Choctaw County Jail Inmate Search

Choctaw County Jail is a small county jail. Most inmates at the jail are awaiting trial, rather than waiting for transfer to a larger prison facility, due to its small size.

The jail's Sheriff came under scrutiny in 2018 for refusing to release financial records detailing expenditures for the county jails food budget. Small county jails throughout Alabama, in general, have been under fire by two activist organizations, the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. The two organizations have alleged that Sheriff's throughout Alabama have purchased cheap, non-nutritional foods for jail inmates and spent the excess budget from year-to-year on personal items. As a result, the two organizations opened an investigation on 49 additional Sheriff's, including the Sheriff in Choctaw County in 2018.

The jail has been subject to several infamous escapes in the past. On June 9 2019, Lamarion Alston escaped from the county jail for several hours before being captured and placed back into jail. Lamarion was awaiting trial for allegedly robbing a dollar store at gun point.

Lamarion was let out of his cell on the evening of June 9th to use the pay phones. Before exiting the cell to make the phone call, shackles were placed around his ankles to impeded any escape attempt. After making a brief phone call, he was escorted back to his cell. The shackles were removed from his ankles while the cell door was still ajar. Once the shackles were removed from his feet, he bolted through the open cell, through the prison exit, and outran prison guards to the front fence that he jumped over.

Lamarion spent hours wandering along dark side roads. An unnamed driver spotted Lamarion and contacted the Sheriff's Department to convey Lamarion's location. When deputies arrived to the location, Lamarion attempted to evade detection by hiding in the woods. He was quickly found and apprehended.

Several years before the Lamarion Alston escape, three inmates escaped from the jail. On December 13, 2014, Demarcus Woodard, Germayel Culbert, and Justin Gordon devised a plan in which one of them would pretend to be sick to lure the night guard into the cell, steal the guard's keys and phone, and escape from the jail. Woodard and Culbert were awaiting trial for murder, while Gordon was on trial for armed robbery. They successfully carried out the plan at 2 AM that morning.

The initial search for the escaped inmates led police to an empty bank parking lot roughly a quarter-mile from the prison. It was believed the three had a car waiting for them in the empty parking lot.

Another day of searching turned up Gordan and Culbert. Gordan was found in a car in a Tuscaloosa parking lot and was apprehended by U.S. Marshals. Culbert was apprehended the same day, but details of his apprehension were not released.

Woodard managed to evade Marshals for another day before being apprehended. Details of his apprehension, like Culbert's, were never released.

On August 10, 2017, an 84-year old inmate named Evan Todd passed away inside the county jail. An investigation found that he had died of natural causes. He had been in the jail for a month before passing away. He was awaiting trial for murder, in which he was accused of shooting and killing his daughter.