'It's killing people': A look inside the violent, grueling lives of Alabama prison guards

Mark Kelley spent 30 years "behind the fence," as he calls his time spent working inside Alabama prisons. By the time he finally hung up the keys for good six years ago, Kelley says the job had taken a severe toll on him.

"It really made me where I can never really trust anyone and I'm always aware of what's going on around me, never relaxed except at home - jaded, I guess you could say," he said Thursday.

"[I had a] few scares from tussles and an inmate trying to bite off my finger. And two heart attacks in my last few years."

The life of an Alabama prison guard in 2017 is a grueling and difficult existence, according to interviews with 11 working and retired state Department of Corrections officers conducted over the past two months.

Their stories are substantiated by hundreds of comments posted over the past year in a private Facebook group run by and for current and former Alabama correctional officers.

In recent years, Alabama prison guards' lives have increasingly been defined by 12- to 20-hour workdays; low pay; physical exhaustion, pain and injuries; emotional trauma; overwhelming stress; and the psychological impacts of being under constant threat of assault, the 11 working and retired officers told AL.com.

Most of them see no clear solution to what they describe as a myriad of intractable problems facing Alabama's prison system and those it employs and incarcerates.

Some have hope for a year-old proposal by Gov. Robert Bentley to issue $800 million in bonds and build four mega-prisons to replace the DOC's network of aging facilities. But the majority sees the plan as a colossal waste of money that would do little to fix the overcrowding, understaffing and harsh working conditions.

'A critical shortage'

Shawn Logan, whose father was an Alabama correctional officer, retired from Easterling Correctional Facility in August after patrolling the facility for close to 25 years following a brief stint at Ventress Correctional Facility. He said last week during an interview over barbecue in Greenville that he genuinely enjoyed the work for the first half of his career.

"When I started in '91, we were on eight-hour shifts. I started off at Ventress ... and at Ventress you only had 23 posts to man, and you had 40-something officers on each shift. You had folks running over each other out there," he said. "So it was nice; you had plenty of back-up, plenty of good help. Officers cared, took pride in their job. When I started, folks were dying to get into DOC."

But the decline in working conditions at Alabama's state correctional facilities has combined with low and stagnant wages to create an understaffing crisis that the DOC says has a direct correlation with rising violence in its prisons.

"The Alabama Department of Corrections has a critical shortage of corrections officers department-wide with an overall staffing level of 53 percent," DOC spokesman Bob Horton told AL.com via email Friday. "Since 2012, the number of DOC officers has dropped by 20 percent and the rate of violent incidents has increased exponentially."

While the job has always been a tough one, for generations it was one that attracted people because it offered good pay and benefits, reasonable hours and an opportunity to serve.

Most of the current and former correctional officers who spoke with AL.com say that things started to deteriorate in Alabama's prisons about 10 years ago, though some say it began even earlier. Conditions have gotten so bad that the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Alabama prisons last year to examine their endemic overcrowding, staffing shortages and violence.

The working and retired officers all agree that things are now at an unprecedented point of crisis that is driving people away from pursuing careers in corrections, which only exacerbates the systemic problems.

"DOC can't give that job away. Don't nobody want it," Logan said. "I wouldn't wish that job on anybody."

'It's killing people'

A correctional officer working day shift in an Alabama prison must wake up well before the sun rises so he or she can arrive at work by the 6:00 a.m. day shift start time. When "you clock in, you never know where you're going to be," according to Scott Everette, who put in 15 years at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore before retiring from the DOC in 2015. Because of the severe understaffing in Alabama's prisons, individual officers often have to simultaneously cover multiple guard posts that are supposed to each be covered by a different officer.

"Officer Everette comes in, you get your post assignment, OK. I sign my name and right beside it says you're covering all four dorms today and nobody is in the cube. That right there is already stressful," Everette said last week in Greenville.

On a normal day, guards at many DOC facilities work 12 hours, but they are often required to stay on another four to eight hours if people call out of the following shift, a common occurrence that officers say wears greatly on them over time.

Karl Griffin retired from the DOC in January 2016 after working 16 years as a guard at Staton, Draper, Elmore, Limestone and Ventress correctional facilities and Red Eagle Community Work Center, his final post. He said the mandatory overtime was a major detriment to his well-being.

"You're a nervous wreck, you're physically and mentally exhausted - not good. It's a stressful job. You'll be working a demanding post, like I was on third shift, working 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., and at 5:30 they would say, you've been mandated to work another eight hours and ... you get off at 2 that afternoon and have to be back at work at 10 p.m."

