Sentenced to 999 years for 1 robbery. Now he's dead.
Prisoners in Alabama continue a work strike to protest the state’s insane habitual offender laws, harsh parole process and the free labor they’re forced to perform.
The overworked guards, meanwhile, appear to be engaged in an unofficial work stoppage of their own. Footage from inside the prison shows hundreds of men milling around in a dorm, not a guard in sight. Instead of engaging with their demands, jail officials have cut everyone’s food rations to two cold meals a day. “Meals”: these are often a piece of bread with baloney. The men are hungry. The guards are MIA, except for when they come around to beat the prisoners or throw them in solitary in retaliation for the strike, according to sources on the inside.
In other words, it’s a tinderbox.
In the week and a half since the start of the strike, three men have died. All three were serving life sentences thanks to the state’s uniquely harsh habitual offender law.
On October 1st, Denarieya Letrex Smith was stabbed to death. No guards appeared to be at the scene as he bled out on the ground, video shows. Smith was serving a life sentence for attempted — attempted — murder.
“On October 3, 2022, Joseph Agee, III was the victim of an apparent inmate-on-inmate assault,” the Alabama Department of Corrections told me. He was pronounced dead in the health care unit.
Last week Corey Griffith, also serving life—or to be precise, 999 years, 99 months, and 99 weeks—died. He was held in minimum security. “This custody level is appropriate for those inmates who have demonstrated the ability to adjust to semi-structured environment and/or those inmates who are nearing the end of their incarceration in order to transition and reintegrate back into the community.”
Griffin’s rap sheet includes an incident of drug possession when he was 19 in 1996, a robbery in 2007 and possession of stolen property. He’d been in prison for 16 years.
Now he’s dead. Gov. Kay Ivey has called the strikers’ demands “unwelcome and unreasonable.”