Kilby Correctional Facility

Kilby prison was the site where Alabama executed prisoners who had been sentenced to death, and when in the 1920s the method was changed from hanging to electrocution, an electric chair, "(Big) Yellow Mama", was constructed in Kilby. The chair was built by a master carpenter, Ed Mason, a man born in London, England, who had been convicted of burglary; he was convicted of having broken into six homes in Mobile to pay off gambling debts. After being promised a furlough or perhaps even parole by Kilby's warden, T. J. Shirley, he built the chair (4-foot (1.2 m) tall, straight-backed, weighing 150 pounds (68 kg)) from maple, and named it "Plain Bill" for Alabama governor William W. Brandon, who he hoped would pardon him. Mason was granted a furlough by Bibb Graves, Brandon's successor, and promptly left the state never to return. State engineer Harry C. Norman installed the electrical wiring; "once the switch was thrown, a prisoner would get a first fist-clenching jolt of power; the current would then reduce and automatically build back up to 2,250 volts for a second shot of electricity". A crown made of metal wire was fitted over the prisoner's head, with a wet sponge to conduct power, and a second, similar electrode on the lower left leg. Norman was to execute the first victim, Horace DeVaughn, convicted of two murders, on April 8, 1927, but refused and quit his job days before. DeVaughn was executed, but it took four shots of electricity to kill him.[4]

On February 9, 1934, five men were executed in a span of thirty minutes: Bennie Foster, John Thompson, Harie White, Ernest Waller, and Solmon Roper. All were black. According to the Alabama Bench and Bar Historical Association, the majority of those executed in Alabama were black, and many lacked proper legal representation; others were mentally incompetent.[4] The last man to be executed at Kilby was William Bowen, on January 15, 1965; executions then stopped while the U.S. Supreme Court debated the constitutionality of capital punishment, eventually overturning the death penalty nationwide in 1972, resulting in every inmate condemned to death having their sentence commuted to life.[4]

Deterioration after forty-five years led to the prison closing in 1970.[4] The prisoners were moved to the new Holman Correctional Facility.

The new Kilby was established as the Mt. Meigs Medical and Diagnostic Center in December 1969 and had an original capacity of 440 inmates. Kilby was designed with an on-site hospital, dormitories, and one hundred two-man cells in order to facilitate its role as receiving center for all male prisoners held by the state of Alabama.[1]

On 1 September 2016, a corrections officer was stabbed in the head by an inmate. He died three weeks later.[5]