Fountain Prison, Alabama: Overcrowding, Prisoners Sleeping on Floor, Violence, Heat, Illness, Sewage Leaking from Bathroom Area Into Prison

With Photos and Video Obtained From Inside the Prison This Week

(Above: Raw sewage leaking from bathroom area into the prison at Fountain Prison on Thursday of this week. See the video toward the end of this article.)

In October of 2022, I covered the prison strike throughout Alabama’s male prisons, which lasted three weeks and focused its demands on reducing sentencing and improving living conditions, and wrote about the prisoners and prisons in the aftermath of the strike. Conditions since have continued the trend of growing even worse.

The great local Alabama reporter and now researcher for Alabama Appleseed Eddie Burkhalter broke down the most recent numbers and other information about Alabama’s second straight year of record high deaths, continuing into this one:

“Alabama prisons saw a record 325 deaths in 2023. Of those, 253 investigations have closed, and 112 deaths were preventable, with 10 homicides, 13 suicides and 89 overdose deaths. That per 100,000 homicide rate is 4 times the national rate, according to the FBI’s most recent data… Alabama’s overdose mortality rate in prisons last year of 435 per 100,000 was 20 times the national rate across state prisons, according to the latest available national data…From Jan. 1-June 20 there were 161 deaths among the incarcerated in Alabama prisons. (Data via records request) Last year we saw a record 325 deaths, and the year before a record 270. We could well set another record this year.”[1]

I recently spoke with a prisoner in Fountain Prison in Atmore, Alabama, near Holman Prison. (Holman has the state’s only death row.) Sources in Holman recently confirmed to me that there was an escalation of violence, possibly a riot, in Holman in the past couple of weeks, which I’m working to learn more about as well if possible.

I’ve reported on the dilapidated and inhumane living conditions of Fountain Prison before. Throughout Alabama prisons in recent weeks and months, sources have reported an uptick in violence, increased discomfort, and an increased sense of desperation to get out of the prison.

In addition to an interview, I received photos and videos this week from a prisoner inside of Fountain, backing up many claims in this article, showing the crumbling infrastructure and inhumane living conditions.

A prisoner I spoke with said that on Monday officers used unnecessary force against a prisoner, and that the next morning, prisoners were assaulted by other prisoners with guards nearby who did not intervene. He noted that, by his estimation, there are only about seven officers in the prison most of the time, and over 1,000 prisoners. I’ll refer to this person as George.

George said various restrictions have been imposed since the strike. “The limit on the store now,” meaning the amount of money you can have on your commissary for canteen items, “is 100 dollars. You can’t spend it like you used to,” he said.

In general, “They won’t allow you to do certain things….because of the strike, and when they found out there was going to be another strike, they closed everything down. Like I said, it’s basically gotten worser than it was before the strike,” said George. “The visitations,” he continued, “only 10 people can go on visitation at one time. If your people don’t call up here, like, on a Monday two weeks before [they plan to come], you won’t get a visit. Only 10 inmates are [allowed] on the [visitation] yard at one time.”

George said the living conditions have not improved since the strike. The Alabama Department of Corrections, the parole board, the wardens, have not improved. “They haven’t stopped nothing. The strike has, like, I guess, striked their nerve,” he said.

And “the violence has been tremendously crazy around here lately.” He reiterated, “Nothing has changed, far as the conditions of these prisons.”

The heat wave that has been roasting the country in recent weeks and months has not helped matters. “It’s tremendously hot in here. They kept us locked up, the whole camp locked down, for a week, because they had a gang riot over at Holman last week, across the street at the other prison, so they put a lock on the camp over here,” said George, confirming what sources inside Holman have said.

He continued, “So, when they put a lock on the camp, we’ve been locked in for the last week – we just came out of lockdown on Monday – due to a situation that happened at another facility. If you ain’t got a fan around, you’re just going to sit up and sweat all day. They took fiberglass and put them on all the windows to keep stuff from going out the windows,” because apparently prisoners had been tossing things like empty cigarette packs through them, and the prison allegedly decided to crack down. “The ventilation here has poor circulation,” said George. During the day, “You’ve got to put the blankets up over the windows to keep the sun from coming in to try to stay cool.”

Asked how many working fans are in his tier, George estimated that there are between 12 and 14. Asked how many people are in his tier, George estimated this aloud by multiplying the number of beds by two, “so 150, 140-something, something like that.”

“You think there are almost twice as many people as beds?” I asked. (I’ve followed overcrowding in Alabama prisons for years, and this estimate was somewhat surprising even to me. I hadn’t seen pictures yet.)

“Right,” said George. “We’ve got people sleeping in the middle rows, in the middle aisles, which is cause to be a fire hazard…. You’ve got folks sleeping on the floors, on mattresses on the floor. Then the police know they got [prisoners] on the hallway. They can’t even go in a cell block because they owe people money or they done something wrong, or they just got kicked out of a cell, and they tell [the officers], ‘Hey, I can’t go in that cell.’ The police still put them in there.”

There are also frequent outbreaks of illness related to the overcrowding and poor living conditions. In Fountain, “They had an outbreak of scabies recently, last couple of days. They just did a whole dorm after scabies. They locked the dorm down. They said that dorm had scabies. You couldn’t go in that dorm. They just had the folks doing scabies tests today.”

The infrastructure of the prison is crumbling as well. On Thursday, raw sewage started leaking from the bathroom area into the prison. The flood was blocking the only way for prisoners in that tier to get into the restroom to access the showers and sinks. See the picture at the top of the story, and the video here:

As of this writing, the Alabama Department of Corrections has not responded to a request for comment on recent episodes of violence in Fountain, cases of scabies, overcrowding in Fountain resulting in prisoners sleeping on the floor, or any other matters in this article.

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[1] See: https://x.com/BurkhalterEddie/status/1812898423806230714 See also: https://alabamaappleseed.org/author/eddie-burkhalter/record-loss-of-life-in-2023-pushes-adocs-death-total-over-1000-since-doj-put-state-on-notice/ See also: https://alabamaappleseed.org/category/author/eddie-burkhalter/