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News Article: An Alabama Prison’s Unrelenting Descent Into Violence

RTR91

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The door opened and there stood a man with knives in both hands. Michael McGregor recognized him immediately. Since Mr. McGregor had arrived at the prison the day before, the man had twice propositioned him for sex and asked if he wanted to buy a knife.

Mr. McGregor, 52, with a long but mostly nonviolent record — some bad checks, a stolen car, a couple of two-decade-old minor robberies — had been unnerved enough to request a move to a different part of the prison. No, he was told. Not right now.

He returned to his cell, shut the door behind him and tried to sleep.

Now here was the man beside him. The door locks at this prison, he later learned, were all but useless. The man, he would also learn, had been convicted of jail rape before.

“You know what time it is,” the man said.

Attacks, like the one on Mr. McGregor, which left him “pouring blood like a water hose,” have happened with grim regularity at St. Clair Correctional Facility, one of six maximum-security prisons in Alabama. In recent years, even by the standards of one of the nation’s most dysfunctional prison systems, St. Clair stood out for its violence.

“The frequency of assaults resulting in life-threatening injuries is quite simply among the highest I have observed in my 43-year career in corrections,” Steve J. Martin, who has examined hundreds of prisons nationwide as a corrections expert, wrote in a 2016 report prepared for a lawsuit over conditions at St. Clair. The prison reflected “a total breakdown of the necessary basic structures that are required to operate a prison safely,” he added in an interview.
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CajunCrimson

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All the more reason to fill up Death Row daily - and clear it out each night. Then those with non-violent crimes can serve out their sentence in peace.
 
MattinBama

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CajunCrimson said:
All the more reason to fill up Death Row daily - and clear it out each night. Then those with non-violent crimes can serve out their sentence in peace.
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Can't make money in a privatized prison if you kill off all of your inventory.
 
Jessica4Bama

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I have a hard time feeling too sorry for people in prison. I'm mean, I guess. Violence shouldn't occur of course, but these aren't saints behind bars.

Edit: I'm talking mainly about the violent criminals. Why isn't there a separate prison system for non-violent offenders? Never understood that.
 
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MattinBama

MattinBama

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Jessica4Bama said:
I have a hard time feeling too sorry for people in prison. I'm mean, I guess. Violence shouldn't occur of course, but these aren't saints behind bars.

Edit: I'm talking mainly about the violent criminals. Why isn't there a separate prison system for non-violent offenders? Never understood that.
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Not everyone in prison committed the crime they were convicted of.
 
Jessica4Bama

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MattinBama said:
Not everyone in prison committed the crime they were convicted of.
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Well of course. There are plenty of innocent people behind bars, sadly.

If y'all have never watched Lockup and Lockup Raw, you should. It's very eye opening. I particularly liked the ones they did on foreign prisons. There is one in Russia that is a bad mama jama. Can't remember the name.
 
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MattinBama

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NationalTitles16 said:
Potentially tens of thousands of innocent people.
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Well beyond potentially - at least nationally.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...eddc056ad8a_story.html?utm_term=.9e01eb002c01

How many people are convicted of crimes they did not commit? Last year, a study I co-authored on the issue was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It shows that 4.1 percent of defendants who are sentenced to death in the United States are later shown to be innocent: 1 in 25.
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That's just death row. And some people may say 4.1% isn't a big deal. But if you're the one in line to be executed for something you didn't do I'm sure it would seem a whole lot bigger.

Here's another couple of links:

http://caught.net/innoc.htm

Even if the true error rate of America’s criminal justice system is only ten percent, this translates to 200,000 innocent people presently behind bars in the United States. It means that there are more innocent prisoners in America than there are prisoners of all kinds in France, Germany and Britain combined. It means that the present number of innocent American prisoners is actually higher than the entire American prison population back in 1970.
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https://www.innocenceproject.org/all-cases/#exonerated-by-dna

Just keep scrolling down. It keeps going and going. And that's just a small fraction of the people that have been released.

The justice system is royally broken.
 
Displaced Bama Fan

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MattinBama said:
Well beyond potentially - at least nationally.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...eddc056ad8a_story.html?utm_term=.9e01eb002c01



That's just death row. And some people may say 4.1% isn't a big deal. But if you're the one in line to be executed for something you didn't do I'm sure it would seem a whole lot bigger.

Here's another couple of links:

http://caught.net/innoc.htm



https://www.innocenceproject.org/all-cases/#exonerated-by-dna

Just keep scrolling down. It keeps going and going. And that's just a small fraction of the people that have been released.

The justice system is royally broken.
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The justice system, much like the Child Protective System of each state, makes money for people. In the end, it's all about control and money. You wonder why it's so hard to adopt a child in this country? Because the state, the judge (see Pennsylvania recently) the companies that "house" the kids, provide oversight, etc...they get paid. As you said, it's broken.
 
