Alabama prisons let out ‘old, sick and dying’ inmates denied parole

Tucked away in the infirmary of Julia Tutwiler Prison, Leola Harris watched and listened as women around her fell deeper into sickness, getting worse by the week. Her health was failing, too, and she knew it. Her diabetes care and treatments were a reminder that the state was paying to keep her alive, providing the wheelchair-bound 72-year-old with dialysis for end-stage renal disease.

But none of that mattered when she came up for parole in January 2023.

She was denied.

“It was just a matter of time before I died in there,” she said in a phone call in late August.

But that wasn’t the end of Harris’ story. That denial didn’t sit well with the people who run the state’s overcrowded prisons.

A year later, the Alabama Department of Corrections let her out anyway, working around the three-member parole board, which has spent the last two years denying nearly all releases from an overcrowded prison system.

The prisons used a little known relief valve called medical furlough, freeing up vital bed space and time for medical staff.

And Harris wasn’t the only one.

In 2024, she was one of three. All three came up for parole, and each were denied.

And then, the prison system turned around and released them anyway.

Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said the law, enacted in 2008, allows for “the discretionary release” of some inmates.

“The Medical Furlough Act allows the ADOC to release certain geriatric, permanently incapacitated or terminally ill inmates to family members under certain conditions. These inmates are better served in this capacity, and it allows more resources for the disruptive inmates,” he said.

‘Nursing home with no care’

Harris sat in prison for two decades, serving a 35-year sentence for the shooting death of 45-year-old Lennell Norris.

The case was never straightforward. Harris let the man inside her home in the tiny town of Shorter in Macon County early one morning in May of 2000. She initially told police that Norris shot himself in her kitchen, while she was asleep in her bedroom. The autopsy report, included in court records, shows Norris’ manner of death was undetermined, and there were varying opinions on whether he could have pulled the trigger.

A Macon County jury heard the case and in 2003, and she was convicted of murder. Shortly after finding herself behind bars, Harris said, she got sick.

And she didn’t get better.

A prison worker pushes Leola Harris out of Julia Tutwiler prison when she was released on medical furlough in July 2024. Harris was sporting a new wig gifted to her by a prison nurse. (Photo by Redemption Earned) Contributed

Harris said she moved into the infirmary about five years ago, along with about 16 other women who were so sick that they had taken up residence there, too. Harris said about eight more lived in another healthcare unit.

There was one woman who wailed throughout the night. Another was blind and had mobility issues, Harris said, and she missed meals frequently because there was no one to help her to get up. Others were wheelchair bound, and some bedridden, not able to use the bathroom without help.

“It’s bad,” Harris said simply through the phone. “It’s really, really bad.”

She said healthcare at Tutwiler, an 82-year-old prison in Wetumpka, was abysmal, “a nursing home with no care.”

Despite her decades of time served and her rapidly declining health, Harris didn’t expect to be paroled when it came her turn in January 2023.

Everyone she knew had been denied. She was no exception.

“I wasn’t surprised at all,” she said.

Supporters of offenders line watch the hearings in the hearing room of the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles in Montgomery, Alabama, January 9, 2024. Tamika Moore | AL.com

The board voted to deny Harris parole and reset her for another hearing five years later in 2028 — the maximum amount of time that the board is allowed to push someone off.

Harris suspects that some of the board members didn’t dive into her file, read about her deteriorating health or study the programs she had completed in prison.

“I don’t think they read nobody’s file,” she said.

Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb, whose legal nonprofit Redemption Earned represents Harris, said she believes the board denied Harris due to her original charge. The vast majority of people eligible for parole with a violent underlying offense are denied.

Still, Harris didn’t want to die in prison. Her lawyers suggested trying the medical furlough program, but Harris had never heard of it.

Most — if not all — of the women lying in beds in the infirmary, Harris said, don’t know about the program, either. Harris told AL.com she never heard of anyone applying for medical furlough, and none of the healthcare staff talked about it. She said those women without lawyers probably will never know it’s even an option.

“If they knew, they would apply and jump on it,” she said.

Harris’ lawyers petitioned the Alabama Department of Corrections to place her on medical furlough. The move is rare, with just 10 people currently out on furlough from a system bursting with 20,000 prisoners and at 169% capacity.

