The Alabama Solution

Bluesky

Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman offer a scathing and searingly powerful look inside the American prison system with their Oscar nominated documentary. In 2019, they were filming at an annual prison BBQ in Easterling, Alabama, when away from the food and festivities, prisoners began to open up about violence, including the beating of prisoners and between the incarcerated men themselves. “It ain’t fit for human society,” one says.

This was the start of a five-year project that sees the men giving first-person testimony to the filmmakers on contraband phones as well as shooting footage from within the prison, a space journalists often find hard to access in the US due to a Supreme Court ruling that “safety and security” can be used as a reason to deny it.

The phone footage is shocking in and of itself, showing unspeakably filthy conditions and overcrowding, while intertitles note that the prisons in Alabama are at 200% capacity while only having a third of the staff that they actually require. Men give further testimony about violence and circumstance, including spending years in solitary confinement, building a disturbing picture of what goes on within the prison walls. It’s hard to believe that these conditions are persisting and the non-sensationalised way in which they are presented makes it all the more horrendous – no other Oscar nominee will make you feel angrier this year. The filmmakers’ approach ensures we see these prisoners as individual humans not just as a mass of ‘bad people’.

Jarecki’s brother Eugene explored the idea of a prison-industrial complex in The House I Live In, as did Ava DuVernay’s 13th, and The Alabama Solution also digs into the way prisons provide cut-price labour – with a strike leading to even more inhuman treatment. The filmmakers also zero in on the case of Steven Davis, who was beaten to death by guards, who claimed it was self-defence, despite a raft of witnesses saying he was holding nothing more than a plastic knife. It’s hard not to feel enraged as the fight of Davis’ mother Sandy Ray for justice unfolds, particularly in the face of testimony from one of the guards involved, Roderick Gadson, whose blasé attitude speaks volumes about the way the state protects its own.

It should be noted that the three men whose testimony drives the film – Raoul Poole, Robert “Kinetik Justice” Earl Council and Melvin Ray – were put in solitary confinement in January. Ray has recently been released but the others are still there. The Alabama Solution is the sort of call-to-arms documentary it’s hard to look away from and that will leave you rooting for it to effect lasting change.

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