Second Chapter of Doing Time
Second Chapter of Doing Time
March-May (2020)
(See a short preface to the series and the republished first chapter here. Buy the full book here. And don’t forget to subscribe, upgrade to paid if you’re able, or gift a subscription to someone you think might be interested in the work, and put that like button in a full nelson.
Continuing the re-serialization of much of my book Doing Time on the Substack, today I’ll republish Chapter Two as new pieces are in the works. Chapter Two was written from March through May of 2020.
One of the most frustrating barriers to interviewing prisoners is the audio quality of their overpriced phone calls, made often on phones that are broken. It became something of a theme in my book, particularly in this chapter, and Kiki Sanchez, who designed the cover, chose to portray an image of wall phones on the cover of the book.
One day early on in the process of interviewing prisoners for Doing Time, I decided to pause and devote a couple of interviews to asking questions about the phones on which the prisoners were talking to me. The pandemic continued to grow worse, and the living conditions of the prisons continued their perpetual decline.)
March-May 2020
Gregory Anderson, Jr. is released from Ventress Prison on March 25, 2020, carrying legal papers and the only items the prison provides: $10 “on a card,” a pair of clothes, and a bus ticket. Ventress gives these three items to those released, nothing more.
Gregory, too, is given a bus ticket, even though the bus station is closed because of Covid-19.
Luckily, his family is able to pick him up. It is a good day, spent with cousins and other loved ones. Anderson’s father is so happy his son is home that he stays up through the night, just talking, catching up with his son, and takes work off the next day.
The day of his release is “one of the happiest days of my life,” says Anderson, “and I was about to cry just seeing how things changed in three years. Like cars and changes to my city, and people who died.”
In interviews with me over the phone from March through early May, prisoners have been discussing concerns about non-working phones throughout the prison, existing and potentially increasing violence, lack of education and information for prisoners about coronavirus, and other issues.
Anderson discusses these and additional topics with me in early April, a couple of weeks after he is released from Ventress Prison. ADOC responds via email to questions about many concerns among the prisoners in this chapter, before a version of it appears in Alabama Political Reporter on May 9, 2020.
Discussing what leaving prison is like, “It’s like PTSD. I mean a lot of guys get out, man, and to me, it’s like the equivalent — I mean, without the guns — it’s like the equivalent of coming from overseas in a warzone … It’s not only officers you have to worry about. It’s other inmates too. I mean, [prison staff] don’t actually protect you,” says Anderson.
“If you got into a situation, I mean, you would just have to pray for the best. You go and bang on the cube, bang on the door, you have to try to get their attention, or they are just not on their post. You know what I’m saying? So, people are getting stabbed to death … you know, there’s a lotta crazy stuff going on at Ventress,” says Anderson.
Former Ventress prisoner Joshua David Willingham, 29, was stabbed in the eye by another prisoner and died on September 13, 2019.[1] At least 29 prisoners died in Alabama prisons as a result of either homicide, drug overdose, or suicide in 2019.[2]
Anderson was in Ventress for two-and-a-half years.
“Ventress is like the worst experience. I mean I have a lot of scarring from that, mentally, and physical damage as well,” he adds.
Anderson’s March 25 release comes six days after the Alabama Department of Corrections first announces a series of precautionary measures throughout the State’s prisons in response to coronavirus after one of the Department’s employees tested positive.[3] Interviews with imprisoned sources for my work on Ventress have been ongoing since weeks before the March 19 measures are announced.
Due to the increasingly urgent, dangerous context of the pandemic, many concerns and fears that the prisoners who I am interviewing have recently described about prison life up to this point are new or worse than they’ve been in the past, but for the most part, the issues they describe have always existed in prisons in Alabama and across the country and are now problematic in more ways and new ways as Covid-19 threatens the lives of prisoners and prison staff alike. But the problems themselves, on the whole, are not new, just even worse, even more dangerous than they already were.
Throughout late March and early April, all of the sources I interview in Ventress report problems with the prison’s phones. The identities of these prisoners are kept private so as to prevent retaliation against them for speaking out.
The source referred to as “Z” in this book claims he and other prisoners have not yet received free, weekly 15-minute phone calls that the ADOC said would be provided to prisoners in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Z first mentions the concern to me in a late March 2020 interview.
All prisoners interviewed say that ADOC is not educating them about coronavirus. Z, like the other sources, says there is no real process in Ventress for informing prisoners about how to protect against getting or spreading the deadly virus.
