Most of the complaints are handwritten in ballpoint pen and sent from prisons to federal courts through the U.S. mail. The particulars about the incidents vary, but fear of correctional officers is a common theme.

“I am requesting an emergency transfer before these officers kill me,” wrote one man from St. Clair Correctional Facility.

“I am more afraid now than I ever have been since I was first incarcerated,” wrote another man from Holman Prison.

“Don’t let these people kill me,” wrote another man from Donaldson Correctional Facility. “I’m scared for my life and that they will say I killed myself.”

The allegations are from three civil rights lawsuits among 124 that the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) has paid to settle since 2020. The vast majority involved complaints of excessive force inside Alabama’s violent and overcrowded prisons, according to a review of court records and state financial data.

More from Alabama Reflector

An Alabama Reflector examination found that of 124 lawsuits that ADOC settled in the five-year period between 2020 and 2024, 94 involved complaints of excessive force. Other lawsuits alleged wrongful deaths and accused ADOC staff of failing to protect incarcerated people from violence, including assaults and rapes.

The cost of defending lawsuits against individual officers and larger, class-action cases against the entire department has pushed ADOC‘s legal spending over $57 million since 2020. In the last five years, the department has spent over $17 million on the legal defense of accused officers and lawsuit settlements, along with over $39 million litigating a handful of complex cases against ADOC, including a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice over prison conditions.

Data on civil lawsuits and outcomes against other state prison systems is not readily available, but the sheer volume of excessive force cases ADOC is settling is significant, according to several correctional experts.

“That sounds extreme, in my experience,” said Steve Sinclair, who retired as Washington’s Department of Corrections Secretary in 2021 after a 32-year career in corrections. “It’s pretty routine to have lawsuits for various reasons, and not all of those are legit lawsuits. But certainly not 60 or 80 plus. It’s inconceivable to me.”

The 94 excessive force lawsuits were settled between 2020-2024, but resulted from incidents that occurred in the span between 2014-2022, and cover 15 of ADOC‘s 26 institutions, including maximum, medium and minimum-security facilities.

Alleged acts of excessive force resulting in serious injury were documented everywhere from the Loxley community work center, a minimum-security facility housing 360 prisoners who work in the community, to death row at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, depicting an institutional landscape characterized by subterranean brutality.

Forty-five percent of the lawsuits detailed injuries so severe that the victims required hospitalization, ranging from lacerations requiring stitches to broken bones, many requiring surgery. Some complaints allege beatings that resulted in multiple injuries. Medical records submitted in court show one man had both arms broken in an incident involving an officer. Another man said he suffered broken ribs and broken bones in his back from a staff assault. A third was hospitalized with a broken leg and hand. Nineteen complaints described traumatic head and brain injuries. At least seven cases detailed catastrophic traumas that left the victims permanently disabled or disfigured.

The findings are the result of a monthslong investigation that included the examination of accounting data obtained from the Alabama Department of Finance detailing all payments made from the General Liability Trust Fund since 2020, as well as court records connected to the trust fund transactions.

The General Liability Trust Fund operates similarly to insurance, with a $1 million cap per incident, to cover both the legal defense of state employees and any potential settlement payment, also known as indemnity, to plaintiffs. State agencies pay an annual premium to participate. The fund is used for individual plaintiff-filed lawsuits that seek damages. Lawsuits filed against entire state agencies, like class-action litigation that seek to change policy, are paid for out of the state’s General Fund.

The increased volume of individual lawsuits filed against employees of ADOC comes as the department is embroiled in several class-action lawsuits against the entire system over prison labor and the lack of mental health treatment, as well as ongoing litigation with the U.S. Department of Justice, which sued the state in December 2020 after concluding that Alabama “failed or refused to correct” unconstitutional prison conditions, including the common use of excessive force.

A staff member from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Alabama’s Northern District said the lawsuit remains ongoing at this time, but would not provide any further details.

