Prisons are a death camp. Many incarcerated people are coming in with pre-existing physical or mental health conditions. Then they are denied access to medical treatment, accommodations for disabilities, mental health counseling, and shamed for pre-existing health conditions. Neither the individual nor the collective health of incarcerated people matters in the prison. This is proven each time an individual cannot receive medical help and every time a pandemic happens in a prison.
Many prisoners eat in the same room as they sit on their toilet because their room is their sleeping space, restroom, and dining area. Alabama prisons are severely overcrowded by the thousands. Prisons are environments of scarcity, not enough food, space, or care. This reality breeds violence. When incarcerated people are struggling to stay alive through resources that are at the disposal of the Alabama Department of Corrections, this does not create a safe space. People are forced into fight or flight. Alabama has high homicide rates within the prison and too often the rates of Alabama prison violence focus on incidents between incarcerated people, not violence enacted by the prison staff. The prison staff (correctional officers and such) abuse, harass, and murder incarcerated people, but this data is under-reported and hidden. One of the bare necessities for life is shelter, and incarcerated people are in living conditions that threaten their health and even life every day.
Prison is the direct successor of chattel slavery. We cannot forget prison’s origins and mistake them for necessary harm to rehabilitate people who committed “crimes”. The laws are created by the same people who uphold a white supremacist, capitalist society. People’s offenses are not charged the same and punishment is heightened for people of color and low-income people. This system is not made to be just. It is made to uphold an empire and has continuously been used to silence people who speak out against it.
Outside of this, crime will always exist when people cannot access life necessities and are surrounded by violence. We should not hyper-focus on interpersonal and inter-community violence while we neglect the violence our nation enacts onto millions here and abroad. Our government is not held accountable for the violence it executes in Haiti, Palestine, Congo, the Northern Mariana Islands, and so many more places. Our nation’s government cannot follow human rights law internationally, so why are civilians held to higher standards than our leaders? How have they convinced the general public that we are a free nation while our society runs on slave labor? There are many questions we can ask about the hypocrisy of our government and its selective choice of “appropriate” and “legal” violence.
This project/website is not supposed to make people feel better. It is supposed to make us uncomfortable. We need to be deeply uncomfortable with what is going on in prisons. Our current society relies on slave labor from incarcerated people. In the 2025, California fires, we saw incarcerated people at the front lines, making no more than $27 a day.1 Incarcerated people’s bodies are seen as dispensable. They have been coerced into excruciating medical experiments, dangerous work environments, and slavery. Prison’s natural effect is one of health destruction and violence. Prisons are a public health crisis that must be addressed.
While this website focuses on Alabama, we must remember this is not a geographic-specific problem, but an ideological one. Prisons enact health violence through their many cruel practices and these sections can only ever be a glimpse into them. There are so many videos throughout this project because incarcerated people are continuously dehumanized and reduced to their conviction, a statistic, or another nameless face. I want us to see, hear, and feel the people who are incarcerated, enslaved, abused, exploited, and forgotten. The health of incarcerated people matters and the only way to fully address the public health crisis of health violence in prisons is to get rid of prisons.
PRISONS ARE A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS: ALABAMA PAVES THE WAY 