MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The state of Alabama has spent $68 million on litigation to defend the Alabama Department of Corrections since 2020, criminal justice advocacy campaign No More Alabama claims in a report released this week.
The report, titled “Settling for Brutality,” details the cost of the excessive force cases brought by incarcerated people against ADOC corrections officers.
It lists a dozen corrections officers who have faced more than three excessive force lawsuits, with the 12 officers racking up a total of 55 cases in the last 10 years. The ADOC still employs all of them, according to the report.
Beth Shelburne, who produced the report alongside Chris Izor, told Alabama Daily News that the lack of repercussions for these officers creates an atmosphere of “zero accountability.”
“It’s really an environment of lawlessness when officers can violate people’s constitutional rights over and over again with no consequences, with no documentation, with no follow-up, with no disciplinary action,” Shelburne said. “There is no law. They’re not following any rules, and if we’re trying to create an environment to correct behavior, this is the opposite of that.”
Shelburne was a co-creator of The Alabama Solution, a 2025 Oscar-nominated documentary chronicling poor prison conditions and violence allegedly committed by corrections officers.
In the wake of the documentary, lawmakers introduced legislation to bolster prison oversight, ultimately ending in a deal with ADOC to create an audit pilot program. The first audit is ongoing, and those involved expect to release the first report in October.
The topic of accountability for violent officers was also a common theme at the Prison Oversight Committee’s annual public hearing on Wednesday.
Speakers shared stories from family members or their own experience being incarcerated about the conditions inside ADOC facilities, often detailing abuse from officers and poor medical care.
In response to the report and members of the public’s comments, committee member Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, called the ADOC “a vortex of corruption.” He called employing officers with several cases brought against them “a waste of money.”
“We could have actually saved money by firing them,” England said. “Can you imagine a scenario where a corrections officer beats someone to death? Not only beats him to death, but then later on, somehow the only witness for it dies too in Department of Corrections custody, and not only was that person given another job, but given a promotion while the criminal investigation was going on? Can you imagine what sort of culture you’re creating of civil rights abuses in those facilities if you get rewarded for beating somebody to death?”
The state pulls much of the funding to represent corrections officers from the General Liability Trust Fund. The report claims that the state has spent 63% of the money in the GLTF – around $20 million since fiscal year 2020 – on lawsuits against ADOC, more than every other state agency combined.
The GLTF is designed “to provide liability protection for state employees acting in line and scope of their job requirements,” according to the Alabama Division of Risk Management. The report said that the fund covers more than 29,000 state employees.
Shelburne deemed this spending as resources being “squandered.”
“The General Liability Trust Fund is a public resource,” Shelburne said. “It has been created not just to defend state employees if they’re sued, but also to pay people when they are wronged by the state. The fact that it turned into this pot of money for private lawyers to get paid for defending officers accused of abuse, sometimes the same officers over and over and over again, over periods of years, is astonishing, and everybody in the state of Alabama should know about it and should be appalled that their taxpayer resources are being used this way.”
Shelburne and Izor produced the report using documents obtained through public records requests and the federal Public Access to Court Electronic Records system. Alabama Daily News reviewed these records.
The report makes several recommendations on how to address the problems it identifies within the system, including mandatory reporting of settled and closed lawsuits against ADOC officers and higher scrutiny for ADOC’s legal contracts.
Shelburne said the report aims to raise Alabamians’ awareness about how the ADOC operates, empowering them to speak out about how the state utilizes public funds.
“This is about government accountability and responsibility,” she said. “It’s about transparency connected to the way state leaders are spending our tax dollars, and it’s about criminal justice as well because this doesn’t make the public safer. Having people that have committed crimes sentenced to due time in these incredibly violent, drug-infested, overcrowded, lawless prisons doesn’t make us safer. It does not create public safety. It, in fact, creates more crime.”
Neither the Alabama Department of Corrections nor Gov. Kay Ivey’s office returned a request for comment.