Violent sexual assaults occur in ‘dormitories, cells, recreation areas, the infirmary, bathrooms and showers at all hours of the day and night,’ a 2019 DOJ report found of Alabama prisons
Daniel Williams , a 22-year-old father of two young children, was supposed to come home to his family from an Alabama prison after completing a one-year sentence for theft on Nov. 7.
Instead, his loved ones made a painful decision that day to take him off life support. Two weeks prior, Williams’ family says, he was beaten and violently raped in an attack led by another inmate at Staton Prison in Elmore County.
What allegedly happened to Williams is emblematic of a broken system that often leaves young male inmates in Alabama set up to be “prey” for rampant sexual violence, a prison reform advocate familiar with the case tells The Messenger.
Carla Crowder, the executive director of the justice-focused nonprofit Alabama Appleseed , believes Williams’ brutal death was the result of long-standing “incompetence, understaffing, and the extreme lack of control in the dorms and in some of the cell blocks in Alabama prisons.”