Notes on Larry W. Yackle's 1989 Book on Federal Judicial Involvement in Alabama's Prison System From Early 70s to Early 80s
Two Interesting Passages to Think About Today
I’ve been reading Larry W. Yackle’s book, Reform and Regret: The Story of Federal Judicial Involvement in the Alabama Prison System, and have been planning to 1) add it to the short reading list I’ve been working on of books about Alabama prisons, most of which are not well known, and 2), write a more in depth piece about Yackle’s book, and lay out the history of Alabama’s prisons from the time his book ends up to now.
The Yackle book, so far, is substantive, so I’ve decided to write about it in shorter, more accessible, separate pieces. I’ve already come across aspects worth pointing out on their own, some passages I think could be helpful to readers for understanding the conditions of the Alabama prison system now, roughly 40 years after that decade of reform efforts Yackle was writing about.
Also, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that most people are not reading their 1980s Larry W. Yackle these days (would be thrilled to learn I’m wrong), so I feel I can do a kind of public service by looking at some important aspects of his book. I’ll try to keep these pieces brief, each one focused on a different chunk of the book.
Decades have passed since the book was published and I don’t want to put words in Yackle’s mouth. He has not worked or spoken on this issue in recent years, and declined to be interviewed for that reason. Perhaps he is precisely as cynical as I am. Perhaps not. But what if the prisons just kept getting worse and worse after that decade of reform movements from the early 70s to the early 80s?
Yackle focuses on the period between the early 70s and early 80s when, following key litigation about the treatment of patients in psychiatric institutions in the State, challenged through the federal courts, similar challenges were made against the prison system, largely in the same federal court in Alabama, which is the court that Yackle primarily focuses on in the book, Judge Frank Johnson’s court.1
In this piece, I won’t be getting into all the specific ways these legal challenges were argued. I’d just like to note two passages toward the beginning of Yackle’s book that feel relevant today.
In describing the history of the Alabama prison system, Yackle points out the following:
From the earliest days, and increasingly after the Civil War, the Alabama penal system was charged at once to pay for itself and to accommodate large numbers of inmates […]. These two themes, the requirement of self-support and crowding, were ever in conflict; the attempt to reconcile them condemned the Alabama prison system to failure.2
This remains true today. Since the end of World War II, the forced labor of prisoners has increasingly been utilized to maintain the facilities in which the forced laborers are imprisoned. Recently, this tension, between “self-support” and overcrowding, was played out in dramatic fashion as Republican Governor Kay Ivey and the legislature scandalously (and successfully) diverted hundreds of millions of dollars in Covid Relief Funds to building new male prisons, and the State plans to continue building one or two more after that, partly to “address” the overcrowding problem.3 There are more than a few problems with that, but as it pertains to overcrowding specifically, here is one of them: They are closing four older prisons at the same time.4 Those prisons are dilapidated and can’t be used anymore. In short, closing four prisons and opening two new ones while doing nothing to decrease the number of prisoners is a strange way to solve an overcrowding problem in a prison system.
The second passage I’d like to touch on is quite illuminating. Just so readers understand how bad the prisons are in Alabama today: At one point in Yackle’s book, he notes that a particularly bad stretch in the early 70s brought more attention to the problems with Alabama prisons and added urgency to the legal challenges that were beginning at that time. This is Yackle’s description of 1972-1973 Alabama prisons, preceding the January 18th 1974 prisoner uprising in Fountain prison,5 written in 1989:
[T]he attention of prison authorities was diverted to even more serious difficulties within the system. The prison population had been growing for years, but now the influx of new inmates was staggering. Frustration and anger grew in geometric proportion. The result in Alabama was what it had been at Attica in New York only two years earlier. Through the long summer and fall of 1973, local newspapers carried scattered stories of inmate violence. Reports that inmates had been stabbed, raped, or murdered became common. By official count, a total of twenty-seven prisoners lost their lives in the Alabama penal system in the 1972-1973 period. Guards were also occasionally injured or killed. The rate of incidents promised to be higher still if the legislature enacted pending bills, sponsored by Attorney General Baxley, to increase prison sentences, and thus the number of prison inmates, dramatically. (P.45)
Compare what was considered to be those particularly scandalous numbers in those years in the early 70s to what we are seeing now. Take this report from December of 2022, 50 years after the scandalous period Yackle was writing about in 1989:
More people incarcerated in Alabama’s prisons have died so far in 2022 than in any single year for decades. In the first 11 months of the year, 222 people have died in the state’s prisons… The Alabama Department of Corrections has not reported the total number of deaths in 2022. Press have confirmed 222 deaths, which exceeds the toll recorded during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.6
Or consider this breakdown of recent numbers by Alabama Appleseed researcher Eddie Burkhalter, a great Alabama veteran local reporter:
Alabama prisons saw a record 325 deaths in 2023. Of those, 253 investigations have closed, and 112 deaths were preventable, with 10 homicides, 13 suicides and 89 overdose deaths. That per 100,000 homicide rate is 4 times the national rate, according to the FBI’s most recent data… Alabama’s overdose mortality rate in prisons last year of 435 per 100,000 was 20 times the national rate across state prisons, according to the latest available national data…From Jan. 1-June 20 there were 161 deaths among the incarcerated in Alabama prisons. (Data via records request) Last year we saw a record 325 deaths, and the year before a record 270. We could well set another record this year.7
See the first three chapters of Reform and Regret.
Yackle (P. 9-10).
Liz Vinson, “‘For Cruelty’s Sake’: State of Alabama Diverts $400 Million in COVID Funds to Build Prisons, Leaving Many in Dire Straits,” Southern Poverty Law Center, 7/1/2022
Ivana Hrynkiw and Ramsey Archibald, “Alabama’s billion-dollar prison plan does not end the overcrowding,” AL.com, 4/7/2023
Yackle, P. 45
“Record Deaths in Alabama Prisons; Many Were Preventable,” Equal Justice Initiative, 12/09/2022