Advocates expect DOJ lawsuit against Alabama prisons to continue under Trump

Criminal justice reform advocates believe the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Alabama over the state’s prison conditions will  continue even as President-elect Donald Trump railed against the department in his presidential campaign.

Those interviewed noted that the lawsuit started in 2020 during Trump’s first term and said that Trump’s criticisms of the department were directed at those who filed criminal charges against him for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.

“It was five years ago this year that the DOJ, under Trump, released a report detailing various ways that incarcerated people’s rights in the men’s prisons were getting violated under the federal constitution,” said Hernandez D. Stroud, a senior fellow for Justice with the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive nonprofit law and public policy institute. “Because that litigation was initiated under President Trump, I don’t think that the litigation will stop because of President- elect Trump’s election.”

But experts and criminal justice reform advocates agree that the DOJ will shift its priorities to issues that align more to the former president’s priorities, ones that include greater powers for law enforcement and less attention on civil rights.

The SPLC, involved in litigation against the Alabama Department of Corrections, declined comment. A message was sent to the Alabama Attorney General’s Office Thursday seeking comment.

Representatives from the DOJ filed a lawsuit in December 2020 against both the state and the ADOC, alleging that violence in Alabama’s  prisons violated incarcerated people’s Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

The lawsuit stemmed from an investigation that began in 2016. In reports published in 2019 and 2020, the agency detailed physical and sexual assaults among inmates and from corrections officers directed at the incarcerated.

“In September 2019, a lieutenant at Ventress lifted a handcuffed prisoner up off the ground and slammed him on a concrete floor several times, knocking him unconscious,” according to DOJ’s 2020 report on excessive force from corrections officers. “The prisoner was unable to breathe on his own, was intubated, and taken to an outside hospital, where medical personnel administered CPR several times to keep the prisoner alive.”

In other cases, the investigation found that corrections officers used force as punishment or retribution. In January 2018, the DOJ alleged that a corrections officer at Staton Correctional Facility in Elmore County instructed a person to take a stretcher to a dormitory. The person replied that he could not follow the order because of a prior order given to him by a correctional captain.

“The prisoner claimed the officer slammed him into a door and hit him in the face three times with little provocation,” the DOJ report states. “The officer then handcuffed the prisoner. A captain reviewed the incident and concluded that the incident could have been avoided and that it “escalated unnecessarily due to provocation by the officer. The documents ADOC provided us do not show that discipline was imposed.”

According to the lawsuit, corrections officers routinely fail to intervene when individuals within the prison facility commit violence against others.

“For example, on May 27, 2020, a 33-year old prisoner at Elmore Correctional Facility died from injuries sustained after being attacked by another prisoner in an open dormitory,” the lawsuit states.

Veronica Johnson, deputy director of the Alabama Justice Initiative, said the fact William Barr, who served as attorney general under Trump during his first term, filed the lawsuit made it seem likely to continue.

“For whatever reason, he felt moved to ensure that Alabama was protected,” she said.

Trump plans to nominate former Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi, who represented Trump in his first impeachment trial, as U.S. attorney general.

By and large, Johnson said, understanding of the issues within the state prisons goes beyond political divisions. She cited testimony from families and loved ones of those currently incarcerated within Alabama’s prisons at a recent meeting of the state’s Joint Prison Oversight Committee.

“Once they understood, and once they knew what should have been happening, they acted accordingly,” Johnson said.

Considering the DOJ that began the investigation that eventually led to the lawsuit, the agency also has the authority to request that it be withdrawn.

“It would seem odd that a change in political leadership would change whether or not constitutional violations are occurring and the extent to which those violations should be remedied, especially when this particular litigation was instituted under President Trump’s Department of Justice,” Stroud said. “It would be one thing if this were a case brought under (President Joe) Biden’s DOJ, and you had President-elect Trump appointing a new Attorney General who would have a new approach, but this litigation was brought under Trump.”

The issue, however, has already been brought before the courts given that the litigation has already been filed, and will ultimately determine whether the case continues.

“I would expect this lawsuit to continue, absolutely,” said Julie Abbate, national advocacy director for Just Detention International, a health and human rights organization seeking to end sexual abuse in forms of detention. “A lot of times it is the framing of the issues that impacts Republicans versus the Democrats. Democrats, of course, are focused on the civil rights and human rights of people who we lock up. The Republican administrations are more focused on making sure that dirty law enforcement folks, including corrections, don’t sully the good name of the rest of the law enforcement community.”

The Office of Civil Rights Division of the DOJ tried to intervene in several cases while Trump was first elected president.

In 2020, the DOJ investigated Florida’s Lowell Correctional Institution over allegations that the state’s Department of Corrections failed to keep females safe from sexual abuse by staff.

In Kentucky, staff working within the Civil Rights Division filed notice against the Boyd County Detention Center in 2019 after an investigation uncovered allegations of staff using excessive force through the use of pepper spray, electronic devices and restraints in chairs.

“The Trump administration, last time, in four years opened more conditions of confinement cases in prisons and jails than the Obama administration did in eight years,” Abbate said. “It really defies political partisanship in nature.”

But Trump’s perspective may have changed after he was the target of an investigation for the role that he played in the insurrection at the capital following his election loss in 2020.

“We know from things that he said, from Project 2025, that appears to be an intention to be very pro law enforcement, which in his view means allowing law enforcement to be pretty aggressive, and not feel so reigned in, which would be very consistent with what he did last time, which is not allow any investigations of law enforcement agencies,” said Christy Lopez, a law professor at Georgetown University and served as Deputy Chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at DOJ from 2010 to 2017.

Abbate said that she also “read the tea leaves” and could sense, along with her colleagues at the DOJ, that police violations of civil rights were not a priority during Trump’s first administration and reacted accordingly by investigating other potential violations.

Just about all agreed that the incoming president will shift the DOJ’s focus away from Biden’s priorities.

“I think it is less likely that it will disappear than some of the policing cases,” Lopez said. “But it really does depend on how anti-civil rights this administration is, and I just don’t know that we know yet whether it is going to be more or less anti-civil rights than the previous Trump administration.”