From [PLN] "I wanted to tell you; your son was beaten to death by an officer. That was a murder.”
Sondra Ray received that message from an unidentified Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC) official after receiving a false accounting of the death of her son Steven Davis while he was incarcerated at the Donaldson Correctional Center in Bessemer. According to DOC officials, Davis had “attempted” to attack another prisoner when guard Roderick Gadson and five other guards responded. DOC officials said Davis “refused to comply” with orders to drop two make-shift plastic knives, so the guards “had no choice” but to “spray him with Mace” and to “restrain him using justifiable force.”
At Gadson’s deposition, he was shown a photograph of Davis. In the image, Davis lay on an ICU bed, breathing through a tube, his mangled face bruised and covered in blood, with his sunken black eyes visible. An attorney asked Gadson if he felt like the amount of force he had used against Davis was “justifiable.” Gadson answered: “I don’t feel like nothing. I just did my job.”
Eyewitnesses to Davis’s killing gave a sharply different account of the incident.
They said that Davis had put down the plastic knives and lay prone and unresistant on the ground when the guards attacked. Gadson hit Davis “with his metal stick in the head, picked him up and throwed him down. [Gadson] stomped [Davis] with his size 15 boot. [Davis’s] head bounced like a basketball.”
A U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation would later reveal that Davis was transported by helicopter to a hospital. A medical examination showed that Davis had sustained “multiple fractures to his skull, eye sockets, left ear and cheekbone, and to the base of his skull.” There was internal bleeding on his brain. Davis died the following day. His cause of death was “officially recorded as homicide caused by blunt force injuries of head sustained in an assault.”
Despite this evidence, neither Gadson nor any of the other guards involved in the killing of Davis were disciplined, even though the DOC paid $250,000 to settle Ray’s lawsuit alleging, inter alia, wrongful death and excessive force. Six months later, Gadson was promoted to sergeant. Documents and lawsuits show he continued his abuse of prisoners, yet in July 2021, the DOC rewarded Gadson with a second promotion to lieutenant.
The killing of Davis and the lack of consequences for his killers is only a fraction of the focus of a documentary recently streamed on HBO Max. The documentary, titled The Alabama Solution, takes its name from a statement made by the state’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey. Commenting on Alabama’s refusal to implement changes recommended by the DOJ to abate the abuse of prisoners within the DOC, Ivey said there was no need for federal intervention because the state would address “the Alabama problem with an Alabama solution.”
But the “Alabama problem” only seems to be getting worse. The DOC’s 27 facilities are currently operating at 200% capacity with only one-third of the required staff. And the DOC has the “highest overdose, murder, and suicide rates in the nation.” The per-capita death rate in Alabama prisons in 2024 was the highest of every state in the nation and was almost double that of the second highest. That same year, the DOC’s mortality rate was 101.81 per 100,000 incarcerated people with 277 prisoners dying that year. Georgia, the state with the second-highest prison mortality rate in 2024, reported 65.29 per 100,000.
The Alabama Solution provides a unique view by featuring raw, uncensored cell phone footage of the appalling and horrifying conditions inside the DOC’s facilities. This footage was captured by Alabama prisoners Robert Earl Council, Melvin Ray, and Raoul Poole on cell phones purchased on the prison’s black market. These men risked their lives documenting, in real time, the disarray, violence and drug abuse inside Alabama’s prison system.
Indeed, the documentary begins with Council serving “five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and loses sight in one eye.” But such is the price of exposing the fallacies of the DOC and creating a counter-narrative to the DOC’s stance against federal intervention. Council, Ray, and Poole credit their advocacy and activism for change inside the DOC to a “self-directed course of study organized by prisoners who were active in freedom movements during the civil rights era.”
Ray and Council also formed the Free Alabama Movement (“FAM”) as a means to remedy the fact that prisons are the only state-run institutions “that the public and the media have no access to.” FAM rallies “family members to push for prison reform from the outside.” The documentary also includes the work of reporters Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman. These reporters have covered prisons for a number of years. In 2019, they were invited to visit the DOC’s Easterling prison in Barbour County. Generally, the DOC prohibits media access. But on this particular day, Jarecki, Kaufman, and others were permitted to document Easterling’s annual volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, incarcerated men—the majority of them Black—danced, smiled and ate fresh roasts while listening to live music and sermons. But off camera, many of the men told stories of “horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, unimaginable violence swept under the rug and appalling conditions that ‘ain’t fit for human society.’” Whenever Jarecki approached filthy corners in response to cries for help, prison officials “shut down filming, claiming that it was unsafe for him to speak to the men without a police chaperone.”
