Bullock

"A system working exactly as intended": a firsthand indictment of the violence, abandonment, and cruelty at the heart of American incarceration.

Bullock: Chronicles of Deprivation and Despair in an American Prison is not simply a book about conditions inside one of Alabama's most notorious prisons-it is a collective testimony, a record of survival and resistance, and a call to confront the prison system as an instrument of state violence. Through a series of in-depth interviews with prisoners at Bullock Correctional Facility, journalist and writer Matthew Vernon Whalan brings forward the voices of people most often silenced: those who have lived, suffered, and endured inside the largest prison system in the world today.

Overcrowded to 150% of its capacity, flooded with fentanyl and sewage alike, and structurally collapsing, Bullock is presented here not as an outlier but as emblematic of the American carceral state. Through the words of people like Derek, Jordan, and Cecile, we hear of prisoners with untreated HIV and seizure disorders shackled to hospital beds; people sleeping on concrete floors without blankets in freezing temperatures; elders and people with disabilities extorted, ignored, and assaulted with impunity; a dorm flooded with feces on Christmas Eve. And we learn how state officials-fully aware of these conditions-have responded with indifference, cover-ups, and profiteering, including the diversion of federal COVID relief funds to build more prisons.

This is not journalism in the abstract. Whalan's work is a direct intervention against the cultural and political forces that normalize prison as a solution. He refuses to flatten his subjects into statistics or morality tales, instead allowing them to narrate their own experience, contradictions and all. In the process, Bullock offers a rare and unflinching look into the everyday horror of incarceration, grounded in the legacy of lawsuits like Pugh v. Locke, which decades ago declared Alabama's prisons cruel and unusual-a ruling that remains brutally relevant today.

With a foreword by Eddie Burkhalter of Alabama Appleseed, Bullock is a document of deep listening and political urgency. It shows how prison is not failing but functioning: as a regime of disposability, where lives are discarded and death is bureaucratized. It dares readers-especially those on the outside-to grapple with what it means to organize in solidarity with the incarcerated, and to confront the larger system that makes such cruelty inevitable.

For those committed to abolition, justice, and the dignity of all people, this book is essential reading.