William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility
Alabama Department of Corrections prison
William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility is an Alabama Department of Corrections prison for men located in unincorporated Jefferson County, Alabama, near Bessemer. It came to national prominence after the Casey White prison escape in 2022.
History
The prison opened as the West Jefferson Correctional Facility in 1982. On January 12, 1990, corrections officer William E. Donaldson was stabbed and killed by an inmate. The prison was later renamed in honor of officer Donaldson. Originally the prison had a capacity for 700 inmates in dormitory housing and 16 inmates in individual prison cells; the capacity increased as expansions opened.
In 1996, according to Joe Hopper, the commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, the system's prison guard shortage was the most acute at Donaldson during that year. In that year the prison housed around 1,400 prisoners, with 207 prison guards watching them.
Donaldson was the main setting of the documentary film The Dhamma Brothers, which chronicles the establishment of a Vipassana meditation program for prisoners.
Operations
As of 2010 the facility can house 1,492 prisoners.
“William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility” enters the record as alabama Department of Corrections prison. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what William, Donaldson and Correctional can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8008227. Authority coordinates are 33.514, -87.185. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2022, 1982, 1990 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.