ADOC and the Alabama Attorney General’s Office continue to deny that the state’s prison problems amount to systemic constitutional violations, but lawyers for state employees are routinely using public dollars to quietly pay out dozens of lawsuit settlements—the amounts determined in confidential settlement negotiations or mediation, not reported in court filings, and outside stakeholder scrutiny. While settlements are not an admission of liability, these lawsuits were filed over the same conditions that led the DOJ to sue the state: overcrowding, understaffing, inadequate facilities, and “an excessive amount of violence, sexual abuse and prisoner deaths.”

The DOJ began investigating Alabama’s 13 prisons for men in 2016, and in 2019 released the first of two findings letters that detailed why the federal department found reasonable cause that conditions in ADOC violate the Eighth and 14th Amendment rights of prisoners, amounting to cruel and unusual punishment.

“All too often, correctional officers use force in the absence of a physical threat while making no effort to de-escalate tense situations,” the DOJ stated in its findings letter on excessive force. “Such uses of force heighten tensions in already violent and overcrowded prisons. Correctional officers also use force as a form of retribution and for the sole purpose of inflicting pain.”

In response to questions about the surge in excessive force lawsuits and settlements, an ADOC spokesperson pointed to the DOJ.

“Most are piggybacking off the allegations contained in the DOJ findings letters, which ADOC adamantly denies,” wrote ADOC‘s spokesperson, Kelly Betts, in an email response.

Betts also wrote that ADOC “does not comment on pending litigation or confidential settlement negotiations and any resulting agreements,” and referred questions about the number of settlements or specific lawsuits to the Alabama Attorney General’s Office, which began handling most of ADOC‘s civil litigation in 2023.

The Alabama Attorney General’s Office did not respond to multiple emails and phone messages seeking comment, including a list of submitted questions.

For decades, ADOC had no internal grievance process for people in prison to file complaints over officer abuse or misconduct. Without proper oversight inside the prisons, lawsuits can serve as a backstop for accountability.

Many legal rights and protections for people in prison have been put in place by the courts, and some of those cases started out as complaints from the prisoners themselves. Everything from the right to send and receive mail, to the right to basic medical care are the results of litigation, said one man who has filed lawsuits against ADOC officers in the past and asked to withhold his name out of fear of reprisal.

“There’s really no bottom to how badly a state will treat prisoners without the intervention and oversight of the courts,” he said. “Filing a lawsuit seeking damages is often the only meaningful way to challenge mistreatment in prison.”

‘A culture of impunity’

The 94 excessive force complaints that resulted in settlement payments to victims do not represent the total lawsuits filed against ADOC officers, many of which are dismissed by the courts.

“These are probably the most egregious examples of what is really a culture of impunity and violation of people’s rights,” said David Gespass, an attorney who has represented incarcerated people in excessive force cases against ADOC officers.

The complaints detail incidents occurring in various parts of the prisons — open dormitories and individual cells, but also prison barbershops, chow halls, health care units and bathrooms. Forty-five percent of complainants said officers beat them while they were handcuffed, and 27% alleged the excessive use of chemical spray, two factors cited in the DOJ’s findings.

The state’s highest security and most overcrowded prisons generated the most lawsuits in the time period examined. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer topped the list with 25 excessive force lawsuits ending in settlement, followed by Holman, St. Clair, Limestone and Bibb.

Some of the complaints include shocking and gruesome details.

• 2018 assault at Ventress. The complaint stated an officer handcuffed the victim behind his back, then 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.” ADOC settled the lawsuit for $90,000, and according to court documents, terminated the officer who assaulted the man.
• 2019 incident at Limestone. The complaint stated an officer placed the victim in a takedown position, known to cause “excruciating pain” in the shoulders, then another officer kicked his legs, causing him to fall and strike his head on the floor. Officers then sprayed him with mace, kicked and punched him. The man suffered a traumatic brain injury, permanent hearing loss, and numerous contusions, according to the complaint. The plaintiff was released from prison and died of an overdose in 2023, according to court documents. ADOC settled the lawsuit with his mother for $9,000.
• 2018 assault at Staton. The complaint stated that two officers sprayed the victim with pepper spray, beat him with batons, kicked and stomped him. The man was flown to a hospital in critical condition, where he was diagnosed with bleeding in the brain, multiple fractures to his ribs, face, head, back and damage to his lungs. The man is now in a long-term VA hospital “bedridden, unable to verbally communicate, and minimally conscious.” ADOC settled the lawsuit filed by his family for $55,000.

