As Alabama execution looms, supporters of death row inmate turn to Michigan governor

by Ralph Chapoco, Alabama Reflector
February 4, 2025

Alabama’s plan to execute Demetrius Frazier on Thursday could be complicated if the governor of Michigan attempts to intervene.

Frazier, convicted of the 1991 rape and murder of Pauline Brown in Birmingham, is scheduled to be put to death by nitrogen gas. Frazier was serving a life sentence in Michigan after being convicted of murdering 14-year-old Crystal Kendrick in 1992. He was convicted of Brown’s murder in 1996 but was incarcerated in Michigan until being transferred to Alabama in 2011.

Frazier’s mother Carol and friends and family of Frazier asked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to intervene last week.

“I love my son with all my heart,” Carol Frazier stated in her letter. “I know my son has changed. Demetrius has repented. He has asked God for forgiveness. He has also told me he has made a mistake and wish he could take it back.”

Whitmer has not publicly weighed in on the case. A message was sent to the Michigan Governor’s Office on Monday seeking comment. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel wrote in a filing last month that the state “does not seek to return Frazier to a Michigan correctional facility.”

“The question before our office was not whether or not the attorney general should intervene, but whether that transfer was appropriate and legal under Michigan law, which we determined it was,” said Danny Wimmer, press secretary for the Michigan AG’s Office in a statement last Tuesday. “Outside of that, this department does not intervene in other states’ criminal matters.”

Frazier’s legal options have narrowed considerably in the past week after two of his lawsuits have stalled in the courts. A federal district court judge for the Middle District of Alabama denied his request for a preliminary injunction on Friday.

Demetrius also asked a court to dismiss a second federal lawsuit after Nessel said they were not seeking to return Frazier to Michigan. No further appeals had been filed with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals as of early Monday afternoon.

Alabama carried out six executions in 2024, more than any other state. Three involved nitrogen gas. Michigan abolished the death penalty in 1847.

Shortly after the Alabama Supreme Court granted the state’s motion, Frazier, like other inmates subjected to nitrogen gas, argued that Alabama’s current nitrogen protocol violates his Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment, citing testimony from experts and witnesses from the previous nitrogen gas executions carried out by the state.

The judge ruled in favor of the state, stating that “Frazier has failed to show a substantial likelihood of success on the merits — ‘the most important preliminary-injunction criterion.’”

U.S. District Judge Emily Marks, relying  on testimony from Joseph Antognini, anesthesiologist and witness from the state, ruled for Alabama, writing that “the oxygen deprivation resulting from inhaling nitrogen materially differs from the oxygen deprivation occasioned by other forms of suffocation, such as smothering with a pillow.”

Marks dismissed witness testimony of inmates struggling under the gas, saying they ‘cannot reliably pinpoint when an inmate loses consciousness.’”

Frazier filed another lawsuit claiming that he is technically in the custody of the Michigan Department of Corrections and was transferred to the custody of the ADOC after an executive agreement was signed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley in 2011, according to Frazier’s defense team.

Supporters have urged Whitmer to intervene.

“Michigan was the first state to legislatively abolish the death penalty, and the state has a constitutional prohibition on executions,” said Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty Action, who helped deliver the signed petition to Whitmer. “Human rights norms usually keep counties and states from sending prisoners to places where they face human rights violations, but in Mr. Frazier’s case they inexplicably decided to ship him off to Alabama to be killed.”

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

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Conservatives want to increase birth rates. These moms are terrified to have more kids.

by Kelcie Moseley-Morris, Alabama Reflector
February 3, 2025

Clare Barkley of Ohio always pictured having a second baby. But watching the erosion of reproductive rights and fights over public education and health care, she said the world feels like it’s in upheaval and isn’t sure she wants to roll the dice.

Kristen Witkowski, a North Carolina mom of two, has had several life-threatening complications related to her pregnancies. She might have considered having a third child but is now so terrified of getting pregnant again, she said she wishes she’d had her fallopian tubes tied during her second Cesarean section.

And Brenna Craven Dumas, a mother of two in Arizona who had high-risk pregnancies, wanted to be so sure she didn’t have another, she got her tubes tied and asked her husband to get a vasectomy.