Z also claims that medical staff, classification officers, and possibly other workers in Ventress have had two weeks off of work during the same week in March that the ADOC is purporting to implement the coronavirus response measures. One of the March 19 measures (cited above) is waving certain fees and payments for prisoners’ medical care.
In an early April interview, Z says he still hasn’t received a free 15-minute call and there is still no real process for educating prisoners about coronavirus.
Z then describes the many problems with Ventress’s phones, says three out of four phones in one of the dorms are broken with one working poorly, and that even in the midst of the pandemic, over a hundred prisoners each day use the one phone that still works in that dorm. The demand on the use of the one phone is even greater due to ADOC’s suspension of prison visitations, and prisoners’ need to connect with loved ones, especially during lockdown.
Another source, referred to as “Y” in this book, says in an early April interview that he also has not received a free 15-minute call or information about how to access one.
Y also says he hasn’t seen ADOC educating prisoners about coronavirus, explaining that most prisoners have only the prison’s TV with which to stay educated and up to date on the pandemic, and the prison’s TV has “no Alabama local news,” he adds, which makes it difficult to stay up to speed on how the counties in which they are imprisoned are impacted by the pandemic.
In another April interview over the phone, the prisoner referred to as “C” in this book says that Ventress staff and administrators aren’t educating prisoners about coronavirus, and also describes the same problems with the prison’s phones that Z and others discussed earlier.
Each prisoner in Ventress who I interview during April notes an increase in violence throughout the month and a fear of worsening violence going forward. C also says that prisoners with flu-like symptoms and Covid-like symptoms are being moved to the prison’s gymnasium.
In an April 13 interview with me, Gregory Anderson, Jr. discusses the living conditions in Ventress prior to his release in March. He echoes the other prisoners’ concerns about broken phones.
“And if you’re lucky, there’s maybe two phones in each dorm that works out of four or more,” Anderson says. “There’s only one or two working and then that causes issues — you know — causes people to get stabbed, fights. And it’s not even the inmates’ fault. I mean [safely providing phones] is something the prison should do to accommodate the inmates. But they don’t care. You can talk to the Warden, anybody in the chain of command, and nothing is done about it.”
Anderson says people complained about the phones in the past and ADOC claimed to have taken steps to address the issues.
“Like, they started a new system, supposedly, where they’re supposed to give all the inmates tablets, and they were saying it was supposed to take place this month,” Anderson says in the April interview.
According to AL.com, ADOC’s plan to provide tablets to prisoners first appeared in a pilot program at Tutwiler Prison for Women in 2015 and continued in 2019.[4]
None of the prisoners who I interview for this book say they’ve been given tablets. When I ask C whether ADOC has told prisoners when they’ll get the tablets, C tells me, “It’s in progress…They say about a month.” C says the workers who put in Wi-Fi routers in the prison told prisoners that the tablets would arrive in about a month.
“It’s really just the quality of the phones. I mean, the material is cheap,” Anderson says. “If you move them around too much, they start going out. They short out easily. You have to hold it a certain way and, like, bang on it, all sorts of stuff, anything you can do to actually get the phone to work.”
Anderson continues, “So, I mean it’s frustrating. I’ve been through that, where the phone’s not working and your family can’t hear you and it’s cutting out — you know — it’s crazy … If you could see people actually using the phones, you would see: It’s not a regular procedure. It’s like some crazy stuff you’ve got to do. You got to hold the cord a certain way, like fold it, or like – I don’t know – like, kind of bend it behind the phone, something like that. They’re really, really raggedy phones.”
Asked if he recalls the last time he stayed in a Ventress dorm in which all four phones worked, Anderson laughs.
“What? I’m sorry. Wow. Never, never, ever, ever once in the whole two and a half years,” he answers. “There were never more than two phones working. I mean at least there’s maybe two usually. But there were never more than two phones working in a dorm.”
Anderson, too, discusses whether he saw any efforts by staff or administrators to educate prisoners about coronavirus in the weeks before his release, particularly any time following the ADOC’s March 10 announcement that the Department would take “proactive steps to protect the health and well-being of inmates and staff, including the distribution of educational information on prevention and intervention.”[5]
Asked whether ADOC distributed educational material on Covid-19 prevention and intervention between March 10 and his release weeks later, Anderson answers, “No, man, they hadn’t.”
He continues, “Those people will say anything to the public to hush people or get people off their back, but they are not really going to comply with anything for real. Like I said, from the way they feed you [to] the phones to excessive force, a lot of things.”
