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In this age of mass incarceration, prisons and jails across America are vicious places, but Alabama’s brutality is exceptional. Hitching posts, chain gangs, botched executions, the tough on crime state has a long legacy of piling terror and deprivation on the people they imprison.
The U.S. Department of Justice in Dec. 2020 filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Alabama and the Alabama Department of Corrections alleging violations of inmates’ constitutional rights to protection from prisoner-on-prisoner violence, sexual abuse and excessive force by prison guards.
The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices for the Northern, Middle and Southern Districts of Alabama found systemic problems of unreported or underreported excessive use of force incidents, a failure to properly investigate them and attempts by correctional officers and their supervisors to cover them up.
“Specifically, the department concluded that there is reasonable cause to believe that prisoners are subjected to excessive force at the hands of prison staff,” the Justice Department said in a 2020 press release.
In previously released reports, the Justice Department detailed systemic problems of abuse from guards, corruption, rampant drug use, violence, overcrowding and understaffing in Alabama’s prisons.
Victor Russo spent the last 35 years in Alabama prisons. Since 2016, Russo was stabbed in two separate assaults at two different prisons, both required outside treatment at a hospital, and he recently died under suspicious circumstances after a conflict with staff. His story demonstrates the ground truth of the escalating violence inside Alabama’s prisons.
Russo’s problems began in 2013 at St. Clair Correctional Facility when an officer issued him a citation for failing to obey a direct order to shave with a razor. ADOC rules require incarcerated men to be clean shaven, unless they have a religious exemption or a “shaving profile,” a waiver issued by medical staff that allows them to maintain a small amount of facial hair.
Russo said he told the officer he had a shaving profile in his record, but the officer, who is black, told him, “since he wanted to be a smart mouth cracker she was going to make sure he got what he was looking for,” according to a lawsuit Russo filed against the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) for failing to provide sufficient security that could have prevented his assault. Russo was also a plaintiff in a 2014 class-action lawsuit filed by Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) over conditions inside St. Clair Correctional. In 2017, the two sides reached a settlement, but are now back in mediation after ADOC did not follow through on promised reforms, according to the DOJ.
The officer that ordered Russo to shave cited him with a disciplinary violation and he lost his housing assignment in the prison’s “honor dorm,” a voluntary faith and character-based housing unit found in major ADOC facilities, where residents follow a strict set of guidelines but have additional benefits. The honor dorms are considered the safest places to live within ADOC’s maximum and medium-security facilities.
Russo was transferred into general population and claims within the first hour he was robbed of his commissary items by three prisoners with knives, whom Russo suspected were high on methamphetamines. When he went to report the incident to correctional staff, Russo said an ADOC Captain suggested he get a knife to protect himself. Russo asked to be moved to a safer dorm, but did not want to identify the men who robbed him out of fear of retaliation, so another Captain sent Russo to administrative segregation and issued a new disciplinary citation for “creating a security, safety or health hazard,” according to Russo’s lawsuit.
As soon as Russo arrived in segregation, he said he identified the assailants to a Captain and the prison eventually placed the trio on Russo’s enemies list. His lawsuit states that two were transferred to other prisons, but the ringleader, an alleged gang member named Edward Carrington, who goes by the nickname “Blood T,” remained in general population at St. Clair while Russo sat in solitary confinement for months, “a placement he perceived to be punishment for reporting his own victimization.”
The DOJ cites numerous examples of ADOC unnecessarily disciplining prisoners who are victims of assaults or have sought protection from threats of violence.
“By focusing on the reporting victim’s past misconduct instead of allegations of abuse, ADOC misses an opportunity to prevent violence while simultaneously discouraging other prisoners from coming forward,” the report states.
In November, 2015, Russo was back in population and Blood T was in segregation, charged with another alleged robbery and stabbing. Russo claims several prisoners affiliated with Blood T’s gang came into his cell with knives and threatened him.
“Do you want to end up like Birdman?” they asked, referring to another prisoner who had been murdered a month earlier because he refused to retract his enemy list. The gang members told Russo he needed to lie to prison staff, claiming he owed a debt he couldn’t pay, and ask to be moved to segregation. According to Russo, the gang members saw this as the easiest way to get Blood T out of segregation, because he was on Russo’s enemy list and prison rules required them to be separated.
Russo said he did what he was told. He made up a story to officers about owing a “storeman,” a prisoner who loans money with interest. Russo was given a disciplinary infraction and sent back to segregation until February, 2016, when Blood T was involved in a robbery with another gang member known as “Black Jesus.” According to the lawsuit, the pair tried to rob two prisoners and Black Jesus was stabbed. Blood T returned to segregation, so Russo cycled back into general population.
Russo said he requested a meeting with staff, where he told a warden and three other officers that Blood T’s gang members were harassing him and forced Russo into lockup so Blood T could be released back into population. The staff members told Russo they would remove Blood T from his enemies list so he wouldn’t have any more problems with the gang. Russo said that didn’t happen.