“Alabama’s prison infirmaries are overflowing with people who are dying,” said Cobb.

Over the last ten years, an average of just seven people were placed on medical furlough each year. This year, it’s been a last-ditch effort to get dying people out of prison after the parole board denied them release. As of this summer, four people have been medically furloughed.

State law spells out who can get the status: someone who is geriatric, permanently incapacitated, or terminally ill, according to strict guidelines. No one convicted of capital murder or a sex offense can get a medical furlough, and the prison commissioner makes the ultimate decision.

Hamm, the prison commissioner who makes the those decisions, said many factors go into his choices. Some of those considerations are the inmate’s criminal record, public safety, and the inmate’s ability, or inability, to commit new crimes.

The other two

As with Harris, Hamm released two other seriously ill inmates this year who had been denied parole.

Samuel Turner, 57, was denied parole in 2022, despite his family showing up to the parole hearing and speaking words of support. He’s served more than a decade in prison for a manslaughter charge, resulting from a fight at his Montgomery County home in 2010.

According to previous news coverage of the case, Turner’s cousin and her boyfriend were arguing when Turner intervened and fatally stabbed the man. Turner’s lawyers argued he acted to protect two women. He’s not set to go back up for parole until the summer of 2027, again pushed off for another five years.

The face of Samuel Turner at the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles in Montgomery, Alabama. He is one of many who were denied of parole in Alabama. Tamika Moore | AL.com

Bernard Sargent, 61, was denied parole in June 2023. His next parole hearing is slated for June 2025. He has served three years of a 15-year sentence for being a felon in possession of a gun, after he was caught with a .22 caliber revolver. He was barred from having a gun after an earlier conviction of third-degree robbery.

The parole board voted to keep Sargent and Turner locked away. And yet, both were let out by the prisons on medical furlough this year due to serious health issues.

While the names of the furloughed inmates are public record, the prison system didn’t reveal their medical conditions.

Rep. Jim Hill, R-Moody, sits on the Alabama legislature’s Joint Prison Oversight Committee. Earlier this summer, he said at a public meeting that parole board members should have come to the hearing and listened to the concerns of family members whose loved ones are dying in behind bars.

In a phone interview, he said he thinks medical furlough and medical parole are ways to get people who aren’t dangerous out of the state’s overcrowded facilities, and leave room for those who are.

“Public safety is of utmost importance,” he said, “but if you have an individual who is simply beyond the point where for that person public safety is an issue, or the potential to harm someone is not an issue, then I think we ought to be utilizing this more than we are.”

Cobb, a Democrat, agreed.

“The taxpayers should not want their tax dollars wasted on individuals who have no possible way of ever hurting anyone ever again,” she said.

“Policymakers and citizens of Alabama need to ask themselves: Is this policy making us safer? Are we safer when we force old, sick, and dying people to rot in prison? Is that making us safer? And the answer is no. It’s wasting tax dollars and not making us safer.”

The face of Bernard Sargent at the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles in Montgomery, Alabama. He is one of many who were denied of parole in Alabama.  Tamika Moore | AL.com

There was a fourth person so sick the prison system sent him home this year, too.

Guy Moore spent 25 years in prison for a string of store robberies in north Alabama. No one was hurt in those holdups, but Moore did brandish a knife. The 61-year-old was not eligible for parole, after being sentenced to die behind bars under the state’s old Habitual Felony Offender laws. His case never went before the parole board, and he was never denied.

Money talks

Healthcare costs for Alabama prisons are skyrocketing, caused by a myriad of issues: the number of people in prison, the aging inmate population and inflation.

In 2024, officials projected the department would spend $224 million on inmate healthcare. That’s $69 million more than four years ago.

This year, the department estimates it will spend an average of $31,928 per inmate. A third of that money is for medical care.

In May, the department reported that over 10% of its inmates are older than 60. According to data from the Alabama Department of Corrections, 45 inmates are currently on dialysis, 47 are classified as “total care,” meaning they require assistance for everything, and 70 are in “long-term care,” meaning they’re not going to get better.

The prison system operates one facility for elderly and sick inmates, the Hamilton Aged and Infirmed Center. One other prison, St. Clair Correctional Facility, has a “total medical care infirmary” with dialysis services, a cancer unit, and an emergency room.