Anderson also describes the absence of medical staff and some other Ventress staff in the last weeks of March.
“They were gone. There was nobody there. I mean, like, you were probably going to die if something happened to you. They shut the medical down…The officers were telling us you couldn’t even go down there. And you could look down there and see [that] there was nobody there,” Anderson says.
Asked about the duration of the medical staff’s absence, Anderson says they were gone for about two weeks.
“It was like when they first said that coronavirus was getting bad, and that’s when they [first seemed to be absent]. And so I guess either the medical staff refused to be there or they made them leave. But I know they didn’t have medical staff there. Like if it was an emergency enough, you probably would’ve just had to go to the hospital,” he says.
Asked if medical staff were still absent by his release on March 25, Anderson says perhaps some staff were there by that time, but he isn’t certain.
“To tell you the truth, I really don’t think that they were there. If they were, it was really, really short-staffed,” Anderson explains. “I guess there could’ve been somebody down there at some point, but it wasn’t like it’s supposed to be or … like it usually is. And I think they were either scared or they had an order not to be there.”
Like Z, Anderson says he noticed the absence of Classification Officers in his last week before being released.
Anderson, too, discusses the lack of access to local information about coronavirus.
“They get Georgia news [on Ventress’s Television],” Anderson says. “Pretty much all you’re going to see is Georgia news. You’re not going to be informed on Alabama news.”
Anderson discusses how the lack of information was causing panic among prisoners, eager for news about the virus, toward the end of his time in Ventress.
“When I was last there it was a high stress level,” he reflects, “because on everybody’s mind, man, is, ‘If the virus comes in here, it’s gonna knock us over like some dominos.’ That’s what everybody says, like, ‘Damn, I don’t wanna catch that [while] stuck in prison.’ ‘Are they gonna let some of us go?’ ‘What are they going to do about it?’ And you’re left in the dark. You know? So, it’s really stressful. You don’t know if you’re gonna live or die. You don’t know if you’re going to make it out.”
Anderson also talks about other problems ADOC has had with outbreaks of illnesses and the danger caused by the unsanitary prison.[6]
In Ventress, “We’ve had TB [tuberculosis] outbreaks, meningitis[7] outbreaks, a lot of different things before coronavirus,” Anderson says. “We’ve had scabies outbreaks.[8] So, I mean it’s messed up. It’s really not sanitary. If you don’t take precautions to be clean yourself, you’re going to be really exposed to a lot of — I mean, there’s no telling what – diseases and viruses.”
He continues, as noted in Chapter One, “The cafeteria is not sanitary. I’ve found rat droppings in my food. I mean, you might find bugs in your food. In the morning, there’ll be bugs in your oatmeal. Like, especially when it’s warm out, I guess, like, bugs get into where they store everything. And they don’t care.”
Asked about statements from other prisoners that those with flu-like and coronavirus-like symptoms are being moved inside the prison, Anderson stops me before I can finish the question, “And held in the gym?” he asks.
“Yeah, they hold them in the gym,” he says. “That’s why I already knew you were going say that, because I’ve been in Ventress and I’ve seen it,” he explains. “They put you in the gym and just leave you in there.”
Anderson says there is no medical equipment in the gym, and that he knows one prisoner who lived in Ventress’s gym for about a week.
“There’s nothing,” he says. “You’re just locked in there and you’re stuck. It’s really weird, man, I’m telling you. It’s like, wow, I’m pretty sure that’s scary. I’m glad I’ve never been in that situation.”
ADOC spokeswoman Samantha Rose responds by email in early May to comment on the prisoners’ concerns, days before my article appears in APR.
Rose declines to address questions about prisoners being taken to the gym at Ventress, citing security purposes, and says, “ADOC will not disclose areas within its facilities or on its grounds that will be used to quarantine inmates who may be symptomatic or have tested positive for Covid-19. Disclosing this information compromises our ability to safely move inmates within our facilities.”
Rose says that as a result of the disruptions caused by Covid-19, ADOC began providing all prisoners with one free 15-minute phone call per week and extended hours of availability.
“This benefit has been and continues to be provided to every inmate in all ADOC facilities, including Ventress Correctional Facility (Ventress). No inmates are denied this benefit for any reason,” Rose says in her email.
Rose says that every Monday, 15 free minutes of call time are added to each inmate’s account and that any unused free minutes expire at the end of the week.
