Steve Marshall is soft on crime.
Rapes. Murders. Violent assaults. Extortion schemes that take advantage of some of Alabama’s most vulnerable, hardest working citizens.
Steve Marshall has turned a blind eye to all of it.
That’s why he’s so mad about the documentary “The Alabama Solution,” which chronicles the horrid conditions within Alabama’s prisons. Because that documentary exposes Steve Marshall, Alabama’s outgoing attorney general and hopeful U.S. Senate candidate, as a fraud.
Because you cannot, in one breath, tout your tough-on-crime position as Alabama’s AG, and in the next breath celebrate yourself for ignoring the well documented commission of thousands of crimes. Not without being a fraud.
That’s exactly what Marshall has done.
Nearly every case of extreme prison violence, and certainly every questionable death within our prison walls, has come through Marshall’s office over the last decade. Every lawsuit filed by prisoners has been reviewed by people he’s employed. He was responsible for nearly all of the tens of millions of dollars in contracts the state has spent on outside legal counsel defending our prisons.
He has received extremely detailed descriptions of crimes so awful and violent that they have left experienced prosecutors and law enforcement officers with nightmares. He has heard from victims of extortion—victims who are not in prison and who have done absolutely nothing wrong. He has received countless phone calls and other correspondence from family members and attorneys describing violence and threats and beatings and rapes and murders.
And last week, after the director of “The Alabama Solution” invited Marshall and Gov. Kay Ivey to the Oscars on Sunday, Marshall responded by gloating about his lack of action to address those crimes.
In a self-shot video, in which Marshall is apparently roaming about a parking lot somewhere, he states that he won’t “be intimidated” by “The Alabama Solution” director Andrew Jarecki, who is “soft on crime.” Marshall called the documentary “propaganda” and stated that if Jarecki wanted to be fair, he should have interviewed the victims of the underlying crimes that landed the prisoners in custody.
Now, let’s think about this.
“The Alabama Solution” documents the conditions within Alabama’s prisons and spends its time sharing the stories of those men and women in the prisons. It contains footage from within the walls of the prisons. Literally no one disputes that the descriptions and footage are authentic and accurate portrayals of life inside Alabama’s prisons.
Marshall’s response, though, is to say that the film doesn’t interview the victims of the prisoners’ original crimes—the crimes that landed them in prison.
In other words, he’s saying: Yeah, this is all true, but do you know what these guys did to be put in prison where these bad things are happening?
Or to put that another way: Alabama’s AG is apparently saying that rape, torture, murder, extortion, starvation, forced drug abuse and daily violence are acceptable punishments within Alabama’s justice system.
That’s bat-guano insane.
And Marshall just says it, like it’s the most normal thing in the world for the attorney general of a state to be strolling through a strip mall parking lot saying, yeah, but do you know what those guys did to deserve being raped and extorted?
I don’t feel like I should have to say this, but maybe I do—those are crimes.
Assaulting someone in prison is every bit as much of a crime in prison as it is on a random street corner in Alabama. That we’ve come to find it normal when it occurs in prison says something about our expectations but does absolutely nothing to change the seriousness of the crime.
And the state of Alabama has an absolute duty to attempt to prevent those crimes, to investigate those crimes and to hold accountable those who commit those crimes.
That I even have to type that is incredibly depressing.
What we’ve done with our prisons is an absolute travesty. They are the very definition of dysfunction from top to bottom, and there seems to be no will at all to make them better. In fact, there is apparent pride taken, at least by our AG, in how God-awful they are.
In the meantime, we are exposing simple criminals—not to mention correctional officers and other staff—to disgusting violence and violations. We are wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on lawsuits, medical care and mental health services. And we are operating bad prisons at a cost that is much, much higher than it would cost us—than it costs every state that does it better than us—to operate good prisons.
All because our AG, and a whole bunch of other state leaders, seem to have forgotten that crime that occurs within our prison system is still crime.