Jarecki recounted, “It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see. They use the idea that it’s all about safety and security because they don’t want you to understand what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.” The film crew received the same basic message from prisoners over and over: “We don’t have access to the outside world. Please share this.”
The ghastly cell phone footage shows rat-infested cells, piles of human excrement, rotting food, and blood-streaked floors. Also depicted are routine officer beatings and men carried out in body bags. Hallways are seen filled with men in near-catatonic states induced by drugs sold by guards on the black market. Throughout the documentary, viewers will see incarcerated men “nodding out,” a term used to describe the condition of sleeping while standing or sitting upright as a sign of opioid abuse. Overdoses in the DOC’s facilities are the major contributor to the skyrocketing number of deaths in those facilities. In 2023, at least 122 incarcerated persons died from drug-related causes in Alabama’s prisons, up from just nine drug-related deaths in 2019. Yet Gov. Ivey has failed to address the drug crisis in any meaningful manner. Less than 5% of DOC prisoners participated in any drug treatment program in 2024, a sharp decline from 15 years ago, when about 20% of Alabama prisoners participated in drug treatment programs.
Illicit drugs are a major factor driving the violence and death through the DOC’s prisons. The overdose mortality rate in 2023 was 20 times higher than the national average across all state prisons in 2019 (the last year for which nationwide data was available). In October 2024, the Alabama Legislature’s Commission on Alabama Opioid Settlement Funds applauded the “30% drop in drug overdoses” in Alabama (that “drop” apparently did not include overdoses within the DOC). But when DOC official Deborah Crook was asked about the agency’s use of funds for Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT), she said “[f]inancially, we haven’t used all of the money allocated.” She explained that the DOC had “served 500 incarcerated people in the MAT program and at the time had 256 people in treatment.”
Illicit drugs are frequently brought into the prisons and sold by DOC staff. Publicized arrests and interviews with incarcerated people demonstrate that to be the case. The problem isn’t unique to Alabama. Guards working in prisons throughout the United States supplement their meager wages with profits from drug sales. Former DOC guard Stacey George explained that “the system turns a blind eye to drug smuggling because of understaffing. If a guard was caught bringing drugs inside, officials would have no choice but to fire him, exacerbating the [staff] shortage.” George added, “There’s no checkpoints out front. There’s no dogs anymore. So, they’re not even paying attention.”
Lack of Guard Accountability
While the DOC’s prisoner population has decreased by 4,000 in the last ten years, incidents resulting in the use of force by staff have increased by 47% in that same ten-year period. The year 2020 reported the highest number across all of the DOC’s facilities, with 2,659 incidents involving use of force. Three prisons reported more than 300 uses of force in 2020 (another all-time high): Donaldson Correctional Facility reported 300 use of force incidents; Limestone Correctional Facility reported 308; and Tutwiler Prison for Women reported 329. Former DOC Warden David Wise, who retired after working in the DOC’s prisons for 28 years, said: “So much of this violence by officers is senseless and unnecessary. There’s not a convict in the system that, if he refuses an order, I can’t put in a cell without hurting him.”
The DOC’s use of force policy permits officers to use force “if a prisoner is aggressive, for self-defense, the protection of others and property, to prevent escape, quell a disturbance or when an inmate exercises physical resistance to a lawful command.” Wise said that the last justification in that list is “where some officers push the bounds of what’s legal and necessary. Some of them take that to say, ‘OK, well you disobeyed my command. I can whoop your ass.’ That’s not the way it’s supposed to go. If they use proper strategy and do what they’re taught in the academy, there should be very few incidents and lawsuits.”
The DOJ reported its findings to Ivey and other Alabama officials in July 2020. Among the many findings was that excessive force was “used frequently” in 12 of the DOC’s major facilities. The DOJ report cited 17 specific incidents as well as two that had resulted in death.
