The State of Alabama Is Watching Kenneth Traywick Die
A Hunger Strike, a Federal Monitor, and the Slow Violence of Custodial Neglect
There is a moment in every institutional failure when the language collapses. Not because the facts are unclear, but because the vocabulary we are accustomed to using—oversight, monitoring, protocol, accountability—can no longer bear the weight of what is happening. That moment arrived quietly, over a weekend, when a woman attempted to confirm whether her husband was alive and was redirected to a voicemail that no one answered.
By that point, it was already Day 24.
Twenty-four days without food is not an abstraction. It is not a protest in theory. It is a medical emergency that has crossed multiple known physiological thresholds. It is the point at which the body begins consuming itself in earnest, where electrolyte imbalance becomes unpredictable, where cardiac rhythm can destabilize without warning, where cognition falters not because the mind has failed but because the body no longer has the resources to sustain it. It is also the point at which silence ceases to be bureaucratic and becomes lethal.
On Day 24 of Kenneth “Swift Justice” Traywick’s hunger strike inside Bullock Correctional Facility, there was no contact from the Alabama Department of Corrections. There was no contact from YesCare, the private medical contractor tasked with providing constitutionally adequate care. When his wife attempted to request a welfare check—an act so minimal it should not require escalation—she was routed to a voicemail believed to belong to an administrator who did not work weekends. No return call came. No update was provided. No confirmation of condition. No identification of who, if anyone, was responsible for medical decision-making that day.
This was not a failure of technology. It was a failure of duty.
Custody does not pause on weekends. Medical crises do not respect calendars. Hunger strikes do not suspend themselves because administrative staff are unavailable. Yet what unfolded over the next ten days would reveal a system in which responsibility is so thoroughly diffused, outsourced, and deferred that even the most basic question—who is in charge of keeping this man alive—could not be answered.
The hunger strike had already entered its fourth week when the weekend silence set in. Swift Justice had made his demands clear. They were not theatrical. They were not incoherent. They were documented, repeated, and consistent: an end to retaliation and excessive force; expungement of disciplinaries issued after his arrival at Bullock; transfer from a facility where he reported credible safety risks; accountability and investigation into staff conduct; and a meeting with Commissioner John Hamm, a meeting previously promised and never delivered. These were demands rooted in survival, not spectacle.
By Day 25, the silence gave way—not to transparency, but to verbal assurances. After difficulty reaching anyone at Bullock Correctional Facility, Swift’s wife was told by a lieutenant and a captain that her husband was “okay.” No documentation accompanied the claim. No medical information was provided. No explanation of monitoring protocols, contingency planning, or escalation thresholds was offered. At this stage of a prolonged hunger strike, words without records are not reassurance. They are placeholders.
Day 26 marked the moment when the moral stakes could no longer be misunderstood.
On that Monday, Swift’s wife again attempted to obtain confirmation of her husband’s condition and the oversight governing his care. She was informed that no wardens were present at the facility. Requests to speak with medical leadership—specifically the Director of Nursing—were transferred to a phone line that rang unanswered. When she asked who held decision-making authority in the absence of wardens, she was told she would be contacted if the situation became “terminal.”
Terminal.
The word was not offered in a clinical briefing or a documented risk assessment. It was delivered casually, as a boundary marker for notification, as if the duty of care begins only when death is imminent. To tell the spouse of a man on Day 26 of a hunger strike that she would be notified when his condition became terminal is to admit, without intending to, that prevention is not the priority. It is to concede that the system is prepared to watch deterioration occur so long as it can say it was monitoring.
Monitoring, however, is not care.
By Day 26, the human body is operating under extreme physiological stress. Medical literature recognizes that after this point, sudden cardiac arrhythmias can occur without warning; electrolyte imbalances can become immediately life-threatening; neurological impairment increases; organ systems are under sustained strain; and the risks associated with refeeding grow exponentially more complex. Waiting for a condition to become terminal before engaging family or clarifying authority is not a care plan. It is a failure of preventive oversight.
Delegating healthcare to a contractor does not relieve the State of Alabama of its constitutional obligations. Nor does the absence of senior administrators suspend them. Custodial duty is affirmative, continuous, and non-delegable. It does not begin at the point of irreversibility.
Day 27 brought confirmation—and with it, a deeper indictment.
