A spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Corrections confirmed on Monday the death of an incarcerated individual at Limestone Correctional Facility during the previous week.
Kenyon Arrington, a 34-year-old incarcerated man at the Limestone County facility, was the victim of an assault by another incarcerated person on Saturday, the ADOC spokesperson said, and “became unresponsive” after arriving at the health care unit within the facility to receive medical attention.
Life-saving measures were attempted, but Arrington succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead later that day, the spokesperson said.
The ADOC’s Law Enforcement Services Division is investigating the circumstances surrounding his death and will release more information at the conclusion of their investigation.
Limestone correctional facility is the largest state prison by the overall population, with a month-end population of 2,246 incarcerated men in a facility designed to house only 1,628, according to the latest statistics provided by the ADOC.
In the U.S Justice Department’s on-going lawsuit with the state of Alabama and the ADOC, the government argues that correctional officials continually fail to protect incarcerated men from physical violence and death.
An amended version of the complaint describes the “pervasive and systemic” violence in Alabama’s prisons for men, with the number of deaths related to inmate-on-inmate assaults increasing by over 200 percent from 2015 to 2020. The ADOC misclassifies and underreports instances of homicide, with some deaths not being reported at all, the complaint added.