Horton, the prison system spokesman, does not deny that these problems exist, though he says the DOC is taking steps aimed at addressing them.

"The overcrowding, understaffing, and extended shift hours are all valid concerns," Horton said via email. "The ADOC has increased recruiting initiatives and Commissioner Jeff Dunn is asking for a five percent increase in officers' pay in the 2018 budget."

Horton added that in 2015 Dunn for the first time appointed a deputy commissioner for training and professional development who is in charge of recruiting, hiring and training correctional officers.

Logan worked a lot of night shifts toward the end of his career. He says that 26 posts are supposed to be manned at Easterling per shift, but that "on day shift you might be lucky to have only 12 officers assigned to your shift, and then two or three of them, or more, call in sick every day."

That means that at the conclusion of his shift, supervisors would frequently demand that he work another four or more hours before he would be allowed to go home.

"It's killing people. Since I started at DOC I've had to have three knee surgeries from walking on that concrete 10 miles every day," Logan said. "When I got home and sat down in that La-Z-Boy and tried to get out of that chair 30 minutes later, I was walking like I was 100 years old."

'No one would believe it'

Working so many long shifts under highly stressful circumstances has a cumulative negative impact on even the toughest officers' mental and physical health, according to the current and former officers who spoke with AL.com.

"It takes a toll on your body, especially when it's 100-something degrees inside Holman prison and all you've got is fans circulating air around, and it's dirty and it's stinking, mold everywhere," Everette said. "And you're still, like, OK, am I going to get jumped on today? Am I going to get stabbed today, like officer Bettis did?"

Correctional officer Kenneth Bettis, a good friend of Everette's, died Sept. 16, after being stabbed 15 days earlier by an inmate at Holman. In March 2016, former Holman warden Carter Davenport and another corrections officer were stabbed during a riot at the prison, but both recovered from their injuries.

Everette added that the harsh realities of the work damaged the mental and physical health of officers at Holman, which has long been known as one of the most violent correctional facilities in Alabama.

During his time at the prison, he said he had "seen people get murdered, witnessed countless executions, seen people walk up the hall guts hanging out, seen a guy get cut from here to here," and traced his finger from the base of his throat up the right side of his face to his ear. "People tell me, 'you ought to write a book,' and I tell them no one would believe it."

Though prisoners assaulted each of them over the years, Griffin, Everette, Logan and Kelley were luckier than many of their colleagues, as officers are increasingly being seriously injured and even killed by inmates. All four retirees say that is due in large part to the toxic mix of overcrowding and understaffing that has increasingly gripped Alabama prisons over the past 10 years.

As of October 2016 - the most recent month for which DOC has made data publicly available - Alabama's prisons were at 173.3 percent capacity. As Horton said, overall staffing is at 53 percent. And there have been no new prisons since May 1998, when Bibb Correctional Facility opened in Brent.

These factors turned the prison system into a powder keg that seems to have exploded in recent months, according to Everette, Griffin, Kelley and Logan; seven current correctional officers who spoke with AL.com on condition of anonymity; and hundreds of comments posted by dozens of current and former guards on the private Alabama Correctional Officers Facebook group.

Reports of vicious attacks in DOC facilities were common during the 12-month period that ended in September, with 1,345 inmate-on-inmate assaults; 636 inmate-on-officer assaults; five inmate suicides; and six inmates and one officer murdered, according to DOC statistics.

Many prisoners, correctional officers and prison reform advocates believe the assault numbers would be much higher if every incident that occurred was reported.

And many of those same inmates, guards and prison advocates say that the level of violence has intensified in recent months. That assertion is buoyed by the fact that there have been at least five murders and two inmate suicides at Alabama correctional facilities since Oct. 6. That's when the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was launching its ongoing investigation into violence, rape, overcrowding and other problems at Alabama prisons.

'Where do I start?'

Being in such a violent environment is clearly dangerous for Alabama's state prisoners, who frequently have little protection from assaults by other inmates in open, often largely unguarded dorms.

But it also poses a critical threat to correctional officers, dozens of whom said in interviews and in their Facebook group that they feel more vulnerable than ever because they are left with fewer resources, less back-up and more incompetent leaders with each passing year.

"Things have gotten a lot worse. Where do I start? First and foremost the staffing has just gone down dramatically, and at the same time the population of inmates has gone up drastically," Griffin said.

Over three decades with DOC, Kelley worked at Holman and Ventress correctional facilities and Elba Community Based Facility.

