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The Alabama Department of Corrections saw 277 incarcerated individuals die within prison walls in 2024, a rate four times the national average.
Eddie Burkhalter, a researcher for the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, obtained the number through a records request as the nonprofit works toward building a database of Alabama prison deaths stretching back a decade.
The number of deaths is a drop from a record high of 325 deaths last year, which put the state at five times the national mortality rate for prison deaths.
Alabama’s prisoner mortality rate is 1,358 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with a national average across state prisons of 330 deaths per 100,000, according to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics.
“It’s a large number, but what’s even more telling is a record request response I got recently from the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, which collects in-custody data for the federal government,” Burkhalter said. “I asked for deaths from 2019 to now; in 2021, 118 people died in Alabama prisons. From 2021 to 2024, that’s a 134 percent increase in deaths.”
The manners of death are not yet available for 2024, as Burkhalter said that information takes longer to pull together, but Appleseed has documented the manner of death for most of the 2023 cases.
“The trends we’re seeing are more overdose deaths, which are becoming more and more common a huge problem,” Burkhalter said. “There are a lot of natural deaths as well. Talking with other researchers, I’m learning that many times some of these natural deaths could actually be medical neglect cases where the person did not get the care they needed in a timely fashion and passed away. There are homicides and suicides as well, all preventable deaths. Those are all preventable deaths where people should be able to serve out their sentence.”
Burkhalter said each deceased individual’s data on length of sentencing may or may not end up being part of the database, but said the deaths include people sentenced to serve as little as one year in the prison system.
“It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been sentenced, any sentence could be a death sentence because ADOC is just not in control fully of these facilities,” Burkhalter said.
The Alabama Legislature and ADOC have taken some steps to try to address the lack of guards that has played a critical role in these issues, Burkhalter said, but have been unable to meet the target number of officers required under a federal lawsuit from the Department of Justice.
“(ADOC) is not going to meet the court order; they keep pushing back the deadline because they just can’t meet it,” Burkhalter said. “I mean, they’ve taken steps, ADOC and the Legislature, good steps to try to increase hiring—but it’s just not working. We’re losing officers; some of them are being arrested for crimes that are work-related. A lot of (contraband) is coming in through officers. To ADOC’s credit they’re catching some; but it’s not apparent whether those arrests are resulting in convictions. That’s something else we’re looking at, but it’s a really complicated problem.”
Burkhalter said there are some obvious actions that could help to reduce the number of deaths inside the prison system.
“We think ADOC should be ramping up security checkpoints. We’ve had attorneys and staff who have witnessed employees coming in not being checked at checkpoints,” Burkhalter said. “If you want people to stop dying from fentanyl in a max security prison, you stop people from bringing it in. Make the check-in look like a TSA checkpoint. Drug contraband is a huge business in Alabama prisons. People get killed over contraband. Weapons are brought in and sold. Increased security at those facilities would be a first good step and it’s something they could do.”
Prisoner classification is also a system that Burkhalter said needs fixing, as some of the individuals who could be a danger to others appear to be allowed back to mix with others who they could put in danger.