On April 20, 2016, as he was unlocking his cell door after a meal, Russo spotted an alleged gang member walking toward him with two others following behind. His lawsuit details the attack. They rushed in, threw a jacket over Russo’s head and put him in a “sleeper” hold, placing an arm around Russo’s throat from behind. They held his arms and legs and tightened the grip around Russo’s neck, telling him, “this was going to be the last time he could be the cause of Blood T being in lock up.” Russo passed out.
When he regained consciousness, the three assailants came back to Russo’s cell and asked if he would comply with their order to return to segregation so Blood T could be released. Russo told them no.
“Next thing I know, they’re stabbing me in the back, in the head,” Russo said. “After about five minutes of stabbing and beating me, they took off running. The whole dorm had cleared out. They get the word out about what’s fixing to happen and everybody runs and hides, even the police.”
Victor Russo after being stabbed 16 times
Russo had been stabbed 16 times. Bleeding and disoriented, he hobbled out of the dorm and asked an officer for help. An infirmary nurse cleaned up his injuries and called an ambulance. Russo spent three nights at UAB hospital, where he received 28 staples in his wounds and a tube placed in his chest to drain fluid around his organs, according to the class-action lawsuit filed by EJI. The same day, according to Russo’s lawsuit, another prisoner in his dorm was stabbed in the same way.
When he was discharged from the hospital, Russo was taken to Kilby Prison, where he was held in solitary confinement for weeks.
“It was like I was being punished for being stabbed,” Russo said. He was eventually transferred to Donaldson Prison.
In the summer of 2018, Russo was walking through a corridor at Donaldson when he was attacked from behind, stabbed in the back of the head. He said the assailant was trying to “catch out,” when a prisoner intentionally commits a conduct violation in order to get sent to segregation for his own protection. Usually the assailant fears for his own safety, so he targets a random person unrelated to his own conflict. Two former correctional officers have stated this is a regularly occurring phenomenon in the quagmire of Alabama prisons.
Russo said a nurse in Donaldson’s infirmary attempted to bandage his head with an adult diaper, but it failed to contain the bleeding, so an officer drove Russo to a hospital in the back of a prison van where Russo was handcuffed and shackled, vomiting into his own lap. Russo said he received a unit of plasma at the hospital and was then returned to the prison and back to the same block where he was stabbed in the head.
In February 2022, one day before he was found unresponsive with blunt force trauma in his cell at an Alabama prison, dying two days later at a hospital, Victor Russo wrote a letter to the warden describing being severely beaten by a lieutenant six days before, and having the nozzle of a can of chemical agent stuck in his mouth and the officer “pulled the trigger.”
That officer, Lt. Mohammad Jenkins, was arrested nearly a month later by the Alabama Department of Corrections Law Enforcement Services and charged with second-degree assault for beating Russo.
Lt. Mohammad Jenkins
Russo, 60, was found unresponsive in his cell on Feb. 23 and died at a local hospital two days later. In his handwritten letter Feb. 22 to William E. Donaldson prison’s warden, Russo wrote that Lt. Jenkins stopped him on the way to the cafeteria and wouldn’t allow him to pass. Russo in the letter describes being sprayed with chemical agent while on the floor then Jenkins “got me up and we went up the hall beating me on my head and spraying me.”
Russo said the beatings, some of which were witnessed by four other officers, continued in the prison’s East hall gym, where Russo said “he put me in one of those cages on the right side of the gym and beat me some more with his fists.”
“Then he cuffed me to the bench and beat me some more and maced me,” Russo said. “He even stuck the nozzle of the mace can in my mouth and pulled the trigger. Then he beat on me some more.”
Officers later took Russo to the prison’s infirmary to have a body chart completed, Russo wrote. Body charts are done by prison staff in infirmaries to record injuries and get statements from incarcerated people as to what physically happened to them.
“Jenkins told me that if I said anything to anybody he would keep me in lock up,” Russo wrote.
Russo wrote that on Feb. 18 he was written up for three infractions; assault on an officer, refusing to leave the dining hall and possession of a knife.
On Feb. 23 Russo was found unresponsive in his cell and was taken to a local hospital “for care of an injury he sustained because of passing out.” He died two days later and despite being found with blunt force trauma to the head, the department said it wasn’t investigating the death as a homicide.
The Alabama Department of Corrections in a statement about Officer Jenkins’s arrest said the department was assisted by the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Northern District Office.
“This arrest was made after LESD’s investigation into a February 16, 2022, altercation between Jenkins and Donaldson inmate Victor Russo produced sufficient evidence that excessive force was used by Jenkins against Russo. The ADOC condemns all violence in its facilities, and use of excessive force by ADOC staff is not tolerated,” the statement reads. During its investigation the department obtained Russo’s letter, which was used along with other evidence to charge Jenkins.
We would like to thank WSFA and Alabama Political Reporter for the content. Click HERE to view WSFA’s original comprehensive article regarding violence within the Alabama prison system. Click HERE to view Alabama Political Reporter’s original comprehensive article regarding the arrest of Lt. Mohammad Jenkins.