Warden McKee contacted Swift’s wife and confirmed that Kenneth Traywick remained alive, conscious, communicative, and monitored daily, including vital signs. The confirmation was appreciated. It also exposed the limits of the system with stark clarity. Monitoring was occurring. Authority was not.
When asked where the process went from there—what decisions would be made, by whom, and under what criteria—the warden acknowledged that he could not answer. He could provide updates on condition, but he could not speak to next steps, particularly those involving Commissioner Hamm. He also indicated that he had no authority over YesCare and could not compel medical communication.
The family found itself trapped in a procedural vacuum: a man refusing food under medical observation, overseen by a contractor operating beyond the reach of facility leadership, with no accessible decision-maker empowered to resolve the underlying crisis. Attempts to reach the Commissioner’s Office yielded nothing but deflection. The hunger strike was repeatedly framed as Swift’s “choice,” as though voluntariness negates custodial responsibility.
By this point, the pattern was unmistakable. Each day added documentation. Each attempt at communication added proof. The press releases issued during this period were not reactionary. They were deliberate, measured, and structured to record escalation, identify authority gaps, and provide opportunity—again and again—for intervention before irreversible harm occurred.
Day 27 was one of those thresholds.
The letters enter the record not as sentiment, but as evidence.
They were written by hand, over several days in mid-December, as the hunger strike passed through its most dangerous phase. They are not rambling. They are not incoherent. They do not read like the writings of a man detached from reality or unaware of consequence. They read like what they are: communications from someone whose body is under severe physiological strain but whose intent remains deliberate, whose reasoning remains intact, and whose requests remain narrowly focused on documentation, transparency, and safety.
In one letter, Swift Justice explains that he has been informed by medical staff that his organs are at risk. He does not dramatize the statement. He records it. He asks for written confirmation. He asks for a treatment plan. He asks for documentation explaining what is being monitored, by whom, and under what protocol. These are not the demands of a man seeking martyrdom. They are the demands of someone attempting to protect himself while engaging in a protest that he believes is the only remaining means of being heard.
He writes about dizziness. About fatigue. About confusion that comes and goes. He writes about being pressured to end the hunger strike without receiving written medical explanations. He writes about sodium levels. About IV fluids. About the danger of refeeding. The letters show awareness not only of his own condition, but of the risks that accompany any abrupt intervention. They demonstrate that he understands the stakes. They also demonstrate that he has repeatedly attempted to engage with the system in good faith, asking for clarity rather than confrontation.
What the letters do most effectively, however, is strip away the convenient fiction that this is a purely voluntary act for which the State bears no responsibility beyond observation. Hunger strikes do not absolve custodial institutions of duty. On the contrary, they heighten it. When a person in custody refuses food, the obligation to provide care does not diminish; it intensifies. The State cannot force-feed without meeting stringent legal and ethical standards, but it also cannot retreat into passivity and call it respect for autonomy.
The letters make clear that Swift Justice was not seeking abandonment. He was seeking engagement.
By Day 29, the hunger strike had reached a point at which even the language used by the Department began to betray its inadequacy. On December 18, Warden McKee again confirmed that Swift remained alive, communicative, refusing food, and monitored daily. He also confirmed the absence of a resolution pathway. During that same day, Swift’s wife was advised by Constituent Services that the requested actions—transfer, meeting, expungement, review—had been denied. No written decision accompanied the denial. No explanation was offered. No opportunity for dialogue was extended.
Denial without documentation is not resolution. It is concealment.
At this stage, the requests from the family were neither expansive nor unreasonable. They asked for documented confirmation of medical monitoring and risk assessment. They asked for clarification of hunger-strike and refeeding protocols. They asked for identification of on-call decision-makers with authority to act. They asked for a scheduled meeting with Commissioner Hamm. These requests were framed not as ultimatums, but as preventive measures. The family sought transparency and planning, not crisis notification.
The response was silence, followed by repetition of the same procedural void.
By Day 30, the hunger strike had become a prolonged medical emergency by any credible standard. ADOC confirmed ongoing monitoring but continued to withhold information regarding who was directing care, what diagnostic monitoring was occurring, and what refeeding contingencies existed. Conflicting information circulated regarding mail access and family contact. Decision-makers remained unidentified. Communication remained fragmented.
Monitoring continued. Responsibility did not.
