Officials say unrest at prison in Alabama leaves 2 hurt
A prison in southern Alabama that serves as the state's only execution facility was on lockdown Saturday, hours after a violent uprising left two prison officials injured.
Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Horton said the prison warden and a corrections officer were stabbed in the uprising at one of the dormitories at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in southern Alabama, just outside of Atmore. Their injuries were not life-threatening.
About 100 inmates were involved in the disturbance in which inmates took control of a prison dorm and started a fire in the hallway, Horton said.
Holman is the only state prison where executions are carried out, although the dormitory where the violence erupted is not death row.
Horton said three emergency response teams were deployed to bring the prison dorm under control. He said the facility is now calm and remains on lockdown. The violence erupted Friday night when an inmate stabbed an officer while the officer was trying to break up a fight between two inmates. Warden Carter Davenport was stabbed when he and other officers arrived to assess the situation.
"When the warden responded to the situation he was also stabbed. Inmates tried to take control of one of the dorms," Horton said.
Video that was apparently shot from inside the prison by an inmate with a contraband cell phone shows inmates starting a fire at the end of the dormitory and running around the dormitory.
"It is going down," said the inmate on the expletive-filled video after talking about the stabbings of the warden and officer.
The Department of Corrections confirmed that some inmates inside the prison were able to publish photos of the disturbance using social media. Corrections officers were conducting a complete search of the prison for illegal cell phones and other contraband, prison officials said.
It was the second incidence of violence within a week in the state's troubled prison system, which has come under criticism for overcrowding and staffing level concerns.
A corrections officer was stabbed Monday at St. Clair Correctional facility in Springville while trying to break up a fight between two inmates. An officer was also stabbed at St. Clair in November.
Six inmates were killed across the state prison system in inmate-on-inmate assaults in 2015, according to previously provided information from the Department of Corrections.
Alabama prisons hold nearly twice the number of inmates the facilities were originally designed to house. Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley has proposed an $800 million bond issue to build four new prisons and close most existing facilities
The most recent monthly statistics available from the Alabama Department of Corrections show 830 prisoners housed at Holman in December. While the prison was designed to hold 581 inmates, it was packed with 835 beds at the time.
"It's going to get worse and worse until we still start dealing with the overcrowding," Sen. Cam Ward, chairman of the legislative Prison oversight committee, told The Associated Press.
"You can't have that low level of staffing and that many inmates in such a small confined inmates," he said. "Anybody who has been inside the facilities know what a dangerous situation those officers work in every day."