He Reported Abuse. Alabama Threw Him in a Suicide Cell and Called it Procedure.
Swift Justice’s hunger strike exposes the brutal architecture of ADOC’s violence and silence.
In a state already infamous for running some of the most violent, overcrowded, and openly inhumane prisons in the United States, it took almost nothing to set the match. At Bullock Correctional Facility in Alabama, where the line between “correctional institution” and “documented human rights crisis” has long since been erased, one officer’s can of pepper spray and one man’s refusal to be quiet have now turned into a slow-moving emergency the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) is trying very hard not to see.
On the morning of November 20, 2025, at approximately 8:45 a.m., witnesses say Correctional Officer Glover followed incarcerated advocate Kenneth Shaun “Swift Justice” Traywick into another man’s bed area and sprayed him from behind with pepper spray. There was no recorded provocation. It was not an isolated act, either. According to those inside, Glover had already become a name muttered with dread in Bullock’s dorms—someone who, after allegedly assaulting another incarcerated man, publicly promised that anyone who witnessed or talked about it would, in his words, “get f***ed up.”
That’s the atmosphere in which Swift Justice has been living: a prison system that federal courts and the U.S. Department of Justice have already labeled unconstitutional, dangerously violent, chronically understaffed, medically negligent, and structurally retaliatory. Bullock is not an outlier in Alabama—it is a symptom.
In response to the assault, Traywick did one of the only things left to a man locked inside a system designed to erase him. At 10:52 a.m. on November 20, he began a hunger strike.
From the first hour, he made his intentions painfully clear: this is not a suicide attempt and not a mental health crisis. He is not asking to be put on watch as a danger to himself. He is refusing food as an act of protest—protest against violence, corruption, and retaliation inside Alabama’s prisons, and protest against a system that punishes those who document abuse more harshly than those who commit it.
Traywick is not just another name in an ADOC database. He is the founder of Unheard Voices of the Concrete Jungle (UVOTCJ), an advocacy organization that has spent years documenting conditions inside Alabama’s carceral system. That work has made him a target. When he writes grievances on behalf of other men sprayed with chemical agents, he is sprayed himself. When he calls out misconduct, the state’s response is not to investigate; it is to cut his phone line, seize his tablet, and bury him in restrictive housing.
Within hours of the assault on November 20, his family tried to do what ADOC’s public-facing mission statements say they should be able to do: check on him. His wife, a doctor with professional experience in juvenile corrections, called Bullock again and again, requesting a simple welfare check. She did not ask for detailed medical records. She did not ask for confidential treatment plans. She asked: Is he alive? Is he safe? Has someone laid eyes on him?
Staff at Bullock said they would “tell him to call.” They knew his tablet had already been taken. They knew he had no access to a wall phone. They said it anyway.
When she went up the chain, to ADOC’s Constituent Services, she met the same brick wall. On November 21, she spoke with a representative who refused to provide even basic, non-medical information—despite the fact that in 2024 ADOC required all incarcerated people to sign Form ADOC-OHS H-2(c), an authorization explicitly allowing verbal communication about their current health status. Traywick signed that form. ADOC now acts as if it does not exist.
Instead of honoring their own paperwork, staff reportedly told her there is no such form, that nothing authorizes them to speak with family, that she would simply have to wait until her husband was allowed to call. It is a chilling kind of bureaucratic cruelty: the rules are whatever the officer on the other end of the phone says they are, regardless of what ADOC forced people to sign just a year before.
Meanwhile, inside Bullock, retaliation escalated. After reporting the assault and reaching out to both ADOC officials and outside organizations, Traywick was hit with the familiar toolkit of carceral punishment. His tablet was confiscated. His phone access was restricted. He was thrown into restrictive housing. Stamps, paper, and personal property were taken, cutting off his written communication with the outside world at the same moment his legal cases required his attention. Two more disciplinary reports appeared—conveniently timed to justify his isolation, conveniently aligned with his refusal to quietly absorb an assault.