These women live in states that currently or previously had abortion bans, and cited those policies as part of or the primary reason for their fertility decisions.

The national fertility rate — calculated as the total number of live births per 1,000 women of reproductive age — has declined steadily in the United States over the past decade, from 62.5 in 2013 to 54.5 in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data shows the decline is present in every state to varying degrees. During the same time frame, rates have fallen steeply in states with abortion bans, including Idaho, where the rate dropped from 71.8 to 57.5, and Arizona, which fell from 66.3 to 54.1.

Those falls in fertility have been top of mind for elected politicians tied to President Donald Trump’s second-term administration. It is a central piece of Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s presidency as written by the conservative Heritage Foundation and several anti-abortion organizations.

In a memo issued on Jan. 29 by new U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, programs supported or assisted by transportation funds have been directed to give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average. As a congressman for Wisconsin, Duffy supported and co-sponsored many anti-abortion bills, including a bill to defund Planned Parenthood.

Vice President JD Vance has expressed concern over declining fertility rates for several years, and repeatedly drew attention during the 2024 presidential election for negative comments he made about women without children and society as a whole becoming too detached from the ideal of becoming a parent. He has argued that policies limiting or prohibiting abortion access, which he supports, are not contributing to the rates, and advocates for higher taxes for those who don’t have children and for expanding the child tax credit to help families.

“Our society has failed to recognize the obligation that one generation has to another is a core part of living in a society to begin with,” Vance said at the annual anti-abortion March for Life event in January. “So, let me say very simply: I want more babies in the United States of America.”

Why fertility rates are lower

Phillip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in population science, said birth rates have been declining for centuries as modern culture shifted away from using children as a source of labor.

“So that gets you down from eight children per woman to three or four, and then the question is, what makes you continue to go all the way down to very low numbers?” Cohen said.

In the past two decades, he attributes the decline to positive and negative factors. People have more opportunities to spend their time in other ways, especially women, along with more career and life goals that previously were more difficult or impossible to pursue. Although some women manage both a career and a family, there is often pressure to choose one for financial, societal or individual reasons.

The negative factors that are driving down rates, Cohen said, are the expenses of having children, uncertainty and risk.

“(There is) concern about being able to raise children who are competitive in an increasingly unequal world and who can succeed in a society where the penalty for not succeeding seems to be growing,” Cohen said. “If you’re worried about how your kids are going to turn out, and Americans really are … then you can increase your chances of your children succeeding by having fewer of them.”

That rings true for Katie T. in Alabama. Growing up in Alabama as one of four children, she always thought that she would have a big family — probably five kids.

But with the past few years of political developments, including Trump’s re-election, the economy and five months of being a first-time mom, she has decided one baby is enough.

She and her husband are “one and done” after their son, who was born in August. Throughout her pregnancy, Katie said she was already stressed about living in a state with a near-total abortion ban in case anything went wrong, especially as a pregnant woman close to 35, the age when pregnancies are medically considered higher risk. The closest state with broad abortion access is Virginia, which is about 10 hours away by car.

“After I had my baby, I went in for my first checkup to talk about birth control options, and I talked with my husband at length about how I just don’t think (more kids are) in our future anymore,” said Katie T., who asked not to use her last name out of fear of retaliation in her community for her political beliefs.

Not only that, but finances also weighed heavily.

“We are realizing now that daycare is a literal second mortgage payment, and we just can’t afford that,” she said.

Not having a sibling for her son is a disappointment, she said. Her siblings are all older than her, and she describes growing up essentially as an only child, so it was important to her for a long time to have more than one child. But facing a reality of political fights over vaccines and the education system, along with more potential restrictions to reproductive health care, Katie said she had an eight-year birth control implant placed right after the election.

“I hope he will forgive us one day for that,” she said.

‘If something happens, where do we go from here?’

Kiley DeVor, 28, moved from California to Idaho to obtain a degree in physical therapy, and she specializes now in pelvic floor therapy. She and her husband bought a house, thinking they could stay in Idaho for a while, until the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision in June 2022 and Idaho implemented its near-total abortion ban. The state has been at the center of several abortion-related lawsuits in the past two years, including a Supreme Court case in June about whether abortions that are performed during a medical emergency are subject to prosecution under the state law. That matter is still pending in the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

During that time, DeVor said she’s discovered other health issues in addition to endometriosis she’s had for many years that may make conceiving a child more challenging.

