Floors streaked with blood, rat-infested cells, flooded hallways and routine beatings by officers – these are but some of the degrading conditions within Alabama state prisons revealed by leaked cellphone videos in a shocking, galvanizing new documentary that premiered at the Sundance film festival on Tuesday.
The Alabama Solution, directed by Andrew Jarecki (The Jinx) and Charlotte Kaufman, reports on the inhumane living conditions, forced labor and rampant officer violence against the state’s incarcerated population, as told by inmates who served as confidential, covert sources. The two-hour film, made over the course of six years, also documents prisoners’ longstanding efforts to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in a 2020 report, under constant physical threat from prison management. Despite federal calls for prison reform, Alabama’s prisons currently operate at 200% capacity, the film notes, with only one-third of the required staff. The state’s prisons have the highest rates of murder, drug addiction and death in the country.
“This film is a lot to take in. It’s difficult to watch,” said Jarecki to a braced, impassioned crowd, including the families of incarcerated Alabamans, at Tuesday’s premiere. “I hope you feel as emotional about it as we do.”
Jarecki and Kaufman began the project inadvertently, when Jarecki visited Montgomery, Alabama, with his family. There, he met a prison chaplain who offered to bring him along to an annual revival and barbecue at Easterling correctional facility – the rare event permitting a camera. The Alabama department of corrections (ADOC) is legally allowed to bar journalists access to state facilities, in effect making the state’s prisons, which house close to 20,000 people, a black box of information.
Once inside Easterling, Jarecki was approached by incarcerated people – overwhelmingly black and brown men – asking to speak off camera about the dire state of affairs at the facility. “This ain’t fit for human society,” says one. “They don’t want you to see the slave labor going on inside,” says another. “We’re at a humanitarian crisis level.” Before Jarecki was forced to stop filming, the camera records men calling for help from behind bars, forced to endure sweltering heat and filthy conditions.
Soon, inmates began reaching out to the film-makers via contraband cellphones, which they used to document an outrageously brutal and broken and corrupt system designed to exploit human labor. Led by the incarcerated activists Melvin “Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun” Ray and Robert Earl “Kinetik Justice” Council, the network of sources recorded officer beatings, unsanitary conditions, rampant drug addiction (supplied by officers on the black market) and first-person testimony at great personal risk. Council was nearly beaten to death by guards during the course of production and lost sight in one eye; another source recorded smears of blood trailing from Council’s cell after he was dragged away, unconscious and facedown.
The film takes its name from the prescribed reform by Alabama’s governor, Kay Ivey, to a system sued by the justice department in 2020 over “systematic” violence and abuse – “an Alabama solution to an Alabama problem”. As in, sticking to Alabama’s tradition of rejecting federal mandates for civil rights. As the film notes, the state has long required federal interventions for reform, such as forcing Alabama to eliminate slavery during the civil war, ending debt peonage in the early 20th century, federalizing the national guard to desegregate the state’s schools in 1963 and preventing discriminatory voting practices in the 1960s.
According to inmates and substantiated by cellphone footage, conditions in the state’s prisons have not improved since the justice department ordered the ADOC to reform in 2020. Instead, Ivey ordered the construction of three new prisons, 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. At the same time, the state’s parole rates plummeted by 72%. The overwhelming number of parole requests are now denied.
While inmates documented prison abuses, The Alabama Solution also investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was killed by officers at the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The film-makers follow his mother, Sandy Ray, as she is repeatedly denied information about her son, who was beaten beyond recognition. Eventually, she hears the state’s explanation on the news: Davis threatened officers with a knife, according to the ADOC, necessitating physical force in self-defense. But numerous witnesses told lawyers that Davis only wielded a plastic knife, which he threw away when told to lie on the ground. Four officers beat him anyway; one, Roderick Gadson, beat Davis with a metal baton and stomped on his face, bouncing his head off the concrete floor “like a basketball”, according to one source.
After three years of obfuscation and investigation, the state declined to press charges. It settled a civil suit by Ray for $250,000, never admitting wrongdoing. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, has since been promoted twice. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officers. In the past five years, according to the film, Alabama has spent $51m defending officers from misconduct lawsuits.
All the while, the state reaps the rewards of forced labor. Incarcerated people provide $450m in goods and services to Alabama each year, whether in its 13 prisons or outside them, as inmates are leased to corporations and state projects for what some have called modern-day slave labor. One incarcerated man notes the great irony that though he is repeatedly denied parole because he’s considered a “threat” to citizens, he is still trusted to work in the community, even on the governor’s mansion.
“Forced labor is coerced because of these violent conditions” in prisons, said Jarecki at a Q&A following the film’s premiere. Officers “have a huge amount of leverage over these men”. And yet, despite overwhelming odds, Ray and Council helped organize a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in October 2022. Though the effort received national attention, Ivey deemed their demands “unreasonable”; footage in the film shows how the ADOC ended the strike by starving prisoners en masse.
Though focused on Alabama, the film reminds that such exploitation is not just an Alabama problem. “What you see in this film is going on all over the nation,” said producer Alex Duran, who spent 12 years incarcerated in New York. The liberal bastion of California, for example, recently rejected a ballot measure that would have banned forced prison labor, and the state deployed 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of Los Angeles’s deadly blazes; they were paid between $5.80 and $10.24 daily – less than minimum wage.
In a prerecorded message at the premiere, Council and Ray issued a blunt call to action in every state. “You should be demanding access to the inside of these prisons and the people who are being warehoused in your name,” said Ray. “We don’t know what tomorrow might bring. But what we do know about today is that we’re going to give everything that we have in the struggle for freedom.”
“The Alabama Solution is a culmination of 50 years of work” from incarcerated activists, Council told the audience directly, as he surprise-called from the Limestone correctional facility. Council now leads a class-action lawsuit against the ADOC which, like the justice department suit, remains in litigation.
He thanked viewers “on behalf of the brothers who didn’t make it, who didn’t live to see this, and on behalf of the brothers who participated and contributed to make it happen”.
“We’ve gone as far as we can in depicting every aspect of what life is like in here,” he said. “This is where we pass the baton to you.”
Article by:Source: Adrian Horton in Park City, Utah