In Ray’s lawsuit naming Gadson and the other guards responsible for the killing of Davis, she cited 14 incidents of excessive force by DOC guards against incarcerated people between 2016 and 2019. The Court concluded that “fourteen incidents in three years is sufficient to plead ‘obvious, flagrant, [and] rampant abuse,’ especially when these incidents were purportedly brought to the attention of the supervisory officials in question.” In her suit, Ray also explained that, ordinarily, allegations of excessive force are investigated by staff at the facility where the incident occurred. But because Davis was killed, the DOC’s Intelligence and Investigation (I & I) Division investigated. Pointing to the DOJ’s report, Ray asserted that investigators understood that their job is “to protect the [DOC], not to hold inmate abusers accountable.” The DOJ report revealed “the lack of discipline and investigation occurred not only with institution-level investigations but also was a component of I & I investigations.” This lack of accountability, according to the DOJ, encouraged a “pattern of excessive force … specifically in Alabama’s male prisons” that included “the use of batons, chemical spray, and physical altercations such as kicking, and often result in serious injuries and sometimes death.”
The DOJ report observed that a “review of a statistically significant set of [DOC’s] use of force incident reports and accompanying documentation from a six-month period demonstrated that a large number of reported uses of force [in 2017] were unjustified under the legal standard.” See: Ray v. Gadson, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 196958 (N.D. Ala. Nov. 2, 2023). As of 2025, Gadson himself has been named a defendant in 26 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force. Standing at over six-feet tall and weighing almost 300 pounds, Gadson is known within the prisons as “Big G.” The son of a police officer, Gadson began working for the DOC in 2007.
Gadson has worked inside 13 of the DOC’s prisons. He often worked inside the segregation unit at Donaldson. This is where Gadson and his compatriots killed Davis. It is also where he was first named a defendant in a lawsuit alleging excessive force in 2008, just a year into his “career.” The DOC settled that suit with a payment to prisoner plaintiff Kenneth Knabenshue. Not one of the 26 lawsuits has led to prosecution or even disciplinary action against Gadson. While the state has paid out $426,350 in settlement funds to plaintiffs in ten of those suits—and an additional $2.5 million in legal fees defending Gadson—the guard himself has not paid a penny. In fact, when questioned about the suits, Gadson seemed unaware that he was even named a defendant in many of the filings.
This lack of accountability and consequences perhaps explains the increased severity of Gadson’s brutality and the size of the payouts as his attacks on prisoners progressed over the 15-year period from the Knabenshue settlement in 2009 to the Davis settlement in 2024. For example, prisoner William Harris alleged that on May 4, 2010, Gadson and another guard “handcuffed him, then pepper sprayed him in the face before beating him with a night stick until he passed out.” Harris wrote, “[t]hey beat me viciously, as if I were a plastic punching bag instead of a human being.” The case settled with Alabama paying $30,000 to Harris without any admission of responsibility. On April 12, 2017, Gadson went for a “two-fer,” committing at least two separate assaults at Donaldson that resulted in lawsuits. Prisoner Terry Carsterphen alleged he was Maced in the face by one guard and then Gadson “began striking me in the head with a metal baton, busting my head in the process.” (Unfortunately, this case was dismissed due to Carsterphen’s inability to pay a $17-filing fee).
Also on April 12, 2017, Zackery Wilson alleged that Gadson “maliciously assaulted” him while Wilson was “inside my cell not causing any type of disturbance.” Gadson “punched Wilson” repeatedly in the face, then stomped on Wilson while he was on the ground, causing a contusion at his left eye and a permanent knot on the left side of his head. In a case stemming from an incident that occurred in 2017, the DOC agreed to pay $40,000 to settle another lawsuit involving excessive force alleged against Gadson. The prisoner was rushed to a hospital where he spent three nights undergoing treatment for a collapsed lung, broken vertebrae, and broken ribs.
Gadson attacked another prisoner inside the segregation unit at Donaldson just three months prior to killing Davis. The prisoner survived the beating but had to be taken to a hospital via ambulance. He suffered multiple injuries, including a broken leg and broken nose, and numerous fractures to his hand requiring surgery. The DOC settled the subsequent suit for $10,000. Gadson’s brutality continued escalating, culminating in the death of Davis and the payout of $250,000. Gadson’s beating of Davis was so savage that the Court granted the Defendant’s request for a protective order prohibiting the disclosure of Davis’s autopsy photos “because the inflammatory nature of the photographs would ratchet up the potential for retaliation against the defendants.” See: Ray v. Gadson, USDC (N.D. Ala. 2023), Case No. 2:20-cv-00499.