Family and advocates describe this as what it is: coordinated isolation. You report abuse, you lose your voice. You denounce retaliation, you get more.
By Day 2 of the hunger strike, the pattern was unmistakable. Dr. Traywick’s calls to Bullock on November 20 and 21 were met with scripted non-answers. No one would confirm whether a welfare check had actually been conducted. No one would give a simple yes or no to the question of whether her husband had been seen, evaluated, or monitored. Instead, they hid behind selective interpretations of policy, pretending not to recognize the very authorization forms ADOC itself had mandated.
By Day 3, even the pretext began to fray. After multiple calls, she was again denied a welfare check. In one call, a correctional officer reportedly told her that her husband would receive a new disciplinary charge for possessing a contraband cell phone—an accusation that collapses the moment it encounters facts. Every one of Swift’s calls to his wife came from a facility phone. She has ICS call logs showing the times. She has phone company records showing no mysterious incoming calls, no hidden numbers, nothing that remotely resembles a burner or smuggled device. She told the officer this. They did not care. They insisted he would be searched and written up anyway.
That’s the logic of Alabama’s prison system: facts are irrelevant; the accusation is the punishment.
While this was happening outside his cell, something even more stark was happening inside it. After Traywick’s hunger strike was recognized, he wasn’t placed somewhere where his health could be monitored and his rights respected. He was initially placed in what amounts to a psychological and physical pressure cooker: a suicide cell.
Naked. No clothing. No bedding. No personal property.
For a man who has made it clear he is not suicidal, the message is obvious: we will treat your protest as pathology, and we will strip you—literally and figuratively—to force compliance. His writing materials were taken, preventing him from communicating with his family or his lawyers. Restrictive housing at Bullock has no tablet access at all; that means no digital mail, no ability to receive messages, no electronic communication. Even his outgoing mail became suspect. He reported mailing two letters to his family; under normal conditions, they should have arrived. They did not. In a system already under federal scrutiny for interference and neglect, it is hard to see that as an accident.
By the time UVOTCJ confirmed what he was saying directly—by then, around Day 8—the hunger strike had moved from symbolic protest to medical danger. Traywick has a documented history of chest pains, episodes of racing heart, high blood pressure, and elevated cholesterol. Ten days without food under those conditions is not just risky, it is life-threatening. His wife tried to ask the most basic question any competent medical system would be prepared to answer: who is monitoring him, and how will you safely reintroduce nutrition when this ends? No one could explain how ADOC planned to prevent refeeding syndrome, a known potentially fatal complication when food is suddenly reintroduced after prolonged starvation. She was told only that “a nurse is checking on him.”
This is how Alabama runs prisons that federal courts have called unconstitutional. A man with known cardiac risk factors is on a hunger strike in a state-run facility, and the best his family can extract from the institution caring for him is: some nurse, somewhere, might be looking in on him. No documentation. No clear schedule. No written plan.
ADOC’s own mission statements talk about safe, secure, and humane confinement. They talk about appropriate medical care, transparency with families, and maintaining public trust. On paper, these are the values of a modern correctional agency. In practice, Alabama is running something much closer to a closed, retaliatory, and deeply unlawful black box.
By Day 7 of the hunger strike, the void of information had become its own form of violence. Traywick’s family still had no independently verifiable medical update, no written confirmation of his condition, no clear timeline of monitoring or care. ADOC, in the way only a state agency can manage, was both everywhere and nowhere: it could seize his property, restrict his communication, and enforce discipline—but somehow could not or would not produce a single piece of paper confirming his vital signs.
From the outside, the questions were obvious and brutal. Where is the documented health evaluation? What monitoring is taking place? Why is independent confirmation of his safety being withheld? Why are families forced to beg for information in a system funded by their own tax dollars?