Both facilities, like the rest of the prison system, are jam-packed. Hamilton is designed to hold 123 inmates, according to prison data, but currently there are 295 beds.

St. Clair was designed for 984; it has beds for 1,195 now.

Hill, the lawmaker and a former circuit judge, said the state has to balance the healthcare costs with inmate needs.

“We have a duty to provide medical care for people we incarcerate,” he said. “I certainly want the lowest possible figure that is reasonable and provides good care. Part of that, to me, is removing people from the system that are the most expensive to care for and provide the least risk of doing harm.”

When asked in a phone interview why the parole board didn’t release people who were deemed sick enough to be furloughed from prison, Hill didn’t have an answer.

“Your questions are well taken,” he said. “You’re going to have to ask somebody else why they don’t take some actions that to you seem common-sensible.”

The parole board has repeatedly denied requests for comment from AL.com.

Denied anyway

There is also a way to request medical consideration when coming up for parole to get on the docket earlier. But even when an inmate lands a rare hearing on the medical parole docket, the odds are not in their favor.

According to data from the Bureau of Pardons and Paroles, just 36 people have had medical parole hearings since 2021. And of those, only 13 were granted parole.

Hearings for sick inmates aren’t done any differently than for regular parole cases.

An inmate still must have a majority vote from the three-member board, and people can still show up to speak for or against release. Neither Turner nor Sargent were moved up on a medical parole docket; Harris did get her hearing on the medical docket. But the parole board denied all three anyway.

Last October, the board granted medical parole to two men: Thomas Owens was one of them. Owens is a quadriplegic, who was imprisoned for property crimes that happened before his injuries. But even he did not earn a unanimous vote, as parole board chairperson Leigh Gwathney voted against his release.

“I am convinced that the public should know that the chairman of the parole board voted to deny the medical parole of a nonviolent offender who is a quadriplegic, completely bedridden, and spends most of the day in a catatonic state,” Cobb, whose legal foundation also represents Owens, previously told AL.com.

“Why would you vote no for a quadriplegic? Why? It simply does not make sense.”

The Alabama Medical Parole Act requires the Department of Corrections to provide a list to the board upon request of “geriatric, permanently incapacitated, and terminally ill inmates who are otherwise eligible for parole.”

Additionally, the department is ordered each year to name all inmates who have spent more than a month in an infirmary in the prior year, those who have received “costly and frequent medical treatment outside a Department of Corrections facility in the previous 12 months,” and all inmates “suffering from a life-threatening illness and whose death is imminent within 12 months.”

This image shows Alabama inmates who were up for parole in April 2023. That month, 299 were denied, 12 had their hearings continued and 40 were paroled.  Justin Yurkanin | [email protected]

That’s how the medical parole docket gets created, essentially just moving up parole dates for those who are sick and eligible.

Over the last few years, as parole rates have fallen lower and lower, and as even medical paroles are more often denied than granted, the prison system has made more use of medical furloughs to take the pressure off the prison staff. In 2020, five inmates were medically furloughed. While that number slumped to three in 2021, it rose to seven in 2022 and 11 in 2023.

‘Like being thrown away’

Earlier this summer, Harris left Tutwiler prison in a wheelchair.

Now, she spends three days a week at a facility receiving kidney dialysis. She has other home medical equipment, including things for her to bathe and to use the restroom. Being on furlough requires that she stay within a certain number of miles from her home, and she has prison officials check on her frequently.

Last year, the parole rate was just 8% in Alabama. That’s despite the board’s own criteria showing about 80% should have been paroled.

But things have changed in 2024 as the board came under scrutiny from the press and public, from two former chief justices and from a host of state lawmakers. So far this year, the parole board has been letting out, in some months, three times as many people as last year.

Harris wasn’t one, but she’s grateful and relieved to be home now, anyway.

On that lunchtime phone call in late August, Harris said she’d rather be dying at home. She talked about her experience, the horrors she saw in Tutwiler, and her health. But she also talked about her friends and the women she left behind.

“I felt thrown away. It’s not that I wanted to be dead, I just wanted to feel alive,” she said.

“It’s like being thrown away, you know,” she told AL.com “Most people in prison, their families seem to forget about them and it’s like being thrown away. It’s like being dead, but not really buried.”

This project was completed with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.