“I’m just like, man, it is going to be incredibly difficult for us to get pregnant, so that’s one hurdle, and then if something happens, where do we go from there?” she said. “If we have to use IVF or IUI, if I have to travel out of state and spend another 10 or 20 grand to get the care I need, that’s just not feasible.”

DeVor’s husband started a general contracting business in Idaho that has done well, but she said he doesn’t want to risk starting a family in the state either and would rather wait until they can move somewhere she knows her health care will be protected.

“It’s been an interesting experience of moving to a state where people say, ‘We don’t want big government,’ but at the same time telling people, this is what you can and can’t do,” DeVor said.

Idaho economist doesn’t see worrying trends so far in population movement

Though one recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research said the 13 states with total abortion bans are collectively losing 36,000 residents per quarter based on change of address data from the U.S. Postal Service, it’s unclear how many of those departures are related to politics. According to data from the American Community Survey, nearly 82,000 people moved to Idaho in 2023, while nearly 65,000 moved away, for a net increase of about 16,700 residents.

Jan Roeser, a regional economist at the Idaho Department of Labor, said the state’s population growth has slowed over the past two years, but it had accelerated greatly during the COVID pandemic between 2020 and 2022.

It’s possible that more young people are leaving the state, Roeser said, as seven districts announced or considered school closures in the first half of 2023 because of declining enrollment, according to Idaho Education News. But Idaho is among the eight youngest states in the nation, she said, and one of the leading states for job growth.

“We’d all like to be able to jump up and move just based on our beliefs, but the reality hits that most of us need a job,” Roeser said. “So really, economic opportunity is what I believe allows people to be able to make that final decision, because it’s expensive, and it’s disorienting.”

Until she starts seeing indicators like a spike in layoffs or a decline in enrollment at state universities, Roeser isn’t too concerned about outmigration. But she does worry about the steady decline of fertility rates.

“There’s not much you can do about it, of course, and it takes a long time to reverse once it starts,” she said. “It’s not something you can solve by coming up with public policy.”

Cohen said abortion bans may lead to a small increase in births initially since access is harder to reach, but in the long run, he expects it to contribute more to decreases because it creates uncertainty and fear about pregnancy.

Economically, increasing fertility rates would be a financial drain and potentially hamper growth, he said. That doesn’t mean policies that make it easier to have more children aren’t worth having, but they shouldn’t be done in the interest of increasing births.

“It’s one of the great victories of human development that we allowed people to lower their birth rates,” he said.

‘I’m not going to let them get me down’

For some people, having more children is almost an act of resistance.

Rachel West, a 34-year-old resident of central Texas, had a baby five months ago after a three-year struggle to conceive. She wants at least one more, but knows it might be a stressful experience again because of where she lives. Texas has a near-total abortion ban, along with an attorney general who has attempted to prosecute women who left the state to have an abortion. Cities in Texas have also tried to institute travel bans to prevent women from crossing state lines for abortions.

At the beginning of her pregnancy, West said there were concerns that her embryo was ectopic, when a baby grows in the fallopian tube rather than the uterus. Ectopic pregnancies are not viable and require termination to prevent infection and loss of fertility.

“We did have to think through what that would look like, if we would have to terminate, if we would have trouble finding somebody,” she said. “It was scary, we were just kind of spiraling at home trying to figure out what we would do.”

As someone who struggled to get pregnant the first time, West has also been concerned about efforts to restrict or ban IVF, just in case it becomes an option she has to utilize. But all of the news developments haven’t deterred her from the idea of having another.

“We’ve always wanted to have at least two, maybe three kids, and I would be very frustrated if because of laws in Texas, I had to change my personal life that dramatically,” West said. “It’s almost a prideful thing, where I’m like, I’m not going to let them get me down.”

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

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For Alabamians with mental illness, incarceration can be life-threatening

by Ralph Chapoco, Alabama Reflector
February 3, 2025

The worst moment for Stacey Fuller came at a Jefferson County jail prior to a scheduled transfer to a state prison.

“It was way overcrowded, the conditions were bad, the anger was building and the depression,” said Fuller, who was being held on a drug-related charge. “I started having really toxic thoughts about hurting other people.”