Day 31 passed without communication from ADOC despite escalating medical risk and increasing media inquiry. The family still had not been informed who was directing Swift’s medical care, what qualifications those individuals possessed, or whether a written treatment plan existed. Swift indicated that he had been told such information would need to be obtained through attorneys—a statement that speaks volumes about how care is conceptualized within the system: as a legal liability to be managed, not a human obligation to be fulfilled.
By Day 32 and Day 33, the hunger strike had entered territory that should have triggered heightened safeguards, clear escalation protocols, and continuous communication. Instead, the same questions continued to circulate unanswered. Media and community inquiries focused on medical leadership, continuity of care, escalation criteria, and communication—precisely the issues the family had raised repeatedly from inside the crisis. The framework governing oversight remained opaque. The safeguards remained undefined. The chain of authority remained broken.
This is not an accident. It is a design.
The Alabama prison system has, for years, operated under federal scrutiny for its failure to provide constitutionally adequate medical and mental health care. The presence of a federal monitor is not evidence of reform achieved; it is evidence of reform promised and deferred. The conditions that gave rise to that oversight—chronic understaffing, inadequate treatment, delayed care, and systemic neglect—are not historical footnotes. They are active variables in the present case.
What the hunger strike of Kenneth Traywick exposes is not a single lapse, but a pattern so normalized that no individual actor appears able—or willing—to interrupt it. Wardens monitor but cannot decide. Contractors provide care but do not disclose. Central office deflects but does not engage. Constituent services deny but do not explain. Leadership remains unavailable. Responsibility disperses until it effectively disappears.
This diffusion of duty is not neutral. It is lethal.
The phrase “monitoring without resolution is not care” is not rhetorical flourish. It is an accurate diagnosis of a system that has mistaken observation for obligation. Watching a man deteriorate while insisting that the deterioration is his choice does not absolve the watcher. It implicates them.
At no point during Days 24 through 33 did the system lack information. What it lacked was accountability. The documentation exists. The requests were clear. The risks were known. The opportunities for intervention were abundant. What was missing was the willingness to treat a hunger strike not as an inconvenience to be endured, but as a crisis demanding leadership.
The insistence on framing the hunger strike as voluntary is perhaps the most revealing aspect of the response. Voluntariness becomes a shield behind which institutions hide, ignoring the reality that custody fundamentally alters the moral calculus. A person in custody cannot seek independent medical care. Cannot choose providers. Cannot demand second opinions. Cannot walk away. Their autonomy is constrained by design. To invoke voluntariness in this context is to ignore the asymmetry of power that defines incarceration.
The letters, the press releases, the recorded calls, and the documented silences together form a record that is difficult to dismiss and impossible to defend. They show a man asking, repeatedly, to be treated as a human being whose life carries weight. They show a family acting in good faith, seeking information rather than confrontation. They show a system that responds only at the margins, never at the center.
This is the cold light of day.
And it reveals a truth that extends far beyond Bullock Correctional Facility or the case of Kenneth Traywick. It reveals a carceral system that has learned to survive scandal by dispersing responsibility so widely that no single hand appears to be on the lever. It reveals how federal oversight can coexist with daily neglect. It reveals how private medical contracting can obscure accountability rather than enhance care. It reveals how language—monitoring, protocol, choice—can be used to anesthetize moral urgency.
There is no dramatic crescendo here. No final revelation. The indictment is cumulative. It lies in the repetition. In the unanswered calls. In the missing names. In the refusal to document. In the casual invocation of “terminal” as a notification threshold. In the insistence that watching is enough.
It is not enough.
What ultimately condemns this system is not that it lacks knowledge, but that it lacks urgency. Not that it is unaware of risk, but that it has normalized it. The record assembled over Days 24 through 33 does not depict confusion; it depicts routine. A routine in which prolonged medical emergencies unfold without leadership engagement, without documentation, without clear lines of authority, and without humane communication. A routine in which responsibility is endlessly deferred until the moment when intervention would no longer matter.
This is what institutional cruelty looks like in the twenty-first century. It does not arrive shouting. It arrives through procedure. Through voicemail. Through unanswered phones. Through verbal assurances that leave no paper trail. Through the careful use of language that reframes obligation as optional and accountability as conditional.
The Alabama Department of Corrections has been under federal oversight for years because its failures were not isolated. They were systemic, persistent, and predictable. The presence of a federal monitor was meant to signal that constitutional violations were not theoretical, that they were ongoing, and that they required structural correction. Yet the hunger strike of Kenneth “Swift Justice” Traywick demonstrates how easily oversight can coexist with inertia. How reform can exist on paper while daily practice remains unchanged. How a system can technically comply while morally collapsing.
