This is an opinion column.

One thing is true, and incontrovertible.

People hide stuff for a reason. Because they’re embarrassed, maybe, or guilty. Because they are skittish, or shy, or perhaps nefarious, or secretive. Because they hold on to a childish belief that if they deny, deny, deny, then no one can ever prove them wrong.

Another thing is true.

People don’t hide stuff they’re proud of.

The Alabama Department of Corrections – I first learned this from tweets by Evan Mealins of the Montgomery Advertiser, so props to him for keeping an eye out during the holidays – has decided to stop reporting inmate deaths, including homicides and suicides, in its monthly reports.

Instead, it will report them in its quarterly reports, which run notoriously behind.

It’s like hiding your cookies after having your hand caught in the jar.

This is a department already under scrutiny and pressure because of inmate deaths and assaults, where more than 130 people died between January and September last year, and perhaps far more. The Equal Justice Initiative has reported more than 220 deaths, topping the pandemic years.

And this is what the DOC does in response? It changes the way it reports deaths. It decides not to tell the people of this state that men and women in its charge are dying inside the publicly built walls?

Like children, who hide candy wrappers under their pillows with the hope and belief the evidence will never be found.

This is a department – let me say it again – that was excoriated by the U.S. Justice Department as a constitutional catastrophe that failed to guard against violence, sexual abuse, and death.

And hell, that was Donald Trump’s justice department.

How do we allow this? How do we rationalize it in a state that officially claims to value life, in the buckle of the Bible Belt? Perhaps it is because we are in the halo of our own hypocrisy.

This is a state that will use COVID relief money to pay for prisons. In a department of corrections that has decided to hire a company called YesCare, Corp. to provide health services to inmates. YesCare, formed from troubled Corizon Healthcare Co., has faced more than 1,000 lawsuits and paid millions to settle wrongful death lawsuits, according to the Washington Post.

Perhaps it is too much in Alabama to hope for a corrections department that seeks to rehabilitate people, that treats them as human and strives to release them into a world where they might have a chance to live productive lives.

But is it too much to ask to strive to keep these people alive?

I asked the DOC who made this decision to change the way deaths are reported, and why. And how the people of Alabama were supposed to take it.

It said in an email its Research and Planning Division “recently reviewed its posted statistical reports and decided to only post inmate death statistics on the quarterly reports because those numbers reflect the findings of closed investigations.”

Though dead people are dead, regardless of the status of the investigation.

DOC said monthly statistics will still be available through public information requests. But the change still makes tracking deaths more difficult, at a time the prison system should be more open, not less.

But the DOC is not the only one that must answer. There is the governor, and the Legislature, and the rest of us.

If we as Alabamians think it fine and just to stockpile people, to warehouse them behind dangerous walls and tally their deaths every quarter, the prison system alone isn’t what needs scrutiny.

If this is what we deem acceptable, we are culpable, you and I. We put up with it. We accept it as status quo. We rationalize it because people have been convicted of crimes. We dehumanize them to make ourselves feel better when they are raped, or killed, and forgotten.

You know what? That seems almost criminal.

John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for AL.com.