She filed a complaint and a request for mental health services to address her anguish.

A guard learned of the complaint and entered the cell block screaming, she said.

“She wanted to know who put this in and why, just screaming, ‘Who is the dumb hoe who put this in?’”

The guard pulled Fuller aside for a conversation.

“I stood up and walked down those steps,” Fuller said. “I think that was probably the worst moment. She took me down the hall and told me we don’t complain about stuff, that by putting in a request, they would deal with it when they dealt with it.”

Attorneys who litigate cases that involve people who deal with mental illness or a mental health crisis, along with advocates seeking to improve treatment and conditions for those with mental illness state that people suffering from mental illness who are incarcerated in Alabama’s jails are placed into harsh environments that can exacerbate their suffering and, in the worst cases, can result in their death.

According to experts interviewed, comparing the treatment of people dealing with mental health conditions and substance use disorders — in which people cannot control their use of legal or illegal drugs, alcohol or medications —  across the nation is difficult because there is no standard for care, with local corrections officials left to decide the treatment options and protocols when they are in custody.

The number of people incarcerated with a mental illness in Alabama and around the country, as well as the types of mental illnesses those people have, is difficult to determine, because the data collection is not robust.

A 2009 study estimated that about 14.5% of the male population in jail nationwide and 31% of the female population had a serious mental health condition, from major depressive disorder to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

States have latitude in establishing the system to assist people in crisis in a carceral setting. Alabama leaves it up to the individual counties, particularly sheriffs’ departments, to decide on treatments, and more importantly, how much care people should receive.

But incarceration presents serious issues for people going through a mental health emergency.

“Prisons and jails are not built, just generally speaking, are not built to be places that address, effectively, a person’s mental health concerns,” said Latasha L. McCrary, a staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Fuller said she suffered from chronic pain stemming from a vehicle crash in 2007 while working as a nurse in hospice care. During that time, nurses were allowed to call in prescriptions for patients, and she said she began calling into the pharmacy to obtain pain medication for herself when she got caught as part of a traffic stop in October 2008.

“I was speeding and made a wrong turn,” Fuller said. “They saw them on the floor. ‘Can I see that pill bottle?’ Stupidly, I didn’t know what to do. Next thing I knew, there were five cop cars, and I was going to jail.”

According to court records, Fuller was booked into Cullman County jail on a possession charge, and state law required her to stay in custody for at least 24 hours. She said the nurse who spoke to her during intake allowed her husband to deliver medication for depression and post traumatic stress disorder while she was incarcerated.

“And that was actually, I didn’t know it at the time, but a very kind, gentle, introduction,” Fuller said.

Fuller said she was then assigned to drug court and entered rehabilitation. But a month later, according to court records, she was arrested in Jefferson County, this time for fraudulently obtaining the medications that she was arrested for earlier in Cullman County when she was charged with illegal possession.

The Alabama Reflector found two cases pertaining to Fuller. The first was a recreational drug possession charge in October 2008 filed in Cullman County. That was followed by five charges that were filed in Jefferson County for conspiracy to fraudulently obtain controlled substances by fraud.

“They stick you in the jail population,” Fuller said. “Stick you in these cell blocks like animals, and then forget about you. There are no questions. You don’t ask any questions. You don’t have any complaints, and there you are.”

Fuller survived a month in the Jefferson County jail before getting transferred to the Tutwiler Women’s Correctional Facility in Wetumpka where she endured another six months, without medication, before she completed her sentence. 

‘They actively conspired to neglect and abuse him’

In January 2023, Steve Mitchell visited his cousin Anthony in Carbon Hill Jail in Walker County. According to a later lawsuit, Steven had not seen Anthony in several months, and Anthony had physically transformed.

“Tony, who was six foot three or four, had previously weighed around two hundred forty pounds. Now, Steve at first took Tony for an old man. Tony was haggard and emaciated, weighing no more than a hundred forty or a hundred fifty pounds,” according to the lawsuit.

Anthony Mitchell was experiencing a mental health episode, Steve said, when he was taken into custody.

He was placed in isolation at the Carbon Hill Jail, in a cell with a cement floor and a drain to be used as a toilet, according to the lawsuit. The cell, according the was not meant for long-term custody, only during the booking process.