Gadson is not the only serial abuser of prisoners in Alabama. Between 2018 and 2024, the DOC paid $198,000 to settle five lawsuits against Lieutenant Akeem Edmonds. One of those suits accounted for $140,000 that was paid to former prisoner Koty Williams. While incarcerated at the Bibb Correctional Facility in November 2018, Williams entered a dormitory to register for a Christian-based reentry program. While waiting, the Correctional Emergency Response Team (CERT) entered the dormitory, announced a shakedown, and instructed the prisoners to stand by their assigned bunks. Williams approached the only vacant bunk but explained to the CERT officers that it was not his bunk. The CERT guards ordered Williams and some other prisoners into the bathroom for a strip search.
While Williams was in the bathroom, guards found contraband (two cell phones, a charger, and two hypodermic needles) in the area near the vacant bunk. Williams denied that any of the contraband belonged to him and again explained that he did not live in that dorm. Edmonds and four other guards ordered Williams into the nearby inmate barber shop. Once inside, Edmonds asked Williams why he would not “own up to the contraband” and then punched Williams in the face, knocking him to the floor. While Williams lay on the floor bleeding from his nose, the other guards punched and kicked him. Edmonds then grabbed Williams by the waist of his pants and his shirt, picked him up, and slammed him onto the wooden bench ordinarily used by men waiting for a haircut. Among the injuries Williams suffered was an “ intertrochanteric fracture of the left hip.” The injury left Williams unable to walk, so Edmonds pushed Williams to the infirmary in a wheelchair. Edmonds denied injuring Williams, and claimed he had observed Williams limping. When he asked Williams why he was limping, Williams had said that he was jumped.
An agent from the DOC’s Law Enforcement Services Division (LESD) visited Williams in the infirmary. But the LESD agent did not photograph Williams’ injuries and later said in a deposition that he did not visit the barbershop or speak with any witnesses. After Williams suggested video surveillance in the dorm would show he was not limping when Edmonds and the guards escorted him into the barbershop, the LSED agent said that he had received a message from the warden stating no video footage of the incident existed. Undeterred, Williams then suggested that the camera in the dorm’s bay area would have captured the incident from another angle. But, “mysteriously,” no one ever checked that footage. The captain in charge admitted he should have checked it, but couldn’t offer any explanation as to why he had not done so.
Edmonds’ personnel file revealed that former DOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn attempted to demote and fire Edmonds for using his utility belt to beat a prisoner who had taken food from a staff refrigerator. But the state personnel board reinstated Edmonds as a sergeant. After the assault charges related to the incident were dropped upon a motion from the prosecution, the DOC promoted Edmonds to lieutenant.
A review by the non-profit news outlet Alabama Reflector found that the DOC settled 124 lawsuits between 2020 and 2024, with 94 of those alleging excessive force. Forty-five percent of the incidents of excessive force described injuries severe enough to require hospitalization, including lacerations that required stitches and surgical repair of broken bones. In one incident, a man had both arms broken. Others had broken ribs and broken bones in their back. Nineteen of the complaints detailed traumatic brain and head injuries. At least seven suits alleged catastrophic injuries that left the victims permanently disabled and/or disfigured.
In one complaint from 2018, a prisoner described being cuffed with his hands behind his back and the officer then striking him from behind, “breaking his jaw in two places, sending a large portion of his jawbone between his teeth and spraying blood all over the wall.” The DOC terminated the accused guard and paid the prisoner $90,000. In a 2019 incident, a guard placed a prisoner in a takedown position that is known to cause “excruciating pain” in the shoulders while another guard kicked his legs, causing the prisoner’s head to strike the floor. Several other guards sprayed him with Mace while kicking and punching him. The prisoner suffered a traumatic brain injury, permanent hearing loss, and multiple contusions. Released from prison, he died from an overdose in 2023. The DOC paid his mother $9,000.
Five settlements stemmed from a CERT raid at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore in 2016. CERT guards charged into a dorm of sleeping men, screaming and beating them with batons. At least one of the men sustained multiple serious injuries requiring hospitalization. The settlements totaled $13,500. Two years later, CERT guards assaulted a man in a wheelchair at Holman. The CERT team slapped him and then busted his head with a baton, causing him to fall facedown out of his wheelchair. He wrote in his complaint that while he lay on the ground, the CERT guards “kicked and stomped on me so viciously until I defecated on myself. I was knocked out unconscious.” His suit settled for $7,000. Some of the complaints alleged excessive force against prisoners seeking medical attention. Guards at Bibb beat a man in the infirmary while he was experiencing an epileptic seizure “strapped to a gurney.” When his seizure ended, the guards accused him of using drugs and then “chained [him] to a wall as he continued to bleed and exhibit signs of a seizure.”
