The U.S. is no stranger to incarceration-related issues given that, as of 2014, the country possessed about 25 percent of the world’s prison population, despite only having about five percent of the world’s total population. As well as that, if the U.S.’s prison population were viewed as a major city, it would be among the ranks of the nation’s top ten most populous ones. On top of those staggering statistics, the conditions of some states’ prisons are astoundingly inadequate and host hundreds more inmates for every hundred thousand than the national average.
In one of those states, Alabama (which has 946 prisoners for every 100,000 people versus the national average of 698), recent investigations show that the overpopulation of inmates is not the only problem their prisons face by far. What’s most alarming about the conditions of Alabama’s prisons is the fact that many of them appear to violate the inmates’ Eighth Amendment rights, suggesting that the prisons’ terrible conditions actually count as “cruel and unusual punishment.” According to the New York Times, the guards don’t confiscate makeshift weapons and allow sexual violence to occur on a regular basis. Be it the fact that inmate deaths are abundantly violent and common or the fact that those deaths often go unnoticed, the Alabama prison system has been put on notice for their blatant apathy towards inmates’ rights.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) dictates that “violence and sexual abuse, discrimination, overcrowding and other threats to health and safety” qualify as inhumane treatment of inmates, yet those imprisoned in the state of Alabama often face these on a daily basis. Inmates are Americans too, and humans for that matter, and ought to be treated with the respect and dignity that America promises to all its citizens. However, it is mockingly clear that Alabama’s justice system either wrongfully disagrees with this notion or simply does not care. Given their position of fifth-highest incarceration rates in the country as of 2018, it isn’t necessarily a shock that the prisons might end up more crowded than average (often at a capacity of 172 percent), but the reports of inmates essentially not being observed at all due to the sheer volume of them and lack of guards is simply absurd. All of these factors combined show an evident dismissal of the inmates’ rights and, unfortunately, is common throughout the whole country, with some prisons electing to keep inmates in solitary confinement for days on end, with only an hour outside of their confines.
One issue with these prisons’ starkly inhumane conditions is not just the prison system itself but the staff that is hired to work there. Guards at these prisons need better vetting, training and observation, lest they take on the role of predator and prey when it comes to the inmates. Though meant to keep order, there have been a plethora of reports that internal and bone injuries occur when guards aren’t met with immediate placation by prisoners. This type of unhindered anger should not be a common denominator with prison guards, but it appears to be so.
Additionally, Americans can be completely unaware of the horrendous states of these prisons, usually because the media doesn’t have access to the prisons themselves, or when they do they often go unreported or underreported. Citizens have a right to know that people are being abused mentally, emotionally and physically while serving their sentences, and despite the fact that, yes, they likely did break laws (not to mention that a percentage of them may not even belong there), they are still human beings and have the Constitutional, and innate, right to be treated as such.