"At times [earlier in my career], we would have as many as five officers for a dorm of as many as 450 inmates," he said. "Now you're lucky to have one officer for a dorm of 450 inmates. You tell me if that's safe or not, for the officer or inmates."

Adding insult to injury, the officers interviewed by AL.com said that both the quality and quantity of new correctional officers coming out of the training academy are lower than it was in the past.

"Eight out of 10 officers they hire now are just bodies. You've got to hire people who are proud to do the job like it was in the old days," Kelley said. He pins that decline in officer quality on "poor pay, and the academy seems to have lowered their standards ... It's not for everyone. If you ain't got what it takes to work in a prison, you shouldn't be there."

Horton said the DOC is working to improve its recruiting in hopes of hiring better-qualified correctional officers.

"In 2016, the ADOC established and implemented a thorough screening policy for hiring the best qualified applicants," he said. "As a result, recruiting numbers have declined to some degree, but the quality of applicants has overall improved."

Old-timers are not only concerned about the quality of the lowest-level DOC officers and employees. For Everette, who rose to the rank of lieutenant at Holman, the greatest problems are with the leadership, both within the prisons and in Montgomery.

"The biggest thing, in my opinion, is the administration - the captains, the wardens and the Montgomery administration," he said.

"The wardens and captains, they are 95 percent of the problem because, see, there's a lot of stuff Montgomery doesn't know because the wardens and captains aren't going to tell them. And a lot of it is the supervisors they're promoting - they have no clue how to run a prison."

He and Logan went on to explain that many wardens and captains avoid telling higher-ups in Montgomery what is really going on in their prisons in order to avoid being criticized or penalized.

"The folks making all the decisions have no clue," Logan said. "[The wardens and captains] don't show them the real picture, they show them what they want to see. So they say, 'Y'all don't need no extra help; you're doing good.'"

Seeking solutions

The Alabama Correctional Officers Facebook group is a popular online gathering place where current and former officers commiserate about their jobs and share ideas about what should be done to fix the Alabama prison system.

No panacea is hidden among the hundreds of comments posted in the group over the past year, and none of the 11 current and former correctional officers AL.com interviewed have any perfect, easy fixes.

But many of them repeated variations of a few key ideas about what should be on the DOC's to-do list. The most common refrain among current and former officers is that the DOC needs to find a way to fully staff its facilities.

"[The DOC says] it's cheaper to pay overtime than to send 200 people to the academy," Everette said. "I'm not saying they don't care, but they turn a blind eye to a lot of this stuff."

To boost staffing levels, many officers say that pay needs to be increased in order to attract more and better talent, a point that Commissioner Dunn himself has made repeatedly, and is pushing legislators to address through this years' budget.

"Things will not change in the system until we have equal pay to the base State Troopers. Bring back the [25-year] retirement on the RSA program, eliminating the 401ks. Honestly, [20-year] retirement would be almost impossible to turn down," one officer posted in the Facebook group in September. "If Montgomery is listening and they truly want a staff that is strong ... these are the recommendations for a safer work place in our prisons."

Like many of his colleagues, Griffin believes raises should be rolled out in conjunction with an overhaul of the DOC's hiring practices.

"What needs to be done is going to have to be drastic, and it's going to have to be quick," he said. "To boost up the staffing they need to raise the minimum age of cadets from 19 back to 21. Nineteen is too young to be working in these prisons supervising convicts."

Improving the quality of new recruits is often floated as a way to begin to fix the system from within, and a member of the Alabama Correctional Officers Facebook group offered opinions about how to do just that in a November post.

"First off, raise the standards to become an officer," the post said. "Some of the individuals I graduated with were downright embarrassing in the classroom and during practical exercises. Tests were basically previewed right before testing. Screw numbers, we need quality."

Meanwhile, some officers said they felt that though Bentley's mega-prisons plan might not be the best possible way forward, they see it as a better option than doing nothing.

"Are new prisons the answer? That's above my pay grade; I don't know. But are the prisons deplorable? For sure. Do officers work in deplorable conditions? Yes they do," Everette said. "But is [building mega-prisons] the answer? I don't know."

Despite pockets of optimism, most of the current and former correctional officers who spoke with AL.com or posted comments about the issue in their private Facebook group over the past year see a glass almost entirely empty.

"The wound is festering and getting infected. Downtown isn't doing anything. The prisons bill isn't going to do anything because it's going to take too long to implement," Griffin said.

"Right now, if the skies were to open and a brand-new 3,000- to 5,000-person prison were to fall from the sky, it wouldn't do anything because they have the inmates but not the security personnel. It's going to get worse. Like I said, I don't see a way out."