the Virginia Highlands section of the city, where we stayed for a year before another rent increase sent us to Midtown Atlanta. The two-bedroom apartment we shared in Midtown was the nicest place in the nicest neighborhood we’d yet found. Because of my growing caseload in Alabama, I didn’t get to spend much time there.
My plan for a new law project to represent people on death row in Alabama was starting to take shape. My hope was to get the project off the ground in Alabama and eventually return to Atlanta to live. My docket of new death penalty cases in Alabama meant I was working insane hours driving back and forth from Atlanta and simultaneously trying to resolve several prison condition cases I had filed in various Southern states.
Conditions of confinement for prisoners were getting worse everywhere. In the 1970s, the Attica Prison riots drew national attention to horrible prison abuses. The takeover of Attica by inmates allowed the country to learn about cruel practices within prisons such as solitary confinement, where inmates are isolated in a small confined space for weeks or months. Prisoners in some facilities would be placed in a “sweatbox,” a casket-sized hole or a box situated where the inmate would be forced to endure extreme heat for days or weeks. Some prisoners were tortured with electric cattle prods as punishment for violations of the prison’s rule. Inmates at some facilities would be chained to “hitching posts,” their arms fastened above their heads in a painful position where they’d be forced to stand for hours. The practice, which wasn’t declared unconstitutional until 2002, was one of many degrading and dangerous punishments imposed on incarcerated people. Terrible food and living conditions were widespread.
The death of forty-two people at the end of the Attica standoff exposed the danger of prison abuse and inhumane conditions. The increased attention also led to several Supreme Court rulings that provided basic due process protections for imprisoned people. Wary of potential violence, several states implemented reforms to eliminate the most abusive practices. But a decade later, the rapidly growing prison population inevitably led to a deterioration in the conditions of confinement.
We were getting scores of letters from prisoners who continued to complain about horrible conditions. Prisoners reported that they were still being beaten by correctional staff and subjected to humiliation in stockades and other degrading punishments. An alarming number of cases came to our office involving prisoners who had been found dead in their cells.
I was working on several of these cases, including one in Gadsden, Alabama, where jail officials claimed that a thirty-nine-year-old black man had died of natural causes after being arrested for traffic violations. His family maintained that he was beaten by police and jail officials who then denied him his asthma inhaler and medication despite his begging for it. I’d spent a lot of time with the grief-stricken family of Lourida Ruffin and heard what an affectionate father he had been, how kind he had been, and how people had assumed things about him that weren’t true. At six feet five inches tall and over 250 pounds, he could seem a little intimidating, but his wife and mother insisted that he was sweet and gentle.
Gadsden police had stopped Mr. Ruffin one night because they said his car was swerving. Police discovered that his license had expired a few weeks earlier, so he was taken into custody. When he arrived at the city jail badly bruised and bleeding, Mr. Ruffin told the other inmates that he had been beaten terribly and was desperately in need of his inhaler and asthma medication. When I started investigating the case, inmates at the jail told me they saw officers beating Mr. Ruffin before taking him to an isolation cell. Several hours later they saw medical personnel remove his body from the cell on a gurney.
Despite the reforms of the 1970s and early 1980s, inmate death in jails and prisons was still a serious problem. Suicide, prisoner-on-prisoner violence, inadequate medical care, staff abuse, and guard violence claimed the lives of hundreds of prisoners every year.
I soon received other complaints from people in the Gadsden community. The parents of a black teenager who had been shot and killed by police told me that their son had been stopped for a minor traffic violation after running a red light. Their young son had just started driving and became very nervous when the police officer approached him. His family maintained that he reached down to the