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Scene of Stephone Lyon Marshall's murder at Elmore Correctional Facility in Elmore, Alabama
According to eyewitness Eddie Ward, Marshall and his aggressor engaged in four to five separate standoffs, one lasting about 30 minutes, the day before the murder. Marshall was armed with a broken mop stick and the other man held a knife. The guard on duty witnessed these conflicts and did nothing to break them up or separate them.
“If an officer had stepped in on any of these occasions, the circumstances would have been different. The outcome would have been different,” Ward said.
Eddie Ward
ADOC told the Montgomery Advertiser that Marshall “was found by corrections officers with injuries” and “was taken to the prison’s health care unit for emergency treatment.”
Those statements are not entirely true.
According to Ward, Marshall wasn’t found. After Marshall was stabbed, he went to a door to try to get out of the unit to get help. But no officer was on that side of the dorm at that point. Instead, said Ward, he was chatting with a female officer on the other side of the dorm.
The men in the dorm beat on “the cube” (it’s like a station with a window within a prison housing unit) until a guard came back. That officer opened the door for Marshall who stumbled out to another area, where nurses had been summoned by radio. One of the nurses fell trying to address his wounds.
Ward says there was a delay in getting Marshall substantive medical attention because keys to a transport van couldn’t be found.
When questioned about the missing van keys, the Alabama Department of Corrections issued a standard reply:
“The ADOC Law Enforcement Services Division is thoroughly investigating the death of inmate Stephone Lvon Marshall. The agency cannot comment about ongoing investigations.”
But the department continued:
“However, we can confirm that an officer was present in the dorm at the time of the incident and there was no issue with finding van keys.”
There was in fact such an issue with keys that Marshall was loaded into a guard’s personal vehicle and driven to a helicopter which took off and then landed in the same spot because Marshall had already died.
It bears pointing out that the department did, in fact, comment on an ongoing investigation by saying that there was no issue with van keys. But that official comment is suspect; Ward and other witnesses did tell investigators about the missing keyring. This evidence should appear in reports. As the investigation closes, it will be important to note what’s included, if anyone ever gets to see a final report.
Moreover, in its statement, ADOC admitted that the unit was understaffed. Having one officer in C-1 Dorm at Elmore is patently inadequate, even when he’s in the dorm. That building houses 198 men.
For comparison, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the average ratio of inmates to guards in state prisons was 4.9 to 1. In 2020, the federal Bureau of Prisons considered a ratio higher than 15 to 1 to be a staffing crisis. The ratio in that dorm on May 16, was thirteen times higher than numbers that alarm federal officials.
A number of sources who are confined at Elmore have told me there’s no medical office or resources at the prison, not even an infirmary. The ADOC has declined to comment on the existence of medical resources at that particular facility. Because Elmore Correctional Facility was once known as the Staton Annex, it uses the Staton Correctional Facility’s medical resources which are approximately a mile down the road.
The problem is that four people have died at Elmore in 2023 alone. That’s why the transport van’s availability is key here. Providing medical care for anyone in Elmore requires a car or van trip.
Ward himself was stabbed on April 12, 2023. A female officer witnessed the attack and shouted “stop it!” several times but didn’t use her pepper spray until Ward successfully fought off his attacker and then she sprayed both Ward and the man who cut him. He waited 20 minutes before they transported him to Jackson Hospital in Montgomery.
No word on where the car keys were that day.
Chandra Bozelko served more than six years in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent. Her work has earned several professional awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Los Angeles Press Club, The National Federation of Press Women and more.Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.
Lice so severe that even kerosene couldn’t kill them. Shoeless feet padding aimlessly. Gross malnourishment.
That’s how people described the Yellow Hammers, a semi-isolated colony of the ostracized and downtrodden in Illinois that developed during the Reconstruction Era.
The history of the Yellow Hammers is murky. As the legend goes, a Colonel Brodie of the Civil War — it doesn’t include a first name — came home to Alabama, the Yellowhammer State, and relocated to Wilmington, Illinois where he purchased several acres of wooded land and invited anyone from his home state to come live on it, creating essentially an encampment people called “Brodie’s Woods.” Those people who relocated to Wilmington from Alabama were impoverished, almost permanently, and made pariahs in the community as they huddled on Brodie’s land.
The pariahs’ poverty prevented those among them who were employed from purchasing their own equipment so they used company tools — when they were able to work — whose handles were painted yellow.
