When film-makers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Alabama’s Easterling prison in 2019, they found a deceptively pleasant scene. Like Alabama’s 13 other prisons, Easterling largely prohibits media access, but allowed the documentarians to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue, a sunny day in which incarcerated men, most of them Black, ate fresh roasts to live music and sermons. On camera, men danced and smiled. But off camera, many more told a different story – horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, unimaginable violence swept under the rug and appalling conditions that “ain’t fit for human society”. Cries for help emerged from inside the sweltering, filthy dorms. When Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official shut down filming, claiming that it was unsafe for him to speak to the men without a police chaperone.
“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki, whose credits include Capturing the Friedmans and The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, recalled recently. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and security, because they don’t want you to understand what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.” In the short visit, the crew received the same message over and over: “We don’t have access to the outside world. Please share this.”
That thwarted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary, made over the course of six years, on the hell known as the Alabama department of corrections (ADOC). Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman using a decade’s worth of evidence covertly filmed by incarcerated men, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked abuse, forced labor and unimaginable cruelty, and documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.
Following their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, Jarecki and Kaufman got in touch with men inside ADOC, a system that incarcerates 20,000 people with the highest overdose, murder and suicide rates in the nation, at 200% capacity with one-third of the required staff. Led by two long-incarcerated activists Melvin “Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun” Ray and Robert Earl “Kinetik Justice” Council, a network of sources provided the film-makers with years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly: rat-infested cells, piles of human waste, rotting food and blood-streaked floors; routine officer beatings and men carried out in body bags; hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers on the black market. The first-person testimony recounts unbelievable abuse and just as unbelievable fortitude. Council begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and loses sight in one eye.
Such brutality is, we learn, standard within ADOC. While incarcerated sources continued to collect evidence, the film-makers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution, which premiered at Sundance and is now available on HBO Max, follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC, who would not even allow Davis’s family to bring their phones to his deathbed, lest they take a photo of his face with every bone broken (his brother managed anyway). She learns of the state’s explanation – that Davis threatened officers with a knife, necessitating physical force as self-defense – on the news. But multiple incarcerated witnesses told Ray’s lawyer that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four officers anyway; one of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball”.
After three years enduring nothing but obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press charges. (It later settled a civil suit for $250,000, never admitting wrongdoing.) Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officers – part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.
Together, the collective footage and Ray’s case demonstrate just how little the state’s prisons have improved since the justice department sued the ADOC in 2020 over “systematic” violence and abuse. “It feels like a fever dream. It’s Orwellian,” said Kaufman. “This system that is called corrections, and then you start peeling back the layers and you realize how it’s anything but.” Every day during production, “there would be a new discovery of: ‘How is this possible? How is this happening at this volume, and no one really talks about it?’ It was like having an ice bucket poured on our heads, just constant astonishment.”
Even more astonishing is Alabama’s solution. The film takes its name from Governor Kay Ivey’s response to the federal mandate for reform: “An Alabama problem deserves an Alabama solution,” a line that recalls the state’s long history of resisting federal mandates on civil rights. Montgomery, Alabama, served as the first capital of the Confederacy, which seceded rather than end chattel slavery during the American civil war; the state required federal intervention to end debt peonage in the early 20th century, to desegregate the state’s schools in 1963 and to prevent discriminatory voting practices in the 1960s. In several interviews, state officials reject the US justice department reform mandate as federal overreach. The Alabama Solution under Ivey was to construct three new prisons by diverting $400m in federal Covid-19 relief funds – 20% of the money for the state worst hit by the virus – as well as $100m from the state’s education budget. Meanwhile, parole rates plummeted by 72%, with the overwhelming number of parole requests denied.
A still from The Alabama Solution. Photograph: HBO
That solution comes packaged in “tough on crime” rhetoric and a belief, at least as expressed by Marshall and others, that criminality is a fixed, immutable quality rather than a confluence of circumstances. The hardline lack of access to state prisons – all ADOC facilities can refuse or restrict all visits, even from federal monitors, under the guise of “security” – allows that convenient fiction of incarcerated people, justly punished, to persist. “One of the problems is that a lot of people who speak about prisons in Alabama have not visited the prisons,” said Jarecki. “And if you ask them, they’ll give you a blurry answer: ‘Oh, yes, of course I visited the prisons.’ What that often means is: ‘Three years ago, when the DoJ sued us, we did a tour of one of the prisons where they showed us about 3% of it, so I’ve been.’”
“Maybe that’s a little hopeful, that when people see the film, even legislators and people in power in Alabama, they will have to confront the reality of what’s there,” he added. “I think a lot of these people do have a conscience, and it’s just been easier for them to say ‘tough on crime, and therefore I don’t care what happens to these people’, or to make it about retribution.”
But it is indisputable that the state benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery, providing $450m in goods and services to the state each year for virtually no pay. Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unfit for society, make $2 a day – the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow – to work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court and local government entities and youth services. As one incarcerated man puts it in the film: “They trust me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and go home to my family.” It plays over footage of a forced laborer warmly greeting a child while working at an Alabama zoo.
Such laborers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher security. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” said Jarecki. “There’s a financial incentive to keep people locked up for longer than many states and certainly longer than one would imagine for the kinds of things they were convicted of.” One film participant, a Black man, was given 15 years at a maximum-security prison for breaking and entering an unoccupied building.
The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray, which demonstrated both the state’s reliance on forced labor and the lengths to which it would go to keep it. (Ivey deemed their demands “unreasonable”.) Contraband cell phone footage shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, choking out Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat others and cutting off contact from strike leaders.
Charlotte Kaufman and Andrew Jarecki. Photograph: Dave Allocca/Starpix/Shutterstock
The strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in your name.” And while the Alabama Solution may be specific to the state, “all of the conditions that allowed for Alabama to deteriorate into the humanitarian crisis it is today exist in every state across the country – secrecy, limited accountability”, said Kaufman. “A lot of states are already experiencing what Alabama is, and the only difference is we just can’t see it. The reason our film focuses on Alabama is that there was an opening. There was a chance to actually be able to see it.”
From the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “you see similar things in most states in the union”, said Jarecki, referring to even supposed liberal bastions. “You just don’t know about it because they’re treated in secret.”
“This isn’t just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to everything.” The second Trump administration’s approach to immigration “enforcement” looks a lot like ADOC’s vision of crime and punishment – erosion of due process, prisons as “black holes” where people disappear, punitive tactics, blatant non-compliance with federal law, endless obfuscation. The cruelty is the point.
“We hope that people will see this as an urgent call to reconsider how we approach these things, and also a reminder of what’s at stake,” said Kaufman. “The Alabama solution in Alabama could become – I mean, in many cases, it already is the American solution.”
