This is an opinion column.

It ought to be stunning that Alabama’s contract review committee on Thursday reapproved 26 deals paying up to $14.9 million to one lawyer – Bill Lunsford – to defend the state’s disgraceful prison system.

Oughta be.

Then again it ought to be stunning to see the state prepare to spend $975 million – pretty much a billion – to build a single prison in Elmore County.

Oughta be.

It ought to be shocking that deaths in Alabama prisons are so common the DOC changed the way it catalogs them. It ought to shock us that even Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department called them a constitutional nightmare of death, rape, cruelty and ineptitude, that inmates are regularly held for ransom, their families extorted for money in exchange for their safety. It ought to be shocking how Alabama prisons are woefully overcrowded at the same time paroles have all but dried up.

It really, really oughta be.

Lunsford will earn up to $9.9 million over two years on a single case – USA vs Alabama – that claims Alabama’s prisons violate the 8th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, fail to provide safe conditions and can’t protect inmates from each other or from guards. He also has 25 other two-year contracts capped at $200,000 each. The Alabama Joint Contract Review Committee reissued all these contracts — dating from 2018 forward — to Lunsford after he changed law firms.

But if dollar figures and government reports don’t move you, look at the people Lunsford – a fine lawyer, I am told – is being paid to pummel in court. These are from some of the cases you’re paying to defend.

Jamie Prim was a non-violent drug offender who was fortunate enough to be granted parole. But he died of a brutal beating in 2018 before he could be released.

“Mr. Prim was released from prison to a funeral home rather than his family and freedom,” the lawsuit says.

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Another claims that in April of 2018, in Ventress Correctional Facility, a sergeant handcuffed inmate Daniel Beaty’s hands behind his back and beat him while two other guards watched.

The correctional officer “struck him, from behind, breaking his jaw in two places, sending a large portion of his jawbone between his teeth, and spraying blood all over the wall,” the lawsuit says.

Another claims an inmate was raped at Ventress with full knowledge of the staff. The prison “had filled only 30 percent of the correctional officer positions … yet the inmate population at Ventress was nearly double that which the facility was designed to house,” according to the suit.

A suit by Troy Connell contends he witnessed a guard beating another inmate at Donaldson Correctional Facility, and was called to testify at a hearing about what he saw. He answered questions, and was later beaten by a guard for it.

“A correctional officer named Big G told Connell that Connell would leave Donaldson in a body bag carried out the back gate,” the suit says.

Frankie Johnson claims he was repeatedly assaulted at St. Clair and Donaldson, where he was stabbed nine times in 2019 by a group of inmates. The next year he was attacked again, according to his suit.

“While restrained in shackles and handcuffs during a therapy session, Mr. Johnson suffered a second attack at Donaldson, when he was stabbed repeatedly by another prisoner,” it said.

Aundra Boykins claims in another suit he was stabbed 12 times by an inmate in St. Clair Correctional Facility who got to him because a guard was asleep at his post. When the guard woke up he did not try to break up the assault, according to the suit.

Inmate Steven Mullins reported to guards he had been sexually assaulted at knifepoint, but the guards didn’t confiscate the knife or try to protect him. Mullins was killed because of the guard’s “deliberate indifference,” according to the suit.

On and on they go, one after the shameful next. And these are just the tip of them. One inmate’s family claims he was beaten and left to die in Bullock Correctional Facility as prison staff “simply watched or ignored the violent acts taking place.”

Men claim they were attacked, and others died at St. Clair, “where mismanagement, poor leadership, overcrowding, inadequate security, and unsafe conditions, including broken and nonfunctioning locks on the majority of cell doors, have led to an extraordinarily high homicide rate, weekly stabbings and assaults, and a culture where violence is tolerated.”

Another suit argues that “unchecked corruption” contributes to rampant prisoner-on-prisoner violence, “as correctional officers regularly smuggle in contraband for prisoners, enable attacks on enemies of prisoners with whom they have dealings, and fail to adequately report or discipline prisoners that commit attacks on other prisoners.”

Alabama pays – you pay – to defend these suits. As Rep. Chris England, a member of the contract review committee, put it Thursday, the escalating legal fees at this rate will stretch to tens of millions or more, and the problems in prisons will remain. Alabama prisons are inarguably problematic, and lawyers get rich.

“Mr. Lunsford is basically a government agency at this point,” he said.

It really ought to shock us. The money. The inhumanity. The indifference. The fact that we must regularly defend these atrocities from the injured, from the families of the dead, from the federal government and from our own ailing consciences.

Maybe that’s the most shocking thing of all. That we have grown so used to our state’s lack of conscience that it doesn’t shock us at all.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.