These stories, reported by a high school student, can’t be confirmed. First, the only nineteenth century colonel named Brodie was about 12 years old when the Civil War started. One William Brodie from Alabama fought in the Civil War but there’s no record of his being a colonel. A now defunct local Chicago newspaper, the Surburbanite Economist, reported in 1970 that an area of Wilmington, Illinois was known as Brodie’s Woods, but that’s one of very few verifiable mentions of the area.
The more likely story of the root of Yellowhammer is that a cavalry of soldiers from Huntsville went to Kentucky during the Civil War to aid Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s — history will call him both a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and an innovative warrior — Company A of the Confederate Army. They wore new sharp gray uniforms adorned with brilliant yellow trim. A Confederate soldier in tatters said they looked like the bird the yellowhammer, a type of woodpecker, which was made Alabama’s state bird in 1927. The Yellowhammers ended up becoming valuable team members; they supported several of Gen. Forrest’s victories, one of which frustrated Gen. Ulysses Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign.
That the history of the Yellow Hammers is so hard to pin down says quite a bit about the state today; tracing what really happens proves difficult. Even though Alabama media tries to cover events inside the prisons, the state of news in 2023 dictates that coverage isn’t as complete as anyone would like.
Just as the history of the Yellowhammers is unclear, the view into Alabama’s prisons is muddied by the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) and its commitment to opacity. The officials who run that system do not like looksies. Early this year, ADOC stopped releasing the number of in-custody deaths on a monthly basis, ostensibly because there were so many that they either couldn’t keep up or didn’t want to be embarrassed by their inability to protect the state's wards.
Nevertheless, the reports of carnage that keep dripping out — two men were murdered on May 15, 2023, an additional pair added to a list of over 60 since January 1, 2023 — have contributed to a narrative that men and women in Alabama prison are incorrigible, even feral, when all they’re doing is adapting to the environment that the state has established for them.
The truth is that a good number of them are quite high-minded. When they staged a strike last fall, they didn’t even protest the squalid conditions they live in, which happen to be deplorable. Instead they sought policy reform on sentencing and parole which will ultimately benefit people beyond them.
Their strike demands were imminently reasonable, despite Gov. Kay Ivey’s disagreement. But the demands were really only part of the story of the strike. My sources tell me that — under the guidance of some dedicated leaders who I won’t name now — rival gangs and sworn enemies convened in good faith to hammer out what they needed to ask for. In that respect, they’re behaving better than many of us on the outside if they can display that type of comity. They came together despite the fact that they worry every day — along with family and friends — that they’ll be killed or starved. They’re fighting back non-violently. Bravely.
And even effectively. Because of the strike demands, lawmakers introduced two bills poised to pass the Alabama legislature. First is a bill that would mandate the right to attend one’s own parole hearings by video (they can’t attend these crucial proceedings now) and second is a bill that would allow people serving life sentences to petition to have their punishment reduced. Most prison work stoppages achieve nothing. This group of men and women convinced people to listen and act. Do not count these people out.
That doesn’t mean the wind is under their yellowhammer wings. Gov. Ivey just signed a bill into law that reforms the so-called “good time” statute by making it harder to earn time off one’s sentence because ADOC failed to take the good time of someone who attempted escape. Their resilience doesn’t mean they’re safe now or being treated justly. It’s just the opposite.
Alabama’s prison population reflects a lot of their yellowhammer history. Like woodpeckers, they’re tenacious fighters. Much like the Yellowhammer Cavalry in 1862, they're nimble, capable of putting up a few wins, but then ultimately forgotten.
And they aren't living much differently than Brodie’s Yellow Hammers. Some aren’t supplied shoes and therefore aren’t allowed in the chow hall. As I have reported before, the ADOC intentionally starves them when they assert their rights. They wander, often squatting in dorms where they’re not assigned because they want to avoid being raped. The violence doesn’t cease; I hear reports of outright beatings that all too often result in lost “good time” but no medical treatment. And they huddle, displaced and ostracized, in one of Alabama’s 15 state-sanctioned colonies of fear and panic.
But unlike the legend of Brodie’s Woods, these tales are true and verifiable. There’s no fiction here. It’s traceable. It tracks, all too well.
That’s why today The National Memo announces an unflinching series that goes inside Alabama’s criminal legal crisis: the Yellowhammer Files. We’re going to trace and track data and stories until something changes. Check these files as they are published and you will be stunned by what you read.
Chandra Bozelko served more than six years in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent. Her work has earned several professional awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Los Angeles Press Club, The National Federation of Press Women and more.Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.
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