On Day 8, the picture sharpened further. Through a recorded call with his wife, UVOTCJ confirmed many of the details that advocates had feared: the naked suicide cell, the absence of bedding and property, the seizure of writing materials, the blackout imposed on his legal work. Traywick himself echoed what his organization had already said in print: he believes he is being targeted precisely because he advocates for others, especially men with serious mental health needs in Bullock’s mental health dorms. After documenting instances of officers using chemical spray against men who could not adequately protect themselves or advocate for themselves, he found the spray aimed at him.
His message to the public is not theoretical. It is grounded in the concrete, daily reality of men who cannot get out of the way of this system’s worst tendencies. He says, in essence: I have a right to peacefully protest, and I am doing it because I am watching officers abuse men who cannot defend themselves, who often cannot even understand what is being done to them. He looks at Bullock and sees a facility filled with mental health patients who are not being cared for; they are being controlled, and when control fails, they are being crushed.
By what UVOTCJ marked as Day 9, the silence from ADOC had calcified. On November 27, Traywick confirmed that he remained on hunger strike and remained in restrictive housing. His placement there, he has repeatedly said, is retaliation—not for violence, not for contraband, but for advocacy, for litigation, for refusing to be quiet. The pattern is painfully familiar in Alabama: when you shine light on abuse, the institution does not fix the abuse; it dims the light.
What makes this more than just one man’s ordeal is the context Alabama has already built around him. The DOJ has already declared the state’s prisons unconstitutionally violent. Federal litigation like Braggs v. Dunn/Hamm has documented grossly inadequate mental health and medical care. Court monitors, journalists, and grieving families have cataloged excessive force, retaliatory use of restrictive housing, fabricated incident reports, and deaths that can only be called state-inflicted. ADOC’s own facilities have been described as failed by design: overcrowded, understaffed, flooded with contraband introduced by staff themselves, and governed more by retaliation than regulation.
Traywick’s hunger strike does not sit outside that context. It is a case study in how it operates.
Mail, for example, is a constitutionally protected form of communication. A prison system cannot simply shut it off because it finds a particular inmate inconvenient. Digital-only mail systems—the ones Alabama has increasingly leaned on—cannot be used to deny communication when a person is placed somewhere without tablet access. Restrictive housing does not erase First Amendment protections. Yet in Traywick’s case, everything points to just such a maneuver: place him where no tablets exist, seize his writing materials, and let his mail disappear into a bureaucratic void.
By Day 10, the hunger strike had become a test not only of ADOC’s humanity but of its competence. His wife again tried to get clear information about his health. One staff member told her she would have to “call back Monday through Friday and speak to the Director of Nursing.” Another took down information and claimed they would “go check on him,” with no promise of any return call. The pattern remained the same: vague assurances, no written documentation, no proactive outreach.
So she drew a line. She demanded a written confirmation of his health status by the close of business on Monday, December 1. Not verbal reassurances filtered through officers who may or may not care, may or may not even speak to a nurse. Not rumors. She asked for what any family in a functioning system should be able to expect: a written medical update documenting vital signs, monitoring frequency, and clinical condition. The kind of document that can be scrutinized, copied, used in court if necessary.
ADOC did not meet that basic standard. And so the hunger strike continued, because the conditions that sparked it continued.
On Day 11, the picture broadened beyond one family’s fear into something larger. Communication with Bullock remained strained and inconsistent. The only substantive response his wife got came from a third-shift lieutenant who told her “someone is sitting and watching him at all times,” without being able or willing to explain who that someone was or what training they had. A “person trained to sit and watch” is not a medical plan; it is a placeholder, a detail meant to sound reassuring while saying nothing at all.
The lieutenant also promised to ensure Swift knew to make his once-per-month phone call—a cruel detail that speaks volumes. His access to his own wife, his own supporter, his own lifeline to the outside world has been reduced to a single call per month, tied explicitly to punitive placement in restrictive housing.
