The notorious William C. Holman Correctional Facility was described as ‘objectively unsafe’, a place where overcrowded lags do battle in scorching kitchens to stay alive
It is known as America’s most violent prison.
William C Holman, in Alabama, is even known by those who have experienced it as the “Slaughter Pen”. So what really goes on behind its doors, where death row inmates anxiously await their executions?
Located nine miles north of Atmore, Alabama, is the legendarily violent prison known by many lags as the “Slaughterhouse”.
It also bears the monikers “House of Pain” and “Slaughter Pen of the South”, referring to the amount of stabbings and death that are seen within its walls. “You can’t get much lower than this,” an inmate once told documentary producer Hilary Heath in her film LOCKUP Inside: Holman Correctional Facility.
The facility is infamous within the prison community for its barbaric inmates and poor living conditions. The fact that it has a deeply southern locale only adds to its mystique, with many lags serving lengthy sentences for horrific murder and rape-related crimes.
The facility was thrust back into the into the headlines last month after inmate Anthony Boyd, 54, was controversially executed by nitrogen gas.
He screamed “I didn’t kill anybody” among his last words, but he follows decades of grotesque reports of the facility. In 2019 a Justice Department probe found it to be “cruel”, “objectively unsafe” and having “deplorable conditions” that encourage deadly violence and rape.
That led to plans to move more than 600 inmates from there owing to safety concerns.
Jeff Dunn, the department’s commissioner at the time, said: “Since my arrival at the ADOC almost five years ago, this Department has been vocal about the pervasive and extreme dilapidation crippling facilities throughout the correctional system — and Holman Correctional Facility is no exception.
“This is a real and serious issue that cannot be understated and, after learning the extent of the risks associated with continued maintenance attempts at Holman Correctional Facility, moving quickly on our plans to decommission was the right and only decision.”
Three deaths in one week
That year, it was reported three inmates had died of violent causes in just one week and a half. One of them apparently killed himself in a cell in the unit officials had promised to close.
It is reported problems stem from years of chronic understaffing and overcrowding.
The Justice Department report found the prison’s staff was as much as a fifth of what it needed to be to be safe.
Stabbings, fires and abuse
The facility is also plagued by reports of stabbings, fires, riots and abuse. In 2016, there was even a report of a prisoner cutting a prison guard’s eye in a violent confrontation.
Pastor Kenneth Glasgow, who worked with prisoners there, said back in 2016: “It’s a bloodbath. There are killings every day at Holman.
“Three Saturdays ago they had seven officers for a thousand-man prison. It creates a hostile environment. Everybody at Holman’s got knives. As soon as you arrive they tell you, ‘better get yourself a knife because everybody else has one.”
In one incident, inmates rioted and stabbed a guard. They then stabbed the warden after he responded too, before setting fire to the dorm and patrolling the hallways with swords. They both survived the attack after special security squads scrambled to the scene.
Ice-pick weapon
On one occasion, an officer had refused to give a prisoner an extra tray of food.
In response, the prisoner stabbed him in the temple with an ice-pick style weapon, before prisoners went on strike while he was in hospital.
Days later, the prison guard targeted with the ice-pick weapon died in hospital.
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