Clinton Willard Bridges had completed 14 years of a 20-year sentence for burglary and receiving stolen property. He called his parents and other family members every day from St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Alabama, until early September, when his calls home stopped.
Worried that something was wrong, Mr. Bridges’s parents repeatedly called the prison asking for information about their son’s welfare. After days of trying, Mr. Bridges’s mother reached someone at the prison who told her he could not release information about her son because his death was under investigation. That was how she first learned that her son was dead. She started to scream.
The prison has not provided the Bridges family with any information about how their son died or even the date of his death, and has not responded to their requests for his belongings. The only call the grieving family has received from the prison was from an officer who hounded them to send in at their own expense an “Inmate Donation Form” so that the prison could take the last penny left in Mr. Bridges’s account for a prison fund.
Clinton Willard Bridges
Clinton Bridges was 39 years old and no cause of death was given to the family. Alabama law requires autopsies in all cases of non-natural deaths, but the Alabama Department of Corrections did not conduct an autopsy. They instead sent his body to his family for burial.
ADOC’s failure to conduct an autopsy in the death of Mr. Bridges followed previous outcries from families about the shocking discovery that incarcerated people’s organs had been removed during autopsies without consent.
The Bridges family’s funeral home director stopped the burial process after observing signs of serious trauma, including stab wounds to the neck and bruising all over Clinton Bridges’s body. The funeral director called law enforcement and questioned why no autopsy had been conducted.
Mr. Bridges’s body was then taken from the funeral home for an autopsy. A month later, the autopsy results have not been disclosed to the family and no cause of death has been provided. The Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences reports that the case remains under investigation.
Clinton Bridges’s family members now believe their loved one was beaten and tortured before he died, but ADOC will not acknowledge this tragedy.
Alabama’s prisons have seen soaring mortality in recent years, with 2022 and 2023 each setting new annual records for the most deaths of people in prison. This has been driven in large part by increases in deaths due to non-natural causes, such as homicides, suicides, and drug overdoses.
According to ADOC statistical reports, 87 of 275 (32%) deaths in Alabama prisons in 2022 were due to homicide, suicide, or drug overdose.
In 2023, when the number of total deaths in the state’s prisons climbed to 326, at least 136 (42%) were recorded as non-natural deaths, three were recorded as having an undetermined cause, and 42 were still under investigation.
At St. Clair, where 28 incarcerated people died in 2023, at least 43% were confirmed as due to non-natural causes—two homicides, two suicides, and eight drug overdoses—while in one case the cause of death could not be determined.