When denying the guards’ motion to dismiss, U.S. District Judge Karen Owen Bowdre wrote: “The Court finds that a reasonable jury would have difficulty not concluding that prison officers beating a fully restrained, possibly unconscious prisoner who had just suffered an epileptic seizure ‘offends contemporary standards of decency.’” The case settled for $30,000. Most of the complaints were handwritten by prisoners using ballpoint pens. While details varied, their fear of the DOC guards’ brutality was a common theme: “I am requesting an emergency transfer before these officers kill me,” wrote one man from St. Claire Correctional Facility. Another man from Holman wrote: “I am more afraid now than I ever have been since I was first incarcerated.” Perhaps most chilling were the words from a man locked up at Donaldson Correctional Facility: “Don’t let these people kill me. I’m scared for my life and that they will say I killed myself.”
Former DOC Warden Wise said the record number of excessive force complaints resulting in settlements ought to be a red flag to state officials in Montgomery. “You should have enough confidence to be able to, even when there is a lawsuit, defend it, not settle it. The system needs that money, not for lawsuits, it needs that money to make it better.”
“Excessive force should always be treated like a big deal,” echoed former Washington Department of Corrections Secretary Steve Sinclair, who had a 32-year career in corrections. “If you minimize it, that’s what builds a horrible culture. And you shouldn’t have to wait for a court to tell you.” Commenting on the number of suits brought against the DOC, Sinclair said: “It’s pretty much routine to have lawsuits for various reasons, and not all of those are legit lawsuits. But certainly not 60 or 80 plus. It’s inconceivable to me.”
While the overwhelming majority of lawsuits alleged excessive force, other suits described even worse horrors. The DOC has been “dubbed America’s ground zero for prison brutality.” Between 2019 and 2024, a total of 1,377 people died while in the custody of the DOC. The majority of the deaths were from homicide, drugs, and suicide, fewer than half were from natural causes. Nearly 50% of the dead incarcerated persons (660 of them) were Black, a stunningly disproportionate number considering that only about 25% of the state’s population is Black. Many of the lawsuits alleged failure to protect, wrongful death, and even sexual assaults.
In 2019, a prisoner at Bullock Correctional Facility informed the warden he was in danger from another prisoner assigned to the same dorm who had threatened him. The warden laughed and a guard snickered, saying “maybe they will kill your cracker ass.” The plaintiff was later raped by the man who had threatened him. After the sexual assault, the plaintiff was taken to an outside facility for treatment. Unbelievably, the plaintiff was then returned to the same dorm with the same assailant who raped him a second time. The DOC paid a settlement of $10,621.70.
Joseph Wood was killed in 2017 at St. Clair Correctional Facility just two months after his arrival. He had written to his mother that other prisoners were extorting him and that guards were involved. She wrote in her lawsuit: “No one has ever told me who was responsible for killing my son. I learned about his death after [DOC] released his body to me for burial. I saw he had been beaten, stabbed, and strangled. The Department of Corrections failed to protect my son.” After five years of litigation, the DOC paid Wood’s mother $125,000. The attorneys representing the defendants were paid over $400,000 for their legal work. Pastor Robert White said at a Joint Prison Oversight Committee meeting that DOC prisoners were “intimidated or extorted,” forced from their bunks by other prisoners. They have to sleep on the floor in very deplorable conditions because someone has taken their bunk from them.” Describing the violence, White went on to say: “If I could pick one issue that we have to address, it is sexual assaults. That destroys a man, and reduces him to that of an animal.”
The DOC reported a whopping 1,600 assaults in its prisons from January 2025 through October 2025. But the DOC does not categorize assaults, making unclear how many involved sexual violence. Limestone County ranked first with 247 assaults, while the Julia Tutweiler Prison for Women came in second with 146. In addition to the incalculable price of human suffering and misery, the financial payout by the DOC is staggering. Since 2020, the DOC has paid $57 million defending against legal claims, including settlements to plaintiffs and fees to attorneys defending the DOC.
Alabama’s Penchant for Slavery Is Contributing Factor to Unsafe Prisons
At least one commentator has opined that one reason the DOC keeps its higher-security prisons in terrifying conditions of violence is to threaten prisoners at lower-security institutions with transfers if those lower-security prisoners refuse to participate in the DOC’s “work-release program” that is generally considered “forced labor.” [MORE]
