How we reported 'Blood Money'
Barbed wire seen behind a fence at an Alabama prison.In reporting the "Blood Money" series, reporter Beth Shelburne obtained documents and data from the Alabama Department of Corrections and the Alabama Department of Finance to find stories that might otherwise go untold. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
The crisis inside the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) has generated extensive reporting on escalating prison violence and deaths, the proliferation of contraband drugs, and squalid conditions inside overcrowded and understaffed facilities. These factors led the U.S. Department of Justice to conclude Alabama prison conditions violate prisoners' Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment, leading to a lawsuit in 2020.
Since then, the state of Alabama has spent over $39 million defending ADOC in a handful of complex lawsuits, including the one filed by the DOJ. But these cases represent only a fraction of litigation involving ADOC.
During the last decade, an increasing number of individual civil rights lawsuits have been filed against correctional officers and prison administrators over wrongful deaths, failure to protect from violence and excessive force. Unlike the DOJ lawsuit or other large class-action lawsuits, individual lawsuits filed by incarcerated people or their families receive little attention or oversight.
These individual lawsuits were the focus of the reporting for this series. We wanted to figure out just how many lawsuits were being litigated against employees of ADOC every year, and learn more about the nature of the lawsuits, the outcomes, and the cost to taxpayers. Just how much public money was ADOC spending on these lawsuits, not just in settlements to plaintiffs, but paying private lawyers to defend sued officers? And beyond settlement payments, was any systemic change resulting from these lawsuits?
First, we had to recognize an important distinction in how Alabama pays for legal services. When an entire state agency is named in a lawsuit, like in the DOJ's lawsuit against ADOC, legal services are paid for out of Alabama's General Fund budget. But when state employees are sued as individuals, the General Liability Trust Fund (GLTF) is used to pay for their legal defense and any monetary settlement for the plaintiff. This use of the GLTF was the subject of our reporting.
We filed an open records request with Alabama's Department of Finance, asking for a spreadsheet of records connected to all transactions out of the GLTF, as well as total yearly use of the fund by ADOC dating back to 2013. In the spreadsheet, transactions were categorized as either legal expenses or indemnity payments, also known as settlement payments. The transaction records included corresponding case names and numbers, which allowed us to connect each transaction to specific lawsuits. We then located the lawsuits in federal court records, and through reviewing the records, were able to pinpoint lawsuits involving ADOC employees. This is how we identified the 124 lawsuits against ADOC employees that resulted in settlements between 2020-2024.
The 124 lawsuits ending in settlement in this five-year period gave us a fixed group of cases to study, not only to help identify issues and trends in the allegations, but also in the amount of time and money spent on the litigation. Through this project, we aimed to increase transparency and accountability regarding ADOC's increasing use of public resources and taxpayer dollars. And in an effort to deepen our understanding of the crisis inside Alabama prisons, we also wanted to report on the lawsuits themselves, and the human beings involved, to lessen the abstractions of incarceration and illuminate what would otherwise remain unseen, unheard and unknown.
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