Julia Tutwiler Women's Prison

Julia Tutwiler Women's Prison is Alabama’s only state prison for women. Built in the 1940s and named for an advocate of prisoners’ education and humane confinement, it stands in sharp contrast to that legacy: the book depicts an overcrowded, dangerous institution where women’s confinement, inadequate classification, and exposure to sexual abuse became central parts of their punishment.

History, Population, and Conditions

The prison is located in Wetumpka, Alabama. Courts repeatedly found it unconstitutionally overcrowded; it held almost twice as many women as it was designed to accommodate. That pressure formed part of a wider national expansion: from 1980 to 2010, the number of women sent to prison in the United States increased by 646 percent, 1.5 times the rate of increase for men. At the time described, nearly 200,000 women were in American jails and prisons, and more than a million were under the supervision or control of the criminal justice system.

Inside Tutwiler, women were crowded into dormitories and improvised living spaces. As the state’s sole women’s prison, it could not meaningfully classify residents or assign them to appropriate dorms. Women living with serious mental illness or severe emotional problems were placed alongside others, making dorm life chaotic and stressful. Marsha Colbey, newly imprisoned there, could not grow accustomed to hearing women scream and holler through the night. Overcrowding was not merely a question of space: it shaped the daily environment in which women with sharply different needs were required to live together.

The institution’s population reflected how poverty and family circumstances could become entangled with severe punishment. Nearly two-thirds of incarcerated women were serving time for nonviolent, low-level drug or property crimes, while drug laws and three-strikes laws contributed substantially to women’s imprisonment. The book also places Tutwiler in the context of prosecutions of women after unexplained infant deaths. After Marsha Colbey was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole, she was shackled in a prison van and taken there; other women she met had also been imprisoned after giving birth to stillborn babies. Their presence made the prison a meeting place for lives shaped by pregnancy, poverty, and criminal prosecution as well as by the conditions within its walls.

Sexual Abuse, Investigation, and Reform

Overcrowding was not the only danger inside Julia Tutwiler Women's Prison. Women were raped, sexually harassed, exploited, and assaulted by male officers. During prison counts, the male warden allowed guards into the showers, where they leered at naked women and made crude comments and suggestive threats. Women had no privacy in the bathrooms, where male officers could watch them use the toilet; dark corners and hallways became places where women feared they could be beaten or sexually assaulted. The abuse extended even to the prison chapel: the chaplain was sexually assaulting women who came there. EJI had asked the Department of Corrections to install security cameras in the dorms, but officials refused.

The prison’s abuses came into sharper view through the cases of women held there. After a woman who had been raped at Tutwiler filed a federal civil suit without legal assistance, EJI took on her case; defects in her pleadings limited the relief available, but the account of her experience prompted a broader investigation. EJI interviewed more than fifty women and found sexual violence to be widespread. Several women had been raped and become pregnant. DNA tests confirmed that male officers had fathered some of the children, yet little was done. Officers who had faced multiple sexual-assault complaints were sometimes reassigned temporarily—to other duties or prisons—only to return to Tutwiler and prey on women again.

EJI eventually filed a complaint with the United States Department of Justice and issued public reports that received widespread media coverage. Mother Jones included Tutwiler on its list of the ten worst prisons in America; it was the only women’s facility on the list. Legislative hearings and policy changes followed: male guards were barred from shower areas and toilets, and a new warden took charge. The reforms addressed specific opportunities for abuse, but the account’s sequence—from women’s testimony, through documented complaints, to public and legislative attention—also shows how long institutional violence could persist despite repeated warnings.

Communal Life and the Meaning of Release

Tutwiler’s overcrowded dormitories also formed a community in which the women’s private losses became difficult to keep separate. Marsha Colbey noticed those who received no visitors and those overwhelmed by worry for children or parents left outside. She tried to remain detached, but could not ignore women in acute distress. A day of grief for one woman could darken the day for everyone; a hoped-for letter, a family visit after a long absence, or news of parole could lift the whole dorm. In a place where women had little control over their confinement, attention to one another became a fragile form of mutual support.

The prison held women whose cases exposed different routes into lengthy sentences. Efernia McClendon, a Black teenager from Opelika, had delivered a stillborn baby at just over five months and left the remains in a drainage ditch. Police questioned her until she admitted she could not be completely certain the infant had not moved before dying, although the premature delivery made viability extremely unlikely. Threatened with the death penalty, she became part of the growing population of women imprisoned after unplanned pregnancies and decisions made under pressure. Her presence made visible how the criminal system could turn uncertainty and vulnerability into grounds for punishment.

Release mattered beyond the person who walked out. Shortly after Marsha arrived, EJI secured the freedom of Diane Jones, who had been wrongly convicted in a drug-trafficking case involving her former boyfriend and sentenced to life without parole. Jones’s release gave hope to other women serving life terms at Tutwiler. Women Marsha had never met wrote to express gratitude, while Jones told Bryan Stevenson that women in the prison were desperate for help. The prison was therefore not only a place where wrongful convictions and severe conditions accumulated; it was also a setting in which one woman’s successful challenge could make another woman’s future seem less closed.

Marsha Colbey’s Case and Release

The case that brought Marsha Colbey to Julia Tutwiler Women's Prison rested on disputed claims about her stillborn son. Before conducting a formal examination, state forensic pathologist Kathleen Enstice told an investigator that she believed the baby had been born alive; she later acknowledged that she had no basis for that conclusion without an autopsy and tests. Enstice’s subsequent autopsy asserted both a live birth and that the child would have survived with medical attention. At trial, however, the State’s own obstetrician, Dennis McNally, testified that Colbey’s pregnancy carried a high risk of unexplained fetal death, while forensic pathologist Werner Spitz rejected the basis for declaring either a live birth or a homicide. The conflicting medical evidence did not prevent a capital-murder prosecution.

The jury selection further narrowed the chance of an impartial decision. Some prospective jurors said the allegation was so disturbing that they could not honor the presumption of innocence; others said their close relationship with a state investigator would lead them to credit his testimony. The trial court allowed almost all of them to remain on the panel. After jurors raised concerns about execution, the State agreed not to pursue the death penalty if Colbey were convicted, and the jury returned a guilty verdict. She received life imprisonment without parole and was sent to Tutwiler. Her conviction was initially affirmed, but the Alabama Supreme Court later granted a new trial because biased jurors had not been excluded. After two years resolving the legal case and another year negotiating credit for time served, Colbey was released in December 2012, following ten years of wrongful imprisonment.