled movement. They restrict your privileges like store privileges, snack line privileges, yard privileges, library privileges,” and more, she explains, and some of these “privileges,” like yard time, Bullock prisoners hardly ever get anyway.

Confirming what others have said throughout this series, Cecil tells me there have been fires set in Bullock in recent weeks and months: “It was cold, and they had a bonfire going down there in [another] dorm.1 They were trying to stay warm down there. That [dorm] is at the bottom of the camp. They had some big fires,” she says.

The Department of Justice has repeatedly pointed out over the years that not a single one of the Alabama Department of Corrections’ male prisons has a working fire alarm.

Although the temperatures have finally warmed up a bit (without the Alabama Department of Corrections fixing the heating system through the entirety of this winter) problems with the weather and the infrastructure of the prison continue year-round, as storms sweep the country this weekend.

“It’s been raining a lot lately, the last couple of days,” says Cecil when I interview her this weekend. “Water comes into the dorm when it floods. When it’s raining outside, the water leaks into the dorm and it causes a big flood in the dorm by the doors, because if you don’t put any blankets or anything down to stop that water from coming under the doors, it’s just leaking right into the dorm. It’s like that in every part [of the prison]. Even the gym is halfway flooded.”