“How is it possible that journalists can go into a warzone,” Alabama inmate Melvin Ray asks onscreen in Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s new documentary, The Alabama Solution, “but can’t go into a prison in the United States of America?”
The Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) has long shrouded itself in secrecy, with entry tightly restricted for reporters and other visitors. Still, Jarecki and Kaufman have managed to join forces with incarcerated people in Alabama to create a startling exposé of the lethal prison conditions and forced unpaid labor that run rampant within ADOC—with a stunning plot twist that takes a page from the labor movement.
Much of the documentary’s footage from inside multiple prisons was filmed surreptitiously by crafty inmates with contraband cellphones. The prisoners’ “you-are-there” footage captures the brutal violence and hardship they face on the inside and is effectively pieced together with Jarecki and Kaufman’s original material from the outside—including footage of protest rallies led by prisoners’ families as well as interviews with attorneys and other advocates—to form a chilling portrait of these houses of horrors.
Jarecki—a veteran documentarian known for his Oscar-nominated 2003 film Capturing the Friedmans and his acclaimed HBO docuseries The Jinx—says in the film’s press notes that this documentary’s inspiration came from a trip to Montgomery, Alabama, in 2019, during which he managed to gain access to a revival meeting held by a church ministry in a prison yard near Montgomery. “During our filming of this seemingly beautiful and inspiring gathering,” he writes, “men took us aside and began to tell us shocking stories of what was really going on in areas of the prison we hadn’t been allowed to see. Once we heard those stories, we felt compelled to investigate and consider making a film.”
And what a powerhouse of a film The Alabama Solution is! The documentary graphically exposes alleged beatings and killings of inmates by corrections officers, prolonged stints in solitary confinement, and rat-infested facilities in what the press notes calls “America’s deadliest prison system.” According to the film, Alabama’s short-staffed, brutal penal system is not only a hotbed of cruelty, but a corrupt profitmaking enterprise: The state reaps $540 million annually for prison labor that is often unpaid or compensated at as little as $2 per hour, with prisoners leased out as laborers for both corporations and the state. In one sequence, prisoners are shown doing lawn work and other chores at the Alabama Governor’s mansion.
Incarcerated Black community leader Robert Earl Council, a self-taught jailhouse lawyer and cofounder of an inmate rights organization called the Free Alabama Movement, denounces the ADOC in his onscreen interview as a “slave camp.” “You’re going to work for free [in an] unconstitutional prison,” he says. Meanwhile, intercutting news clips announce that Alabama Governor Kay Ivey has proposed redirecting money intended for Alabama public schools to cover cost overruns for new prison facilities, whose construction budgets exceed $1 billion.
Although the majority of prisoners are Black, as are some of the prison guards, a focal point of The Alabama Solution is the case of a white prisoner named Steven Davis, who was allegedly beaten to death with metal batons by corrections officers at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in 2019. The guards claim to have acted in self-defense against Davis, who they say attacked them with two homemade blades. Roderick Gadson, the corrections officer allegedly responsible for Davis’s killing, is believed by the prisoners and close observers to be a member of the prison’s so-called “wrecking crew”—guards noted for their brutal excessive use of force.
Much like Mamie Till-Mobley publicly displayed her son Emmet Till’s disfigured face after his death by lynching in 1955, Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray of Uniontown, Alabama, circulates a graphic photo of her son’s face beaten to a pulp as she seeks justice for her son. James Sales, Davis’s cellmate, intimates on camera that once he’s safely released from prison, he intends to disclose further details to Sandy about what he witnessed regarding her son’s death, suggesting that he has seen evidence of foul play. But this reveal never comes to pass, as Sales dies mysteriously behind bars mere months before his parole date—a turn of events that the film strongly suggests may have been orchestrated to prevent him from speaking out.
On the outside, Governor Ivey and Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall appear as recurring villains who resist efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice, which filed a lawsuit against the state in 2020, to implement reforms at ADOC. Their tactics are reminiscent of the state’s segregationist former Governor George Wallace, who infamously stood in a doorway at then all-white University of Alabama to prevent integration of Alabama’s public schools in 1963.
Despite the stark injustices and the immense odds stacked against them, the prisoners eventually strike back in an extraordinary way. Led by Ray and Council, the prisoners make countless phone calls on their contraband phones to organize a general strike across ADOC’s fourteen statewide prisons, uniting 20,000 exploited prison workers in a three-week-long work stoppage. Their breathtaking industrial action succeeds in gaining national media attention, and results in a mix of wins and defeats in their push for reforms.
The Alabama Solution closes with a title sequence stating that since the Department of Justice’s 2020 lawsuit against the state of Alabama, “there have been over 1,000 deaths inside the Alabama prison system.” It’s a chilling, gloves-off close to Jarecki’s and Kaufman’s documentary—the latest powerful entry in a long lineage of prison films, including narrative features such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), and The Green Mile (1999), as well as Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry’s Oscar-nominated 2021 documentary Attica.
While The Alabama Solution is as gripping as any of these films, it is made even more unique and effective by the substantial involvement of prisoners in its development; Jarecki and Kaufman, along with their incarcerated collaborators, are arguably pioneering an innovative hybrid film form for the digital age. The result of their savvy and diligent work is a compelling depiction of life inside an unthinkably cruel institution, and the brave struggle of prisoners fighting for their rights—and their humanity—in the face of an inhumane carceral system.
The Alabama Solution opens in select New York and Los Angeles theaters on October 3, and streams on HBO Max starting October 10.