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An incarcerated man at Bibb Correctional Facility died on Thursday, according to a spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Corrections.
Lavonte Tyreeke Jefferson, a 23-year-old incarcerated man at the Bibb Correctional facility, was found unresponsive on the ground at the facility on Friday, according to the ADOC spokesperson.
In a statement released to APR on Friday, the ADOC spokesperson said that Jefferson was taken to the health care unit within the facility, where medical staff attempted life-saving measures. Those efforts proved unsuccessful, and Jefferson was pronounced dead later that same day.
The official cause of death is pending the results of an official autopsy, with the Alabama Department of Corrections Law Enforcement Services Division investigating the surrounding circumstances that lead to Jefferson’s death.
Jefferson had been serving a three-year sentence related to a robbery committed in Madison County, according to the ADOC.
Multiple other incarcerated men at the Bibb County facility have died over the past few months, with at least six incarcerated individuals, including Jefferson, now having died in the Bibb County facility since June, according to statistics and statements released from the ADOc.
Many of the cases of death at the Bibb County facility are likely drug overdoses, which are highly common in Alabama’s correctional system due to the persistent and near-constant flow of narcotics that enter the state’s prisons.
One deceased individual, Nyheim Daquan Toney, a 29-year-old incarcerated man serving a 25-year sentence for a robbery committed in Etowah County, was involved in a fatal inmate-on-inmate assault at the Bibb County facility in June. Toney received multiple stab wounds and was eventually flown to UAB hospital, where he was later pronounced deceased.
The ongoing lawsuit by the U.S Justice Department alleges that the lack of correctional staffing and overcapacity at almost all of the state’s correctional facilities directly leads to increased cases of inmate-on-inmate assaults and deaths.
The latest data provided by the ADOC in June shows that Bibb County Correctional facility is at 89.9 percent over its originally intended capacity, which is a decrease from the previous month but still dangerously over capacity. The facility, which is a medium security prison that first opened in 1998, was designed to hold 918 incarcerated individuals and now currently holds 1,743, according to the data from the ADOC.
