"It's a Crying Shame" (Bullock Prison, Alabama, Part Two)
Another Alabama Prisoner Speaks Out on Hellish Conditions in Bullock Prison: Flooding, Sewage Problems, Violence, Drugs, Overcrowding, Health Problems, Amputations, and More
(Picture above from ADOC’s website)
I recently interviewed another two prisoners about conditions in Bullock Prison in Union Springs, Alabama. Part Two will focus on the second prisoner, who I’ll call “Jordan.” Jordan has been incarcerated in Alabama for well over two decades, in Bullock for over 15 years.
He tells me that Bullock is meant to be partially a mental health facility, confirming what “Derek” said in Part One, but that prisoners with and without mental health issues are mixed up all together and prisoners with mental health issues are often targeted, taken advantage of, and assaulted.
“A lot of these guys, they came from the streets with mental health issues and problems like that, and lot of the guys they got down here mixed up with these mental health guys — mental health issues for real — they’re extorting these guys [who have mental health issues], conniving these guys, bullying these guys, and these guys is real slow… A lot of these guys need to be moved up out of this dorm, man, out of this mental health dorm,” he says.
“There’s a lot of bullying going on down here,” he says, and reiterates that it’s “guys with mental health issues” who are the primary targets of the bullying, adding, “They’re manipulating them, taking their shit,” and “making them to do things that they shouldn’t do.”
He says a lot of the prisoners with mental health issues are older ones who have been in the longest. “They go 20 something years, 30 something years. It’s mental health, man, for real… Matt, we’ve been gone 20 something years, man, and these guys just got to prison, man, and they think they’ve got the ups on us because we’ve been gone so long, 20, 30 years, and they’re just bullying us… Something need to be did about it. I’m tired of it, tired of it, tired of it, tired of it… They be bullying these guys, beating these guys, slamming these guys. All they’ve got to is roll that camera. They’ve got a camera down here in these dorms, man.”
Jordan says he has been keeping notes on the dates and times of different violent incidents in the prison.
Further, he discusses the sanitary conditions in Bullock, as well as problems with the infrastructure of the building itself.
“This prison down here in Union Springs, that kitchen down there, they got their damn septic tank built up out of this kitchen,” he says. “When we go eat down there, man, you can smell the god damn septic tank. It stinks so bad in the kitchen, you can taste it in the food when you eat it, man. You can’t even eat the food, man. It is crazy around here. The septic is down there by the kitchen, and the septic tank smells so bad, when you go to eat, you can taste the smell in the food.”
He adds that someone “needs to come down here and inspect and do something about this shit.”
Another problem in Bullock, says Jordan, is that “the water is running into the prison when it rains.”
In a statement in which the near allegory is apparently unintended but nonetheless wasn’t lost on me, he adds, “The foundation of the prison system done sunk. The prisons are sunk. So, the ground is higher than the foundation.”
Many other inmates and journalists over the years have exposed video accounts of the flooding problem in Bullock Prison. See this AL.com article from 2020, for example, or this 2022 video. (I’ve documented similar issues in Fountain Prison here.)
Jordan continues, “So, you can’t do nothing about rain… When it’s raining, it’s running dead in the door, running on the ground. We’ve got blankets. They got blue blankets, what we use to cover up with. They gave us 100 blue blankets to put up out their doors, man. All in the gym, washing, running in the doors, man, all in the kitchen, all in the prison, water just spraying in. It’s been raining for the last three days. It’s getting inside the dorm, man. The dorm is flooded. And the sewage system is backing up through the drain system, man, and they walk all over the floor and walk all through the sewage waters. They track it all over the dorm, man.”
He adds, “There’s feces, man. You’ve got guys down here shitting all over the place inside the dorm, urinating themselves, bleeding on themselves, and they should be in the infirmary, man,” or in the medical ward “down there at Kilby.”
Indeed, if the prisons weren’t so overcrowded, perhaps they would be getting medical attention more quickly, or would be in a medical ward. Although, in Alabama, perhaps not.
“Guys are real sick, man. These guys got medical issues,” says Jordan.