According to the lawsuit, Tony was given a mat to sleep on and was not provided with a jail uniform. The lawsuit alleges he was naked for most of the time he spent in jail. It wasn’t clear whether Mitchell received any kind of mental health treatment.

Two weeks after being taken into custody, at 4 a.m. on Jan. 26, 2023, Mitchell was found lying unresponsive in his cell.

A physician at the hospital who treated Tony indicated that he had a body temperature of 72 degrees, according to the lawsuit.

“The cause of this hypothermia is not clear,” the lawsuit quoted a physician stating. “It is possible he had an underlying medical condition resulting in hypothermia. I do not know if he could have been exposed to a cold environment. I do believe the hypothermia was the ultimate cause of his death.”

Multiple messages were left with both the Walker County Commission and the Walker County Sheriff’s Office seeking comment.

The attorney representing the Walker County Sheriff’s Office declined comment, citing the ongoing litigation. In court filings responding to a lawsuit from the Mitchell family, attorneys for the sheriff’s office called the allegations “the definition of scandalous,” alleging that “ the entire complaint is built upon a false premise that Mitchell was placed in a freezer.”

“Based on nothing but speculation, plaintiff accuses the defendants of murdering plaintiff’s decedent, Tony Mitchell (Mitchell) by placing him in a freezer until he suffered and died from hypothermia and then accuse the Defendants of covering up the murder,” the filing stated. “These allegations intentionally created a firestorm of derision that swept not only these Defendants but law enforcement in general and caused criminal investigations to be opened against the Defendants.”

In a lawsuit filed in 2023, Mitchell’s family accuses jail personnel of restraining him and keeping him exposed to cold conditions starting the evening before his death. The lawsuit states surveillance footage shows Tony raising his head, peering out at deputies pleading for help.

The suit alleges that it was nearly 8 a.m. when jail staff were seen with a uniform for Tony. Then, at 8:30 a.m., they entered his cell with a wheelchair, the first time in several hours that staff tended to him, according to the lawsuit.

“After initially placing him in the chair, deputies pick Tony up and drag him back inside the cell, evidently to conceal his presence as a new female detainee is brought into the booking area and processed, further delaying Tony’s access to the emergency medical treatment he obviously urgently requires,” the lawsuit states. He was pronounced dead that afternoon.

Eight corrections officers have pleaded guilty to one count of deprivation of rights, according to CBS42. One nurse pleaded guilty to denying Mitchell care resulting in his death.

For roughly a year and a half, Ryan Cagle and several others have been regular attendees at Walker County Commission meetings with a single message: Walker County Sheriff’s Office should be held accountable for jail deaths like Mitchell’s, or those that occurred with law enforcement present.

“Watching how the sheriff’s department treated someone who had clear mental health issues, they didn’t just not provide him care, but they actively conspired to neglect and abuse him,” said Cagle, a resident and advocate living in Walker County.

“We spent countless hours, every month, for the past year and a half, all but yelling at the county commission to regulate and hold the sheriff’s department accountable, but also to use the opioid money, the national settlement opioid money, to fund a non-police response team so that we can stop allowing police to be the first line of response to mental health needs,” he said.

At least two other lawsuits have been filed against the Walker County Sheriff’s Office, according to court records.

In September 2021, Frederick Hight filed a lawsuit against the Walker County Sheriff’s Office after a deputy shot and killed his son, Fredrick Hight Jr., when he was dispatched to the scene as part of a mental health call in February 2021. The parties eventually settled the case, according to media reports.

The second lawsuit was filed in June 2023 by Chris Hambric after his son, Greg Hambric, was shot and killed by a Walker County Sheriff’s deputy in June 2021. That case is ongoing.

Dangers of incarceration and mental illness

While the alleged incidents in Walker County are extreme, multiple experts interviewed stated that placing people with mental health conditions into custody and housing them in jail is problematic because of the chaotic nature of the environment.

“Every type of mental illness is disproportionately represented in people in jails than it is in the community,” said Lauren Kois, a clinical and forensic psychologist who worked in Alabama but is now at the University of Virginia studying serious mental disorders in prisons and jails.