Crimson1967

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CajunCrimson said:
All the more reason to fill up Death Row daily - and clear it out each night. Then those with non-violent crimes can serve out their sentence in peace.
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Executing everyone on death row wouldn't even put a dent in prison overcrowding.

"Clearing out" death row every day would put us on the level of some of the worst regimes in history. Not a place I would want to live.

I oppose the death penalty because it does not work as a deterrent and it is never applied fairly and evenly. Plus there is the minor issue of innocent people being convicted. Granted, not that many but even one person being executed for something they didn't do is too many.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Bamabuzzard

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MattinBama said:
Well beyond potentially - at least nationally.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...eddc056ad8a_story.html?utm_term=.9e01eb002c01



That's just death row. And some people may say 4.1% isn't a big deal. But if you're the one in line to be executed for something you didn't do I'm sure it would seem a whole lot bigger.

Here's another couple of links:

http://caught.net/innoc.htm



https://www.innocenceproject.org/all-cases/#exonerated-by-dna

Just keep scrolling down. It keeps going and going. And that's just a small fraction of the people that have been released.

The justice system is royally broken.
Click to expand...


I'm not sure if this is what you're talking about or not. But when a trial/case comes down to human judgement on whether someone is guilty or innocent. I'm not sure that can ever be truly fixed. Especially when one of the requirements to convict someone, "beyond a reasonable doubt", is rooted in opinion and human judgement. Unfortunately not every case has indisputable video evidence that someone is guilty or not. There are almost always going to be information gaps in trials. My wife and I are addicts of the Investigation ID channel on Direct TV. I can't tell you how many times we've watched documentaries of real life trials that ended in someone being convicted and sent to life in prison based on the evidence suggesting that he/she "did it". Not that the evidence truly PROVED they did it. The evidence satisfied the jury's definition of "beyond reasonable doubt". Which does't look the same in everyone's eyes. Scary. Very scary.

But, it begs the question. What's a better method?
 
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MattinBama

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Bamabuzzard said:
I'm not sure if this is what you're talking about or not. But when a trial/case comes down to human judgement on whether someone is guilty or innocent. I'm not sure that can ever be truly fixed. Especially when one of the requirements to convict someone, "beyond a reasonable doubt", is rooted in opinion and human judgement. Unfortunately not every case has indisputable video evidence that someone is guilty or not. There are almost always going to be information gaps in trials. My wife and I are addicts of the Investigation ID channel on Direct TV. I can't tell you how many times we've watched documentaries of real life trials that ended in someone being convicted and sent to life in prison based on the evidence suggesting that he/she "did it". Not that the evidence truly PROVED they did it. The evidence satisfied the jury's definition of "beyond reasonable doubt". Which does't look the same in everyone's eyes. Scary. Very scary.

But, it begs the question. What's a better method?
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I used to watch a lot of the ID stuff as well although it has gotten harder to watch them in the same manner I used to since now when I see a lack of physical evidence and just a confession to catch the person I start to suspect that things may not be as they seem.

There are a lot of countries doing things better than we are in this regard. The problem is there are a lot of things that would work better. No one has a 100% perfect system but there are many ways we could improve the system.

In some countries it can cause mistrials if the media goes too crazy about the story before the trial has even begun or even during the trial. Here we no longer presume innocence we presume guilt as soon as the Nancy Grace's and everyone else piles on about what happened before it has even been sorted out. Here is one article about one of the more recent cases of something like what I was talking about: http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/austra...o-forced-mistrial-guilty-of-contempt-of-court

The adversarial method to me is not the best method. It becomes about who tells the best story in court to the jurors rather than about trying to get to the truth of the matter. In some European countries the truth is given more of a priority.

Police officers and prosecutors rarely ever have any consequences for fudging things in court or outright cheating/violating rights. Some of the worst offending Attorney Generals end up as judges. That ties into another thing for me with these positions being elected officials. It often encourages them not to care about the truth so much as looking good for re-election. And if they let free some guy that the media has already convicted then chances are the voters are going to let them go too.

Another major thing is that the appeals process takes forever and causes lots of issues. Once you are in the system it is a nightmare to try to remove yourself from it. The Undisclosed Podcast was recently covering a case about a guy named Joey Watkins from Georgia whose cell phone records were judged incorrectly during appeals and his appeal was denied. The problem is the cell phone records show that he (unless he loaned out his phone) could not have been where they said he was when the crime was committed. But since the appeal was already denied they cannot re-raise that issue in court even though it helps prove innocence.

I'm sure I could spend another hour typing giant blocks of text but I'll stop there for now.
 
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