There are also “so many rats and roaches down here, it’s a crying shame,” says Jordan. As I’ve reported many times in my book and in previous Hard Times Reviewer articles here on Substack, Alabama prisons are full of rats and cockroaches, along with other creatures sometimes as well.
“We tell them all the time to spray this place. It’s infested with rats and roaches,” Jordan continues. “It’s infested. [My] dorm needs to be sprayed, man. There’s a million roaches in here… Turn the lights off and roaches go running everywhere.”
He says the rat problem in Bullock has improved slightly in recent years, primarily because he’s observed that the rats seem to have gotten smaller, saying they “used to come out of the woods” and some “were 12 inches long.”
Jordan touches on the overcrowding problem in the prisons as well.
“It’s way overcrowded. They’ve got guys sleeping on the floor, guys in the wrong dorm, guys trying to get out, running from the other dorms, got guys beating them up… That’s what a lot of it is. These guys are getting beat up, manipulated and beat up… That’s what’s going on in the prison system, and that’s been going on a long, long time,” he says, adding that he also thinks the prisons need more officers.
He says the overcrowding problem is so bad that prisoners “can’t even get on their assigned beds.”
Jordan sees many of the same health issues in the prison that Derek described in Part One, including amputations.
“Bullock is supposed to be a mental health facility,” he explains, “like for people who went crazy that have mental issues, like people [who] talk all night to their self, peeing on their self, can’t walk, diabetes. Somebody got limb issues or might got one leg, or might got no legs, some types of stuff like that, or might just can’t walk, or might got a spinal issue, them types of issues. That’s what we have down here in Union Springs, guys urinating on themselves, shitting on themselves.”
He says there are over 80 prisoners in his dorm.
Prisoners with these various health issues, says Jordan, “should be in the infirmary, or should be in a camp where [prisoners] have been diagnosed with these types of issues. Colostomy bags on their side and stuff, they should be in a camp where people just have [health problems] like that. They shouldn’t be around regular inmates,” especially “when they’re having all these feces in the population.”
Jordan says the bathroom area of the prison is also “messed up. They need to come in and pressure wash these things, man. They’ve got holes all in the showers, water running all in the walls, busted pipes, running through the walls. The water is constantly running all the time, man.”
He says many of the drains in the floor are no longer functional, and, “When it rains, you’ve got to push it in the shower, try to mop it up and push it in the shower… They ain’t got [working] drains in the floor no more. It’s crazy, water just running all over the place. When it rains, I have to mop water up for three or four hours, man. I shouldn’t have to clean up like that.”
He again says he believes the prison should be “condemned” and “shut down,” and recalls that they “said they would shut it down” but never did.
(See this WSFA-12 article from 2019, covering the possibility of Bullock prison closing, which focuses entirely on the impact on the town and local businesses of closing the prisons, and does not say anything about the prisoners inside them, let alone offer any comments from them.)
Further, Jordan elaborates on the subject of amputations. “They lost limbs, lost their toes, or their foot, because of the sugar. And [for] wheelchairs, their ain’t ramps that go in and out of the doors. The doors will open up for the wheelchair to go through and you can hardly get through the damn door,” he says.
He suspects a lot of the amputations are from diabetes, but he also knows prisoners who “say they ain’t diabetic, but they got their damn leg cut off, and their toes and foot. They say they ain’t no diabetic but they sure got their limbs cut off.”
Jordan adds that drugs are a major problem in the prisons. “The police are corrupt, man,” he says. “The police, they’re bringing all the dope into this damn place. That’s who is doing it… That’s how they’re getting it, because there ain’t nobody else leaving here. Who else leaves this prison? Nobody else. How you think it’s getting in here?” And he says the drugs, combined with the overcrowding, are another main driver of the violence.
In addition to prisoners with mental health issues, “There’s a lot of older guys in here getting beat up,” says Jordan, and he believes the violence in the prison has grown worse over the years.
The ADOC and the prison administration “knows the problems,” says Jordan, “but they won’t solve the problems.”