A report published in 2016 by the Public Citizen’s Health Research Group and the Treatment Advocacy Center based on surveys of 230 sheriffs’ departments in 39 states, found that almost 96% of the facilities reported having some individuals within their custody with a serious mental illness between September 2010 to August 2011.

Roughly 75% of the facilities reported a larger number of people with serious mental illness compared with five to 10 years before.

A study of 1,300 people incarcerated at an unnamed jail in the Midwest published this year found that 20% of those surveyed suffered from some type of mental illness and another 78% had a substance use disorder.

Access to mental health care has been a focus of an ongoing lawsuit in Alabama state prisons. A federal district judge ruled in 2017 that a lack of access to adequate mental health care in state prisons violated incarcerated Alabamians’ Eighth Amendment rights and ordered the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) to institute reforms.

The judge also ordered that the ADOC intensify its recruitment of corrections officers to increase staffing within the facilities. Staffing was identified as one of the key reasons that people incarcerated were not receiving adequate mental health services.

“In the context of mental health, that means that a person could be in a crisis and not have a correctional staff person near or around to be able to observe that fact that they committing, or attempting to commit suicide, or that they harm themselves in some way, that they are having some kind or crisis or breakdown that needs immediate attention,” McCrary said.

People with a mental illness can get into contact with the criminal justice system in a variety of ways. For example, individuals with mental illness who are homeless may be caught violating rules and regulations that deal with loitering or trespassing.

“Jail is going to be more for lower-level offenses, so they are going to be more associated with quality-of-life offenses, things like criminal trespass, criminal mischief,” Kois said. “It could be sleeping in a place where you are not supposed to be sleeping or urinating in public because Starbucks wouldn’t let you go to the bathroom anymore because you scare people.”

Ideally, medical personnel would conduct a thorough evaluation of a person with a mental illness facing incarceration, according to Lisa Dailey, executive director of Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), a national nonprofit that focuses on improving the lives of people suffering from mental illness.

That evaluation would determine which type of treatment is most appropriate, with medication readily available that can be administered relatively quickly.

The individual would then be placed into an area of the facility dedicated to individuals with either medical or mental health needs separate from the general population because they are vulnerable to abuse or harm.

The person would then be transferred to a medical facility as soon as possible and removed from jail while remaining in custody.

In most cases, though, jails and prisons assess individuals in a rudimentary process that can be delayed, Dailey said. Many times, the initial determination of a person’s mental health is done at a court proceeding when a person raises an issue of the defendant’s mental health, according to Dailey.

If a psychiatric facility is full, a person could wait in a correctional facility for months before being admitted, all while struggling with illness.

Treatment can also be costly, according to John Hollingsworth, director of Alabama Crisis Intervention Training, who trains law enforcement and other personnel for how to deal with mental health emergencies when encountering it in the field. Some medications can cost upwards to $1,000 per prescription, which people who are homeless cannot afford.

“It is a complex group of symptoms,” Hollingsworth said. “There is not a blood test that says you are bipolar. You have to show certain symptoms over a certain period before they diagnose you. Once they diagnose you, there are different levels.”

Treatments available in the state’s jails are also limited, and those who need specific medications may not be able to get them.

Most jail settings are chaotic and harmful for people undergoing crisis.

“Sometimes they are just fighting to get the medication they already know that they need,” McCrary said. “You combine that with the feeling of, ‘Here I am in a place that I don’t want to be with people I don’t want to be around,’ or if I have severe anxiety and I am in a dorm with 50 other people, my anxiety just magnifies.”

‘You cannot thrive and survive at the same time’

Fuller has since been released after fulfilling her obligation to the criminal justice system.

Despite that, she had trouble finding a job for a few years, which included stints working in hazardous cleanup and cleaning buildings at night.She also got work picking blackberries and making bracelets to sell.

Her therapist recommended she become a certified peer to help others who have been involved with the criminal justice system. She went through training before working with people who have a substance use disorder.

“I used my lived experience to help others get into recovery,” Fuller said. “What I did was act as a public liaison between the judge, the public defender’s office and the jails.”

Fuller is currently a case manager for Birmingham Reentry Alliance.

“I help people help themselves by finding resources. Because if you are just looking for food and shelter, you are just surviving,” she said, “and you cannot thrive and survive at the same time.”

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

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