Atmore, Alabama, is the location of Holman Correctional Facility, a place where the book’s account of pretrial punishment and execution becomes physical: a short ride from a county jail leads to death row, and a late-night journey ends at a prison ringed by armed officers. The town’s significance lies in this proximity between ordinary roads and a system designed to confine, isolate, and kill.

Setting and Access

Holman Correctional Facility stood a short ride from the county jail, in Atmore. On August 1, 1987, Sheriff Tate drove Walter McMillian there; Ralph Myers was transferred with him. The move placed two men who had not yet been tried inside a prison for convicted people, on death row. The account does not describe Atmore as a broad civic landscape so much as a point on the route into confinement: the nearby jail, the prison, and the distant execution chamber are linked by short drives but sharply divided by the power exercised inside the facility.

The prison’s location did not make it accessible in any meaningful sense. On the night of Herbert Richardson’s execution, Bryan Stevenson raced to Atmore after learning that the courts had denied a stay. The summer light was fading as he drove; by the time he reached the prison, it was dark. Dozens of armed state troopers, local police officers, deputy sheriffs, and apparent National Guard personnel were stationed along the road to the parking area and outside the entrance. The road into the prison was thus not merely a way to reach a building. On an execution night, it became a guarded approach to a state killing.

Holman and Death-Row Confinement

The transfer to Holman was an extraordinary use of the prison. Pretrial detainees were generally held in local jails, not in prisons reserved for convicted people; placing an untried person on death row was rarer still. Even other condemned prisoners were shocked to see McMillian and Myers there. The book stresses that such confinement was punitive in substance: death row was the most restrictive form of confinement, with prisoners alone in small cells for twenty-three hours a day, limited opportunities for exercise and visits, and close proximity to the electric chair.

The unit’s physical conditions sharpened that account. Prisoners occupied windowless concrete buildings, in cells measuring five by eight feet and furnished with a metal door, a commode, and a steel bunk. In August, temperatures could remain above 100 degrees for days or weeks. Men caught rats, poisonous spiders, and snakes inside the prison to pass the time and protect themselves. Isolation, heat, and scarce visits were not incidental details of the setting; they show how the prison’s architecture and remoteness intensified the punishment imposed on people whose cases had not yet been tried.

The Prison on an Execution Night

At Holman, the execution chamber was deep inside the prison. Less than thirty minutes before Richardson was to be put to death, Stevenson was taken to the cell where Richardson was being held. The prison had shaved the hair from Richardson’s body to facilitate the execution, while the electric chair had not been modified after the disastrous execution of John Evans. Stevenson was also thinking of Horace Dunkins’s botched execution a month earlier. The location gathered these events into a single institutional space: the cell, the chamber, and the chair stood within the same prison, and the attorney’s role was to remain beside his client as the final procedure approached.

The guarded entrance and the locked interior frame two different forms of presence. Outside, armed officers secured the route and watched over the scheduled execution. Inside, Stevenson stayed with Richardson, who took his hands and asked to pray. The prison’s arrangement made the approaching death difficult to interrupt, but it did not erase the relationship between lawyer and client at its center.

Narrative Significance

Atmore’s narrative force comes from the contrast between distance and nearness. The prison was only a short ride from the county jail, yet that movement carried McMillian and Myers into a radically more restrictive regime before either had been convicted. On another night, Stevenson’s drive to the same place brought him through a line of armed officers to a client facing execution. The repeated journeys make the location a threshold: beyond its entrance, ordinary protections and expectations give way to confinement, surveillance, and the machinery of death.