Birmingham City Jail Releases Roster After ACLU Makes Public Records Request
Despite the global coronavirus pandemic that puts incarcerated people at greater risk of infection and death, the Birmingham City Jail is still holding dozens of people on charges as minor as trespassing, public intoxication, disorderly conduct, possession of drug paraphernalia, and failure to appear.
BY BETH SHELBURNE, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, CAMPAIGN FOR SMART JUSTICE
According to a list of people incarcerated at the jail on May 8, also known as a “jail roster,” a total of 68 people were being held, and 10 of them had been in jail for over 100 days, 6 of them since 2019. Additionally, the racial breakdown of the jail population was striking: 51 out of 68 people held were Black, or 75 percent of the population. See the full jail roster.
Upon receiving the jail roster on May 14, a public information officer with the Birmingham Police Department said moving forward, the jail roster would be available at the facility.
The effort to obtain the Birmingham jail roster exemplifies frequent obstructions or delays citizens encounter when seeking public information from government entities. Government entities have a responsibility to provide accurate and transparent records about their policies, practices, and other operations to any and all citizens, regardless of credentials. This, however, is often not the case. Here is a first hand account from Investigative Reporter Beth Shelburne about the challenges she faced when searching for public information in Alabama.
“On Friday May 8, I visited the Birmingham City Jail located at 425 6th Avenue South and asked to view the jail roster. The officer working at the jail’s reception area first told me that I could not view the roster, and when I asked her why she asked me who I was and why I wanted to know this information. I told her I was an investigative reporter, to which she quickly replied, “You didn’t tell me that,” and then asked to view my credentials. When I told her the jail roster was public information and should be available to anyone, she called her supervisor to speak with me.
A male officer came into the lobby and asked me if he could help me and I politely asked to see the jail roster and shared my professional contact information with him. He told me the roster was not information they typically released to the public, but he would ask his supervisor and let me know. I waited in the lobby for a few minutes until the same officer came out again and referred me to the phone number for the public information office of the Birmingham Police Department (BPD). I told him again that a jail roster is well established public information and should be available to anyone, and does not require authorization from a gatekeeper. I then called the number from the jail lobby and spoke with Sgt. Rod Mauldin, a public information officer with BPD. I told him I was inside the jail, hoping to view the jail roster. He told me he would have to check with his supervisor, but would get back to me later in the day. I left the jail empty handed.
Sgt. Mauldin informed me on Monday, May 11 that BPD would not release the information to me, but I was welcome to submit a public records request at their headquarters in downtown Birmingham. Once again, I informed him that this information should be publicly available and is surprisingly easy to obtain from many jails in our state that either post a roster in their lobby or on the jail website. I wrote and submitted the records request in person at BPD headquarters later that day. I finally received the jail roster on Thursday May 14, almost a week after I first asked for it.”
Beth Shelburne is an investigative reporter for the Campaign for Smart Justice with the ACLU of Alabama. For investigative reporting on Alabama’s prison and pardons & paroles systems, follow her on Twitter at @bshelburne.