Legislators look to upcoming audit as frustrations with Alabama prisons mount

“Alabama is absolutely an outlier,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. “It is, by far, the worst system in the country to the extent that we are aware of that sort of thing. The violence levels are completely out of control. Every system is going to have some level of violence for sure, but this is on a scale that is not like anywhere else in the country.”