Spectators gather before a meeting of the Alabama Legislature’s Joint Prison Oversight Committee on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025. The meeting was eventually moved to another larger room to accommodate the number of people attended. Those who remained heard of the violent and dangerous conditions within Alabama’s prisons. (Ralph Chapoco/Alabama Reflector)
Ministers and family members described the dangerous conditions that incarcerated people endure in Alabama correctional facilities at a legislative committee hearing Wednesday.
Speaking to a meeting of the Joint Prison Oversight Committee at the Alabama Statehouse that drew hundreds of people, relatives of incarcerated people and those who work with them described assaults, drug overdoses and extortion against inmates and their families, almost five years after the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit alleging the conditions in Alabama’s correctional facilities violate inmates’ Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment…