Antonius Blount, 32, was stabbed to death at Ventress Correctional Facility last Wednesday, according to multiple reports.
Ventress is a medium-security facility in southeast Alabama incarcerating, on average, between 1,100 and 1,250 men.
Since 2019, there have been 12 homicides at Ventress—an average homicide rate of 173 per 100,000 people per year. This is more than 14 times the most recently reported national annual homicide rate for state prisons, which was 12 per 100,000 in 2019.
Most of the homicides at Ventress have taken place in prison dormitories filled with up to 200 men. Out of the 12 homicides at Ventress in the past six years, the Alabama Department of Corrections has not announced anyone receiving criminal accountability for these deaths.
ADOC identified a lack of correctional staff as a “major problem” starting in 2006, and declared the shortage “critical” in 2017. In multiple lawsuits, ADOC has blamed this shortage for unconstitutional conditions within its prisons, including inadequate mental health care and sustained high levels of contraband and violence.
In 2020, the Department of Justice sued ADOC for failing to take steps necessary to prevent its prisons from descending into violence during the ongoing staffing crisis, such as implementing video surveillance systems that have been successfully deployed in other Southern prisons and in Alabama’s Tutwiler Prison for Women. In addition to increasing supervision, cameras enhance the ability to investigate, solve, and reduce incidents of violence and misconduct while also holding staff accountable.
Since ADOC has not taken these steps, the crisis continues. In May, a judge ruled that a lawsuit filed by a man raped at knifepoint at Ventress in 2019 could proceed because he plausibly showed “rampant, life-threatening inmate-on-inmate violence” at Ventress. “The factual allegations paint a dark picture of a lawless state at Ventress where armed, unsupervised, and violent inmates can go wherever they want, whenever they want, and do whatever they want,” the court found.