Bullock Prison, Alabama: “Somewhere They Shouldn’t be Able to House Humans” |
Image by Ye Jinghan.
(I)
The weekend after Christmas, one of my sources was stabbed in Bullock Prison. He and several witnesses to the stabbing described the incident to me in interviews over the weeks since.
While accompanying another prisoner to the medical ward, the source referred to as “Jordan” in these stories encountered an officer and told the officer about prisoners who are consistently assaulting other prisoners in his dorm, and the officer “came right back down here and told these guys what I said,” says Jordan, “and he should not have done that.” Other prisoners who witnessed the event have backed up those claims.
After the officer told the prisoners what Jordan told him, say multiple witnesses, another prisoner confronted Jordan and a yelling match began. The prisoner rushed toward Jordan and the fight became physical. Jordan didn’t know that the man had an ice pick. The man stabbed Jordan in the back.
Jordan was taken to a free world hospital, released in the early evening of the same day, and brought back to the same dorm in the same prison.
Jordan says he was told at the free world hospital that the ice pick missed his lung by an inch. The next day, Jordan was written up with a disciplinary slip for fighting. The other prisoner was transferred.
This all capped off a Christmas week in which a backed up plumbing system created disastrously unsanitary living conditions in the dorm, which multiple prisoners have described throughout this series, and Jordan and another prisoner were reaching their hands into the toilets with garbage bags over their arms, down the drain, trying to pull toilet paper and shit out to relieve the system, and spent hours upon hours trying to manage the sewage water coming up through the drains and into the dorms by using their blankets to mop the floor in a Sisyphean kind of struggle. (See here and here, two of my shorter pieces on that.)
In this and upcoming stories from the many interviews I’ve done in the past couple of........