Brutality and runaway spending rule Alabama’s department of corrections

Published by The Montgomery Advertiser July 29, 2020

By Beth Shelburne

Bill Smith hadn’t seen the U.S. Department of Justice report on excessive force in Alabama prisons until I emailed it to him. Even after receiving it, he couldn’t bear to read the whole thing. The allegations of unnecessary beatings in all the grotesque ways listed - by fists, boots, batons, chemicals - it was just too painful to absorb in its totality. Mr. Smith stopped reading right after the part about the killing of his own son, Michael Smith.

“I just broke down,” he told me over the phone. “To imagine what he went through, just thinking about it tears me up. I don’t understand how someone could do that to another person.”