On Wednesday, the Justice Department put Alabama on notice over the state’s “flagrant disregard” for the constitutional rights of inmates in its prisons. The department said that conditions in the state’s prisons are among the nation’s very worst.

“After carefully reviewing the evidence,” department officials wrote in a letter addressed to Gov. Kay Ivey, “we conclude that there is reasonable cause to believe that conditions at Alabama’s prisons violate the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution,” which protects against cruel and unusual forms of punishment.

The findings in an accompanying 56-page report — the result of an investigation that began in 2016 — shock the conscience. Violent attacks and grisly deaths discovered long after they’ve occurred. Contraband and makeshift weapons that go undetected. Sexual abuse occurring “at all hours of the day and night.” Overcrowding so excessive and staffing so inadequate that inmates are virtually unsupervised and, in the words of a former warden, “in extreme danger.” Grossly inadequate health care. And, according to federal statistics noted in the report, the highest prison homicide rate in the country.

The Justice Department found that the state failed to protect inmates “from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse,” leading to a “pattern or practice” of constitutional violations throughout the Alabama prison system.

Such disdain for basic human decency calls for immediate steps, which Alabama officials have said they intend to take by requesting increased funding for more officers and better, more modern prisons.

But intervention and oversight are needed. In announcing the findings, the Justice Department effectively started the 49-day clock under federal law for Alabama to take corrective actions, or risk a lawsuit in federal court. “This case cries out for a consent decree,” said Jonathan Smith, the former chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights unit that was charged with making sure state and local governments respect the constitutional rights of their citizens.

William Barr, America’s new attorney general, ought to seek court intervention if the state fails to follow the Justice Department’s recommendations — which include hiring up to 500 correctional officers, revising security protocols and addressing basic housing deficiencies, such as bathrooms and living areas in disrepair, that rob inmates of their dignity.

Before the Justice Department’s announcement, The Times published an account of the conditions at one of the Alabama facilities under review, the St. Clair Correctional Facility, based on 2,000 photographs obtained by a civil rights group. “It is hard to imagine a cache of images less suitable for publication — they are full of nudity, indignity and gore,” The Times’s Shaila Dewan wrote last week. “It is also hard to imagine photographs that cry out more insistently to be seen.”

Indeed, the story that those images tell — backed up by the disturbing conclusions of the Justice Department report — need to be spread far and wide.

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