“Incarcerated men defy the odds to expose a cover-up in America’s deadliest prison system,” reads the logline for the HBO-backed documentary “The Alabama Solution.” But that does not begin to describe this powerful and extremely necessary call-to-action.
Over the last decade, incarcerated men in Alabama prisons have been fighting to bring recognition to corruption and inhumane treatment. Thousands of men have died in prison, many at the hands of correctional officers and others of overdoses on drugs allegedly supplied by correctional officers. The death toll is so high that the Alabama Department of Corrections is widely regarded as the deadliest prison system in the United States. With the ADOC also supplying prison labor to private corporations like Walmart, Hyundai, and McDonald’s, accusations of modern-day slavery have also followed.
Veteran Emmy, Peabody and Sundance-winning filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, known for his 12-part HBO series “The Jinx” that led to Robert Durst’s arrest and murder conviction, and Charlotte Kaufman, who has worked with Jarecki for the last six years, amplify the efforts of these prisoners in the shocking documentary “The Alabama Solution.”
As co-directors and co-producers, they have wisely decided to cull together a film that allows the inmates to tell their own stories through their cell phone footage, largely spanning from 2016 to 2020. Footage of inhumane prison conditions from overcrowding, pools of blood from assaults by corrections officers, overdoses from drugs supplied by that same personnel and body bags of those who didn’t make it reveal an overall prison culture that includes inmate abuse, suppression, intimidation and retaliation.
Free Alabama Movement (F.A.M.) members, many of whom have already served more than 20 years, also share their own testimonies. At the center are Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, also known as Kinetik Justice. Council, who is a target as the main leader of the movement, frequently speaks while in solitary confinement. Trained to use their minds and nonviolent practices by incarcerated civil rights activists who participated in the Selma marches, Council and Ray are disciplined and dedicated leaders. Council, a former drug dealer, is a master organizer who inspires people to stand up and unify to bring about change.
Black inmates are not Alabama’s only victims. The beating death of a white man — the 35-year-old Steven Davis — figures prominently in the doc, especially since ADOC chooses to send press releases to the news media over speaking directly to his mother Sandy Ray. As the white male attorney retained by family calls inmates to inquire about specifics around Davis’ death, the retaliatory measures the staff takes against the cooperating inmates are highly disturbing.
Top Alabama officials, from Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall down, respond defensively to a DOJ investigation. Ivey insists that there is “an Alabama solution,” but that solution largely fails to address the issues being flagged and, instead, includes a tone-deaf $900 million proposal. State leaders, who are all white, refuse to admit any major wrongdoing, even as inmate death rates continue at alarming rates. They also refuse to hold any of their staff accountable.
Accusations of slave labor practices grow more disturbing as it’s revealed that inmates who have served decades without incident are denied parole. These same men who are supposedly too dangerous to the public to be released are somehow fit enough to work in private companies and public Alabama facilities where they interface with the public while generating state revenue in the hundreds of millions. It doesn’t sit right. Cell phone footage going inside the nearly month-long work stoppage by the inmates in retaliation, from organization to execution, is both inspiring and crushing, particularly as the realization of just how sinister the institutions can be hits.
Just as news cameras capturing the shocking events of Bloody Sunday in 1965 helped widen support for the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-led Civil Rights Movement, “The Alabama Solution,” with its unprecedented raw and jaw-dropping footage of inhumane prison practices, can galvanize the public behind inmate rights and the critical need for criminal justice reform.
Challenging the foundation of a “law and order” culture is not easy, but hopefully “The Alabama Solution” shows that mass incarceration is not the way to build a strong nation, and that the real fight is between the haves and the have-nots, those in power against the powerless.
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