“The Alabama Solution” is one of the most powerful exposés of the inhumanity of the American prison system I’ve ever seen. Directed by Andrew Jarecki (“Capturing the Friedmans,” “The Jinx”) and Charlotte Kaufman, the movie is a scalding portrait of life on the inside that exerts a grip worthy of a thriller. It’s an investigative documentary, filmed over five years, much of it in and around the Easterling Correctional Facility in Southeast Alabama, that doesn’t merely show us the chronic abuse of prisoners. It uncovers a culture of sanctified lawlessness. And the way “The Alabama Solution” reveals this, peeling away layers of a systemic cover-up, becomes as dramatic as the crimes it’s about.
The movie follows in the incendiary footsteps of documentaries like Ava DuVernay’s “13th” and Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stack’s “The Farm: Angola, USA” and Stanley Nelson’s “Attica,” building on their insights. And it infiltrates the world of prison with an ingenuity, and emotional directness, made possible (in this case) by technology. A Supreme Court ruling has decreed that wardens can bar journalists from entering prisons as a way of protecting “safety and security.” This means that anything can go on behind bars, and it won’t be seen. It’s easier to report on a war zone than it is on a prison. But Jarecki and Kaufman penetrate the walls of secrecy.
They first came to Easterling, in 2019, for what seemed a positive occasion. They were there to record a religious revival, complete with barbecue, being held in the prison yard. But it turned out that this was a glorified public-relations stunt. While they were there, several prisoners took them aside and told them stories of beatings and stabbings and subhuman conditions.
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Those who are serving time have always found ways to get ahold of things (drugs, money, etc.), even when it violates prison protocol or the law. And in “The Alabama Solution,” we watch the incarcerated men of Easterling communicate with the outside world using contraband cell phones. The prisoners remained in touch with the filmmakers, using the cell phones as an underground communication system. And the footage of those calls, presented in a vertical rectangle onscreen, carries an extraordinary muckraking urgency. Prisoners like Robert Earl Council and Melvin Ray, who speak their minds directly and report on what they’re observing, become the film’s forthright and compelling narrators.
We get direct testimony about what has gone on in the prison, but the raw phone footage achieves something else. It humanizes the prisoners, allowing them to undercut their public identities as convicted criminals. The film, in that sense, isn’t just combating abuse. It’s pushing back against even a sympathetic audience’s tendency to pigeonhole prisoners as we’re watching them. The full humanity of these men is something that’s too easy to brush aside, and that’s something “The Alabama Solution” reminds us of at every moment.
We’re presented with shocking statistics about the Alabama State Prison system. It’s one of the worst in the United States, with the highest rates of drug overdose, rape, suicide, and murder. How does something like that happen? Easterling is an institution that’s at 200 percent capacity. The conditions are horrifying. We see Robert Earl Council toss out the rats that are scurrying around his toilet, and we learn that he spent five years in solitary confinement. He looks and sounds astonishingly centered and upbeat for having gone through that hell, but a part of you wonders: How could a prison justify keeping anyone in solitary for that long? In the case of Easterling, which is run like a totalitarian work farm, it’s all part of how the system is organized to shut down the prisoners’ voices, to make sure that even the most glaring breaches of law remain hidden.
Having set us in this nightmare world, the documentary takes shape around a single horrifying event. A prisoner at Donaldson Prison, named Steven Davis, was beaten by guards so brutally that he wound up in the ICU. But it was worse than that: He was found there in a body bag. He’d been killed — for nothing. We’re shown a clandestine photograph that was taken of his corpse, and it’s a hideous image, one that you can’t unsee, his facial bones literally caved in, his eye a black circle. “The Alabama Solution” becomes a murder mystery. How did this happen and why? And how could it have been covered up?
Several prisoners saw what happened, and testify to it, and their words all align. They describe how Davis was beaten, the guard in question taking his boot and smashing Davis’s head, bouncing it off the floor “like a basketball.” But there is one prisoner who offers condradictory testimony. It is Davis’s cell mate, James Sales. What accounts for the discrepancy? Sales has only a few months left of his sentence before he goes free; he’s trying not to rock the boat. And just as we’re wondering how this will resolve itself, something happens. The prison system resolves it, and not in a good way.
The key guard in the story, Roderick Gadson, with his bald head and looming physique, evokes the menace of Suge Knight. We see footage of a hearing in which he discusses the various transgressions he’s been accused of, dismissing them with a blithe awareness that the system will protect him. The system, which includes all the prisons in Alabama, is run for profit. The state’s 20,000 incarcerated people provide $450 million in goods and serves to Alabama each year. Which is why the state has spent $50 million defending prison officers against charges of misconduct.
The injustice of it all — the murder, the silence, the capitalist ethos that goes back to the slave era — is part of a larger racket, presided over by the Alabama governor, Kay Ivey, who’s so jaunty about the wonder of her state’s prison system that she should be played, in the Hollywood version of this story, by Kathy Bates. At one point there’s a state-wide prison strike to protest these crimes, and it appears well-organized. It gains traction and national attention and seems to be working…until it doesn’t. You may think of Attica. For who really holds the cards here?
“The Alabama Solution,” as its title suggests, is about how prisons can be part of a state-wide chain of corruption. We’re told about how the state is planning to consolidate its incarceration system by building three new mega-prisons, at a cost of $900 million. That’s not a solution to overcrowded prison conditions; it’s an efficiency move by a corporation. And the film suggests that Alabama, as bad as the situation is there, is not alone. These trends and injustices are part of how prison in America increasingly works. But “The Alabama Solution” lays bare the rotten guts of this system with enough sobering evidence, and enough filmmaking force, to make a difference.