A Mother’s Plea
How Alabama’s Parole Board Ignores
The Prison Crisis
BY BETH SHELBURNE, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, CAMPAIGN FOR SMART JUSTICE
Sharon Crocker Harris was just fed up. Before her son’s fourth parole hearing on April 13, 2022, Sharon decided she’d take a different approach when she stood up before the three parole board members and asked them to show mercy on her son. Christopher Shannon Fulmer, who she calls Shannon, had been locked up in the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) over 24 years, longer than he’d spent living free, when this latest parole hearing was finally scheduled.
“Usually I go up there and try to tell them he’s changed, that he knows he’s done wrong and has worked hard,” Sharon told me after the parole hearing. “That hasn’t worked the last three times, so I thought, this time I’m going to tell them what his life has really been like in there.”
What Shannon’s life has been like in the Alabama prison system sounds like a script for a horror movie, but is no surprise given the grisly details laid out in the 2020 Department of Justice lawsuit charging ADOC with constitutional violations due to rampant violence, including excessive force, corruption and a lack of correctional staff.
During his incarceration, Shannon has been robbed at knifepoint and beaten multiple times, including an incident in 2017 at Bibb Correctional Facility in which a group of incarcerated men knocked him to the floor and beat him, leaving him with a traumatic brain injury.
Shannon Fulmer as a child.
His mother said he was a gifted athlete and
artist. “He’s still very talented,” she said.
Sharon described this incident when she testified in front of the parole board on April 13. The three board members sat stoically as she described her family’s worst nightmare in the three minutes the board allotted for her testimony.
“He was knocked unconscious, and the inmates jumped on his head,” she testified before the parole board. “It was other inmates that saved him that day, not the prison guards. He was taken to the hospital with multiple facial fractures, cuts that needed stitches and a severe brain injury and then brought back to the prison that day and put back in general population, not the infirmary.”
“He still suffers from that (assault) today,” Sharon later told me. “They put staples in his head and sent him right back to the prison. His mind is still not right.”
Sharon only learned about the 2017 assault after it happened, when her son was well enough to call her and describe what happened. They had an upcoming visit scheduled, and he warned her that his face was still badly bruised.
“He was very confused at that visit,” Sharon recalled. “He was messed up and crying. My daughter, who wasn’t quite prepared, broke down and cried when she saw him. It was just awful.”
Shannon Fulmer, now 44, pleaded guilty to a drug-related murder when he was 19. He was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole and Sharon said her family was led to believe Shannon could eventually make parole if he followed the rules in prison.
“The lawyer made us think he would get out in ten years,” she said. “The first time he went up for parole, the board was very nice and told us ‘your son will get out, he just hasn’t done enough time,’ and they set him off for three years.”
Shannon got his GED and earned a stack of certificates for completing multiple educational and rehabilitative programs inside the prisons—programs he was told to complete if he wanted to make parole, Sharon explained. Still, Shannon was denied parole at his next two hearings, with no explanation of what he could do differently.
“He’s in a fight for his life in there, yet they bring up his disciplinaries every single time,” Sharon said. “He gets written up for defending himself. What’s he supposed to do? Just sit there and get himself killed?”
After Sharon testified at Shannon’s April 13 parole hearing, the victim’s widow testified in opposition to parole, along with a representative from advocacy organization “VOCAL” (Victims of Crime and Leniency) and an officer from the Attorney General’s office. The board did not discuss the case in executive session, but instead voted right after testimony to deny Shannon’s parole and set his next eligibility for 2027, the maximum time allowed by law.
Christopher Shannon Fulmer
has served almost 25 years in prison.
Sharon said Shannon is remorseful for his crime, but she believes he has more than paid for the harm he caused by surviving 25 years in such a brutal environment. She was disappointed by the parole board’s decision, but not surprised. And she questions the politics behind the parole board’s recent record denials, which come at the same time Alabama Governor Kay Ivey pushes ahead with a controversial plan to spend $1.3 billion on new mega-prisons.
“I voted for Governor Ivey, but I’ll never do that again,” Sharon said. “I truly believe one of the reasons they aren’t letting anyone out of prison is so they can justify the need for these mega-prisons. They’re just keeping them crowded instead of giving people a fair chance to get out and make a life for themself outside prison.”
Sharon talked to her son, Shannon, the night after the parole board denied his release. She said he wasn’t surprised by the news and has accepted that he’ll likely never make parole, even though his sentence is life with the possibility of parole.
Sharon will continue to worry about Shannon—the constant exposure to drugs in the prisons, the threat of violence, extortion, rape and a lack of access to decent healthcare. It’s all part of the familiar suffering shouldered by families of people incarcerated in the Alabama Department of Corrections.
“This whole thing has been a nightmare for all of us,” Sharon said. “One that seems like it’s never going to end.”