Outside, as November drew to a close, his wife reflected on the absurdity of being told to be “thankful” during a holiday season while her husband sat in isolation for speaking out against misconduct. She knows what a correctional system could look like, because she has worked in one. She has spoken publicly about what a modernized ADOC might be: a system that values family connections, education, rehabilitation, and accountability; that expands programming in “Faith and Honor” dorms; that creates real visitation opportunities modeled after successful family programs in other states; that invests in pro-social programming, mental health treatment, reentry support, and conflict resolution.
Instead, Alabama doubles down on the opposite: isolation, retaliation, secrecy, and deliberate erosion of the very family ties research shows reduce recidivism and improve safety on both sides of the fence.
And so the questions from the public, from community members calling UVOTCJ, became sharper: Why is Swift on a hunger strike? Why do reports of excessive force at Bullock never seem to produce personnel changes? Why is retaliation easier for ADOC than communication? Why is a man whose advocacy aims to reduce violence and promote reform being treated as the threat?
By Day 12, the system still had no real answers—only more silence.
On that twelfth day, Traywick was able to make a call to his wife around 7:45 p.m. He confirmed that the warden, McKee, had visited him around 5 p.m. and claimed to be “unaware” of the reason for the hunger strike. That sentence, in the context of everything that has preceded it, is either an indictment of ADOC’s internal communication or a deliberate fiction. Media articles had been published. Public emails had gone out. Calls had been placed and recorded. UVOTCJ’s press releases were circulating. The state cannot be both saturated in public pressure and somehow completely unaware of the action that triggered it.
Swift thanked supporters and said the pressure is being felt. He also issued a warning rooted not in speculation but in history: Bullock has a documented record of covering up incidents, including the death of a man named Jamie, a witness in the Dunn v. Dunn litigation, who later turned up dead in the same restrictive housing unit where Traywick is now confined. That is the shadow he is living under—a unit with a history of lethal outcomes for men who dared to testify.
His demands today remain essentially what they were on day one. A direct meeting with ADOC Commissioner John Hamm. An end to retaliation and excessive force. A transfer away from Bullock to somewhere his safety can be meaningfully protected. Removal of the retaliatory disciplinary actions used to justify his isolation and restrictions. These are not radical demands. They do not call for the collapse of the system. They call for accountability, transparency, and basic adherence to the department’s own stated mission and the Constitution.
UVOTCJ, for its part, continues to document everything. The organization has recordings of unanswered calls, calls routed to secretaries’ voicemails, calls that rang endlessly without anyone picking up. It has recorded conversations with staff, documented contradictions, and a paper trail of ignored authorizations and deflected responsibility. Those recordings are being preserved for verified media and, inevitably, for court.
It should not require this much effort to get a simple answer about the health of a man in state custody. It should not require a hunger strike, legal threats, national media, or advocacy organizations to compel a public agency to follow its own rules. But Alabama’s prisons are not broken in the sense of malfunctioning; they are broken in the sense of working exactly as they have been allowed to work for decades: violent, opaque, and fundamentally unaccountable.
ADOC is a taxpayer-funded institution. If any private company operated this way—denying families basic information, retaliating against whistleblowers, “losing” its own forms, ignoring documented medical risk factors, and treating constitutional rights as optional—there would be resignations, indictments, and civil verdicts measured in seven or eight figures. Inside Alabama’s prisons, the consequences fall instead on the bodies of the incarcerated and the minds of the families who sit by the phone waiting for news that never comes.
Swift Justice’s hunger strike is, at its core, an indictment of that reality. It is one man leveraging the only power he has left: his own body, his own willingness to suffer, to force the state to confront what it has become. Whether Alabama listens will say a great deal about what kind of state it really is—and whether “Impacting lives for a safer Alabama,” as ADOC’s slogan promises, is anything more than a hollow tagline pasted over a system that is eating people alive.
by: guest contributor, Will Hazlitt