“To-date, our statistics show that nearly 90,000 free phone calls have been placed by inmates across our correctional system, with more than 6,700 of them placed by inmates at Ventress,” she adds.
Rose says prisoners who may be having problems with their free calls “bear [sic] personal responsibility to report issues like these to their wardens or to facility staff” who will investigate the matter.
Addressing questions about broken phones, Rose says that ADOC was made aware of this issue as a result of “recent inmate reports.”
She continues, “Repairs were made to the malfunctioning phones, and the issue was resolved. As with any utility service, from time to time maintenance issues inevitably arise.”
But as late as the Wednesday afternoon before the publication of the article, May 6, 2020, back in Ventress, Z tells APR in an interview over the phone that while some phones were recently fixed, there are still broken phones throughout the prison, including one phone in the same dorm referenced earlier, in which three out of four phones had been broken for months.
In her email, Rose claims that in addition to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) flyers being posted in every facility, the ADOC’s Office of Health Services gave out educational packets to all facilities for prisoner newsletters that outline Covid-19 preventative measures and CDC- and ADPH-recommended hygiene protocols.
Staff and prisoners have also been provided with face masks, along with instructions on how to use them, Rose says. Unpaid State prisoners, in the first week of April, began making cloth face masks, ADOC announced at the time.
A prisoner at Holman Prison, on May 6 – the day after ADOC’s email response to questions about this article – says he has not yet received a newsletter with information from prison staff about coronavirus.
Speaking to prisoners’ concerns about a lack of access to Alabama news on prison TV, Samantha Rose explains that prisoners “are provided access to cable or satellite television through which they have ample opportunities to obtain current news and information about Covid-19.”
Rose adds, “While the ADOC continues to meet its obligation to keep inmates informed, as is evidenced by the aforementioned Covid-19 educational efforts [in] our entire system, inmates are not entitled to watch local Alabama news programs on television while incarcerated for the crime(s) for which they were convicted.”
Addressing a lack of staff at Ventress for a period after the Covid-19 crisis began, Rose says that, as a result of the virus, “ADOC predictably has experienced an uptick in staff absenteeism.”
She continues, “This is due to a variety of challenges outside of self-reported positive cases of Covid-19 among our staff including but not limited to: other illnesses, childcare disruptions, caring for someone who may have Covid-19, and self-quarantining after direct, prolonged exposure to an individual who tested positive for Covid-19 … However, staff absenteeism as a result of Covid-19 has not resulted in an inability to staff key medical or security posts within our facilities, including Ventress,” and further, adds, “All inmates continue to be provided with critical health, mental health, and rehabilitative services.”
As of Wednesday, May 6, seven state prisoners in Alabama have tested positive for Covid-19. One inmate at the St. Clair Correctional Facility, 66-year-old Dave Thomas, has died after testing positive. Five of Alabama’s 16 prison staff members have tested positive at Ventress Prison, according to ADOC.
By May 6, months into the pandemic in the U.S., only 94 of Alabama’s approximately 22,000 prisoners have been tested for the virus.[9]
[1] Eddie Burkhalter, “Two Alabama Prison Inmates Die on Same Day, Bringing Yearly Total to At Least 27,” Alabama Political Reporter, 12/20/2019
[2] Eddie Burkhalter, “Holman Prison Inmate Killed in December, At Least 14th Prison Homicide in 2019,” Alabama Political Reporter, 5/9/2020
[3] Eddie Burkhalter, “Alabama Prisons Suspend Visitations, Start Screening Staff for Covid-19,” Alabama Political Reporter, 3/19/2020.
[4] Connor Sheets, “Alabama Plans to Supply Prisoners with Tablet Computers, Wi-Fi for Education, Phone Calls,” Al.com, 6/21/2017 (updated 3/6/2019)
[5] William Thornton, “Alabama Prison Officials at Work on Coronavirus Plan,” Al.com, 3/10/2020
[6] Eddie Burkhalter, “Inmate at Ventress Prison Tests Positive for Tuberculosis,” Alabama Political Reporter, 2/14/2020
[7] Melissa Brown, “Disease Outbreak Reported at Alabama Prison After One Inmate Dies,” Montgomery Advertiser, 9/28/18
[8] Alex Aubuchon, “Prison Reform: Health Care in Alabama’s Prisons,” Alabama Public Radio, 4/29/19
[9] Alabama Department of Corrections, “ADOC Covid-19 Preparedness Update,” http://www.doc.alabama.gov/covid19news