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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?’: A NEW FILM LOOKS INSIDE THE APPALLING
ABUSES OF THE ALABAMA PRISON SYSTEM  
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Adrian Horton
October 12, 2025
The Guardian
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_ In the year’s most shocking documentary, The Alabama Solution,
prisoners share astonishing footage in a plea for help _

A still from The Alabama Solution. , Photograph: HBO

 

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
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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
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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
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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
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the justice department sued
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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
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early 20th century, to desegregate the state’s schools
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1963 and to prevent discriminatory voting practices
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several interviews, state officials reject the US justice department
reform mandate as federal overreach. The Alabama Solution under Ivey
was to construct three
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prisons
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diverting $400m 
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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
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72%, with the overwhelming number of parole requests denied.

[A still from The Alabama Solution]

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
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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
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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.

[Two people flank a movie poster on an easel.]

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
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New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100
incarcerated firefighters
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the frontlines of the LA fires for less than minimum wage
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“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
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as “black holes”
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people disappear, punitive tactics
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non-compliance with federal law
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obfuscation
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cruelty is the point.
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“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.”

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The Alabama Solution is now available on HBO
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at a future date

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