Alabama man’s Habitual Felony Offender Act sentence caused ‘deep pain’ for his sister, the last surviving member of their family

By WiLL Tucker, Investigative Reporter, Southern Poverty Law Center

When Deleria Huff’s mother began to grow old, she would sometimes fall in the hallway of her three-bedroom family home in Mobile, Alabama. Deleria would be there to pick her up.

But one day, when Deleria’s mother had fallen, she told Deleria not to help her from the floor. She said her two sons would pick her up. “This particular day, she was still in her right mind, but the statement wasn’t. Your two boys in prison,” Deleria said. “I had to run outside and cry. Oh, I cried and cried.”

Paroled after 16 years, Alabama woman finally begins life as an adult

By Kathryn Casteel, Investigative Reporter, Southern Poverty Law Center

In late 2016, Janine Tarver was up for parole for the third time. She’d already served over 16 years of a 20-year sentence, but she wasn’t optimistic about her chances of release.

“I wasn’t too hyped up about it,” Janine, 37, said. “It already happened twice. It was denied twice. I was like, ‘Well, it’s probably going to get denied this time.’”

Seven years into her sentence and again 11 years into it, Janine’s family faced Alabama’s parole board to make the case for her release.

Despite horrific prison stay, a mother comes to understand her addiction

By Will Tucker, Investigative Reporter, Southern Poverty Law Center

When Shanna Rainey was a mother to two young children, she began using methamphetamine. 

Over the next 20 years, she would endure a cycle of domestic abuse and substance use that would eventually send her into Alabama’s broken prison system twice. Shanna needed help dealing with the trauma that put her at risk for addiction. But in a state with scant resources and far too many incarcerated people, she found prison to be a hopeless place where people with substance use disorders go practically untreated and can continue to use drugs on the inside.

‘He's losing hope.’ Sister maintains faith despite brother’s life sentence

By Kathryn Casteel, Investigative Reporter, Southern Poverty Law Center

Ashley Buford could not hold back the tears when she saw her brother behind a chain-link fence with barbed wire on top.

“I was a little girl. I was 16, and they would be out playing basketball or something. We would ride up there and be able to see him through the fence. It was very hard. When we would leave, I would cry the whole way home.”

Ashley never went inside the Limestone County Jail in Athens, Alabama, where her brother was awaiting trial for almost three years. Her family thought it would be too hard for her to handle. 

That was two decades ago.

After 36 years in prison, now he is free

By Will Tucker, Investigative Reporter, Southern Poverty Law Center

It was pouring rain the day Willie Parker left William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility after 36 years in prison.

Still, a chaplain’s assistant offered to take Parker out to eat en route to a
transitional housing center in Birmingham.

“When I went to prison, with $23 you could buy five bags of groceries,” Willie said. “But this man spent $23 on one little plate for me.”

After parole, Alabama man gets life back on track, help others

By Kathryn Casteel, Investigative Reporter, Southern Poverty Law Center

Chris “Champ” Napier started speaking to students and at-risk youth about his experience in prison before he knew he would ever regain his freedom. 

“I'll never forget the one time that I was telling them that this is not a game. That the officer that held me was not my friend, that he was getting paid to hold me in captivity,” 

That first speaking engagement was in 1995 at Bullock County Career Technical Center. It was five years after Champ, then 18, was sentenced to life in prison for murder.

He describes the incident as a drug deal gone wrong. 

After a hard-won sentence reduction, Huntsville man’s court debt is another obstacle to freedom

By Will Tucker, Investigative Reporter, Southern Poverty Law Center

Fresh out of prison after nearly 23 years, Archie “Jody” Hamlett appeared at his mother’s door in Huntsville, Ala., one fall day in 2017.

He knocked. “It’s me,” he said.

“I don’t know no ‘me,’” his mother replied.

After a moment, she pulled back the curtain on a window in the door. “I had my face up close to it,” Archie recalled. “And I smiled. Then I could hear her fumbling with all the locks, trying to get the door open. And then when she opened the door she just looked ... and she said, ‘Jody.’ I said, ‘What’s up, momma?’ And she gave me a hug.”

Archie had to win a significant legal victory to get to that embrace. He had been sentenced to life without parole under Alabama’s Habitual Felony Offender Act in 1995. In 2016, a judge reduced that punishment to a life sentence that allowed for parole.

‘No rehabilitation,’ just oppression, behind bars in Alabama

By Kathryn Casteel, Investigative reporter, Southern Poverty Law Center 

Frances Everson was born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. The home she now lives in, previously rented by her mother, was always a family affair. She’s visited frequently by her family – her three daughters, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren included. Today, her mother lives right next door. 

Frances was the middle child of five. The youngest sibling was stillborn. Her second oldest brother was hit by a car and killed in 1971 when Frances was just 8. Her sister, only a year younger than she was, was shot and killed in 1981.

That’s when all of the trauma really started to set in. 

“My life started spiraling out of control in the ‘80s,” Frances, now 56, told the SPLC.

Frances said she started using drugs – cocaine, specifically. She developed a habit of taking items from department stores. It was an impulse that ultimately landed her in Alabama’s state prison system more than five times over the course of almost 20 years, starting in 1985.

Creative writing class in prison was ‘light’ in the darkness

For readers who wish to know about it in advance, this piece contains graphic descriptions of domestic violence.

By Will Tucker, Investigative reporter, Southern Poverty Law Center

When her father died in 2005, Sonia Turley-Landers cut her hair much shorter than Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women required and wrote a poem. 

Sonia, 59, shares Native American heritage with both her mother and her father, Jesse Turley.  Through her mother, she is enrolled with the Onondaga Nation.

“We cut our hair when we’re in mourning,” she said. 

Sonia wrote the poem as she had learned to do in a creative writing class in prison – a course, she said, that saved her life.