by Chuck Sharman

In a Facebook post on May 21, 2026, Albert Pugh reported hearing news from both prisoners and guards at Alabama’s Bullock Correctional Facility that Facility Administrator Jermaris Porter was arrested and walked off the job the day before by Law Enforcement Services Division (LESD) agents of the state Department of Corrections (DOC).

Pugh, 63, is the founder and Executive Director of Cullman Re-entry and Addiction Assistance, Inc., a nonprofit operator of halfway houses for those with “no place to go after completion of addiction-related programs.” Before his 2011 release from prison, he served 29 years for a robbery conviction that he was fully exonerated of in November 2024, according to the nonprofit Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, whose attorneys represented Pugh in that effort.

Porter had worked for the prison system just eight months, coming off a troubled tenure at Tennessee’s Trousdale Turner Correctional Center (TTCC), which is operated for that state’s DOC by private prison profiteer CoreCivic. As reported elsewhere in this issue, Porter and his then-boss, former TTCC Warden Vince Vantell, are accused in a federal civil rights complaint of involvement in a widespread drug smuggling ring at the lockup. [See: PLN, June 2026, p.1.]

Vantell was also hired by the Alabama DOC, according to journalist Beth Shelburne. In a post on her Moth to Flame Substack on May 29, 2026, she also published the response to her inquiry about Porter from DOC Public Information Manager Kelly Betts, who confirmed that he no longer works for the prison system but denied that he had been arrested.

Adding to the intrigue was Shelburne’s review of records of two other arrests made by LESD agents on May 19. The DOC identified the suspects to WALA in Mobile as Christopher Jones and Moneki Jones, who were found with “a small amount of marijuana and drug paraphernalia” when agents executed a search warrant at “a residence in Clayton, Alabama.” The DOC neglected to mention what involved the prison system in their arrest, but Shelburne matched the “residence” address to a building on the property of Ventress Correctional Facility—where Vantell has worked as an administrator since the DOC hired him in January 2026.

Though weed was found on the grounds of his prison, the DOC confirmed that Vantell remains employed with the agency, Shelburne said. Curiously, marijuana possession was also one of the charges that got former DOC Drug Counselor Elizabeth Cox arrested and fired from St. Clair Correctional Facility on May 21, a coincidence also reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, June 2026, p.62.]

One who doubts that it’s a coincidence is journalist Matthew Vernon Whalan, author of Bullock: Chronicles of Deprivation and Despair in an American Prison, a book that chronicles the troubled lockup Porter used to run. Interviewed shortly after its publication in November 2025 on Mansa Musa’s Rattling the Bars podcast, he said flatly that drug trafficking by DOC staff is so widespread at this point that “the Alabama Department of Corrections is a drug cartel.”  

Sources: Facebook, Moth to Flame, Rattling the Bars