Executive Summary

Since 2020, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) has spent at least $68 million in taxpayer dollars on legal defense and settlements tied to violence, neglect, and preventable harm inside state prisons, while protecting abusive officers instead of firing them. This brief documents this spending and presents concrete alternatives that would have made Alabamians healthier, safer, and more secure. 

Under the current system, people in state custody have been abused, tortured, sent to hospitals with life-threatening injuries, and even brutally murdered. Steven Davis, whose story is central to The Alabama Solution, was taken to the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in critical condition, then pronounced dead, after being repeatedly beaten by correctional officer Lt. Roderick Gadson. 

Getting rid of abusive, corrupt officers like Lt. Roderick Gadson doesn’t have to cost Alabama millions of dollars. 

Time and time again in Alabama, taxpayer funds have been used to defend a system that enables murders, waste, abuse, and corruption, rather than to prevent them. All the while, killer officers like Gadson have been promoted – in his case, twice. The current spending pattern prioritizes defense and damage control. It treats violence, neglect, and failure inside the prison system as a normal outcome to be defended rather than conditions to be corrected.

That same $68 million could have delivered measurable, statewide benefits that make Alabamians healthier, safer, and more secure. For example, we could have paid for:   

• ~3,000 substance use treatment placements, reducing cycles of incarceration and crisis

• >1,100 correctional officers for one year, addressing staffing shortages the state itself has cited as a driver of unsafe conditions and ensuring that capacity or resource constraints are not part of the problem

• >200 full medical degrees from UAB, expanding the state’s healthcare workforce for decades

• ~8,500 people receiving a full year of comprehensive mental health care, including therapy, psychiatry, and case management, reducing crises, suicide risk, and E.R. use

• 68 city-years* of violence interruption and reentry programs, reducing harm before it occurs (*funding one AL city for 68 years or 68 AL cities for one year)

• ~7,000 people housed post-release, strengthening reentry and reducing recidivism

• >13,000 teachers to be supported with retention and classroom funding, stabilizing K–12 classrooms across Alabama at a time when education funds have been reallocated for prison construction

Taxpayer funds have been used to defend the system that produced these negative outcomes, and that waste continues to this day.