There is a temptation, when confronted with a hunger strike, to reduce it to an act of defiance and stop there. To describe it as a personal decision, a protest tactic, a choice. That temptation is convenient, because it narrows the field of responsibility. But hunger strikes inside custodial settings are not simply expressions of will; they are symptoms of systems in which conventional avenues for redress have failed. They occur when grievance procedures are ineffective, when complaints are met with retaliation, when oversight mechanisms feel inaccessible or performative. They occur when people conclude—rightly or wrongly—that the only remaining leverage they possess is their own body.
The record here shows a man who did not rush toward that conclusion. It shows repeated attempts to engage through established channels. It shows demands that were specific, bounded, and focused on safety and accountability. It shows a willingness to accept medical care contingent on transparency and documentation. It shows a refusal to be reduced to a problem to be managed rather than a person to be heard.
It also shows a system that responded by narrowing its role to observation. To watching vitals while refusing to explain who set the protocols. To confirming life while declining to engage with the reasons life was being risked. To acknowledging risk while postponing responsibility until “terminal” became the trigger for communication.
That word should haunt anyone who believes custody carries moral weight.
Terminal should never be the first notice. It should never be the threshold at which family communication begins. It should never be the point at which leadership decides engagement is warranted. A system that waits for terminality before acting has already failed in its most basic duty: the duty to prevent foreseeable harm.
This is not a story about a single doctor, a single warden, or a single administrator. It is a story about a structure that allows each of those roles to exist without meaningful authority or accountability. A structure in which private contractors provide care shielded by layers of bureaucracy. In which wardens can confirm monitoring but cannot compel transparency. In which central offices can deny requests without explanation. In which leadership remains perpetually unavailable. In which no one appears able to say, plainly and publicly: this is who is responsible, this is the plan, this is how we will protect life.
The cruelty lies in that absence.
The letters written during this hunger strike will not be remembered because of their eloquence, though they are clear. They will be remembered because of what they reveal: a person under extreme physical stress still thinking strategically, still asking reasonable questions, still insisting on documentation, still attempting to navigate a system that treats clarity as a liability. They stand as quiet refutation of any narrative that frames this crisis as impulsive or uninformed. They show a mind engaged even as the body weakens. They show intent without theatrics.
And they force an uncomfortable question: if this is how the system responds when a man is deliberately risking his life in plain view, what happens to those who do not have the leverage of visibility? What happens to those whose deterioration is quieter, slower, less documentable? What happens to those whose families do not call every day, who do not issue press releases, who do not attract media attention?
The answer is not difficult to infer.
What makes this case so instructive—and so damning—is that it unfolded under scrutiny. Every request was documented. Every silence was recorded. Every authority gap was named. This was not a hidden failure. It was an exposed one. And still, the response remained inadequate. Still, monitoring was offered in place of engagement. Still, denial arrived without explanation. Still, leadership remained distant.
This is the lie of reform laid bare. Not that no one cares, but that care has been bureaucratized into irrelevance. That responsibility has been outsourced, diffused, and insulated until it no longer functions as responsibility at all. That oversight can exist without intervention. That documentation can exist without consequence.
There is no need, at the end of this record, to demand change in florid terms. The facts demand it on their own. There is no need to call for reform commissions or task forces or studies. The pattern is already clear. What is required is something far more basic and far more difficult: the willingness to accept that custody creates an unambiguous obligation to protect life, to communicate honestly, and to act before harm becomes irreversible.
Kenneth Traywick’s hunger strike does not ask us to agree with his tactics. It asks us to reckon with what those tactics reveal. It asks us to confront a system that has grown comfortable watching people suffer so long as it can say it was monitoring them. It asks us to consider what it means to hold human beings in cages while disclaiming responsibility for the predictable consequences of that power.
This is not outrage. Outrage is fleeting. This is record.
It is a record of days that passed while phones rang unanswered. Of names that were never provided. Of protocols that were never disclosed. Of decisions that were never owned. Of a word—terminal—used as a shield rather than a warning. Of a system that mistook silence for safety and observation for care.
The cold, hard light of day does not flatter institutions. It reveals them.
And what it reveals here is not a mistake, but a mirror.
by: Guest Contributor, Will Hazlitt