Five settlements stemmed from a raid at Holman prison in 2016 by ADOC‘s “Correctional Emergency Response Team” or CERT. According to the complaints, CERT members charged into the dorm while the men inside were sleeping, shouting and beating men with batons. At least one man was taken to a hospital with serious injuries. The settlements totaled $13,500.

Two years later, another incident involving CERT at Holman led to an excessive force lawsuit filed by a man who uses a wheelchair. The man handwrote in his complaint that one officer slapped him, another hit him in the head with his baton.

“That blow busted my head and caused me to fall out of my wheelchair flat on the floor face down,” he wrote.

“They kicked and stomped on me so viciously until I defecated on myself. I was knocked out unconscious.” His lawsuit ended in a $7,000 settlement.

Prisoners injured during a medical event

At least a half dozen complaints alleged that officers used excessive force on incarcerated men who were in need of mental health or medical attention, including two filed by men who said they were beaten while having a seizure.

One such complaint accused officers at Bibb of beating a man with batons while he was suffering an epileptic seizure in the infirmary, “strapped or handcuffed into a gurney.” When his seizure was over and the beating stopped, officers accused the man of using drugs, which he denied, according to the complaint. They then “chained plaintiff to a wall as he continued to bleed and exhibit clear epileptic symptoms.”

The incarcerated man presented witness statements from other prisoners and prison staff to support his claim, but officers argued their use of force was justified because the plaintiff was violent and unrestrained.

A federal judge denied the officers’ motions to dismiss the case.

“The court finds that a reasonable jury would have difficulty not concluding that prison officers beating a fully restrained, possibly unconscious prisoner who had just suffered an epileptic seizure ‘offends contemporary standards of decency,’” U.S. District Judge Karen Owen Bowdre wrote.

ADOC settled the lawsuit for $30,000.

“Excessive force should always be treated like a big deal,” said former Washington Department of Corrections Secretary Steve Sinclair. “If you tolerate or minimize it, that’s what builds a horrible culture. And you shouldn’t have to wait for a court to tell you.”

Mounting cases, mounting costs

A spike in lawsuits filed against individual officers began in 2020. In the five years before that, ADOC typically filed fewer than 20 claims per year to the General Liability Trust Fund, according to records provided by the Department of Finance. In 2020, the number of claims ticked up to 33, then 58 in 2021. In 2022, facing a surge of lawsuits against officers, ADOC filed 194 liability claims, and then filed 235 in 2023. Complete data for 2024 is not yet available.

That flood of lawsuits caused ADOC‘s spending from the general liability trust fund to quadruple. Between 2015 and 2019, ADOC accounted for $2.9 million in legal expenses and settlement payments from the fund. In the following five years between 2020 and 2024, ADOC utilized $17.4 million from the General Liability Trust Fund, more than any other state department.

Legal expenses for the defense of officers named in the lawsuits amounted to double the amount of paid settlements. Between 2020 and 2024, payments to private attorneys who were hired to represent ADOC employees topped $12.9 million in that five year period, while indemnity, or settlement payments to plaintiffs, accounted for just $4.4 million. Plaintiffs alleging excessive force received a total of $1.7 million, with a median settlement of just $8,000.

These figures represent only a fraction of ADOC‘s overall legal spending since 2020. Legal payments to outside attorneys and law firms for the department’s defense in class action cases amount to over $39.7 million, paid out of the state’s General Fund budget, according to records available in the Open Alabama checkbook database maintained by the Department of Finance. Combined with transactions from the state’s liability trust fund, ADOC has spent over $57 million on legal services since 2020. By comparison, the Alabama Attorney General Office‘s General Fund budget this year is about $13.7 million.

“I think it’s fair to ask, how much is too much?” said Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, a member of the state’s Joint Prison Oversight Committee and a frequent critic of prison conditions and ADOC spending. “It’s hard to imagine that we were intending to create a fund that just allows us to be in a perpetual state of lawsuits forever. When does the state of Alabama start demanding results from these lawsuits?”

This reporting was made possible by support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.