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The opening scenes of “The Alabama Solution” are at once hard to look at and hard to look away from. Grainy footage shows blood-streaked walls and trash and filth strewn about. Men who appear to be in zombie-like trances are in the corridors of Alabama prisons, with help seemingly nowhere to be found. Directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman built much of the documentary from footage that incarcerated men secretly recorded with contraband cell phones. As a result, the film offers an unfiltered view inside a system where overcrowding, untreated addiction and violence are routine, and where official oversight is almost nonexistent. Many of the findings are in line with the conclusions of a 2020 Justice Department report on the state department of corrections.
The film is anchored by the voices of men like Robert Earl Council, known as Kinetik Justice, a longtime prison activist who has spent years in solitary confinement for organizing protests behind bars. It also follows Sondra Ray, a mother whose son Steven Davis was beaten to death by correctional officers in 2019, as she searches for accountability.
I spoke with Kaufman and Jarecki this week about collaborating with incarcerated whistleblowers, the ethics of true-crime storytelling, and the culture of violence and impunity they found among the corrections staff in Alabama. (Jarecki is a Marshall Project donor who also sits on the Board of Directors.)
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. The film is now available on HBO Max.
Jamiles Lartey: When you arrived at the prison with cameras that first day, were you expecting to uncover the violence and suffering that you wound up documenting?
Charlotte Kaufman: We went in there with curiosity. We knew that it was possible we'd see a mixture or hear a mixture of things. We had heard there were issues inside the prison system in Alabama, but we weren't like, “Oh, we're going to make a film about horrible violence in Alabama's prison system.”
Andrew Jarecki: It was clear that we were going into a somewhat sinister environment. I think we just didn't know quite how sinister. These institutions are completely secret. So we were very lucky to be there at all, certainly enormously lucky to be even able to film anything. It was through just a series of unique coincidences that we were able to get access to even one prison with visible cameras.
JL: About a third of the film is shot by incarcerated people themselves, showing things that you likely would not have been invited to see by the prison. Talk to me about the role of smartphones in this film.
CK: Phones have been inside Alabama's prisons since around 2013, and it is true that there are people who are using phones in nefarious ways. But it's also true that people have been using phones to document the realities and the truth of their existence.
And it’s because of the bravery of people who were willing to record what's happening around them, that we were able to put this story together. You get to meet some of those people in the film, but there were many, many more who had been documenting and recording, often posting on social media, trying to reach the right audience.
We were never soliciting anything. We were not directing anyone to film anything. It was about being willing to receive what whistleblowers were putting out there.
JL: The film taps into some of the intrigue and tensions that animate the popularity of the true-crime genre, but in my opinion, does so without crossing into the sensationalism or exploitation that true crime sometimes tips into. How did you walk that line?
CK: We never wanted to sensationalize what was happening inside, and one of the ways to do that was to balance it out with the resilience of the people in the film. We did not want it to reduce the people in prison to the circumstances of their lives inside, but to also show them as leaders and full humans and people [with] lives that continue to evolve and develop. But it's hard, because you also want to show the public how bad it really is.
We wanted to make sure that the specific investigations we were doing, whether it was into Steven Davis's death or others, were not told in a vacuum, and it wasn't just like the thrill of finding the answers out, but that you could see the full context.
JL: My biggest takeaway from the film is what comes off as a gang-like pattern of coordinated violence, intimidation and retaliation by at least some corrections officers. Is your investigative finding here something like that of a C.O. gang?
CK: What I can tell you is we created a database of lawsuits filed by incarcerated people against guards, and we found patterns where the same guards would show up again and again.
The state has an abundance of evidence that there is abuse happening, coming not just from these lawsuits, but also from the [U.S.] Department of Justice. And so there are officers who continue to exhibit this bad behavior, and then the state does nothing. Instead, they provide the legal resources to defend them.
That sends a message to whatever cliques of officers have decided that violence is their way to respond to most situations. It sends the message that, keep doing what you're doing. We're going to green-light this, and we're okay with it.
AJ: And we have a lot of compassion for many of the corrections officers. There are people who go into the system with good intentions. But once you're in that environment for a period of time, you just become desensitized to it.
We know one officer who went in with very good intentions. But when he got there, he started realizing that it wasn't just that he would be expected to sell drugs or sell cell phones or attack prisoners, but that he was going to have to support other people who planned on doing that. He was uncomfortable, and he didn't go along with it. And then he got a phone call from somebody on the same shift who said, “Are you going to be down for this? Like you understand how this works, right?”
JL: Are you concerned that the people you feature in the film, who are still incarcerated there, may be targets of retribution?
CK: We're all preparing for what the reaction might be. There's an effort that has been put together to provide legal response to retribution or retaliation, and lawyers that can visit them frequently and respond to things as they come up.
As [prisoner organizer] Kinetik Justice said in the film, “We got sick of filing lawsuits, and we are turning to the court of public opinion.” I think they really do believe in the court of public opinion, and that there is a protective measure when you give people the truth and allow democracy to do its job, and allow the people to say what they will abide and what they will not tolerate.
JL: Is there anything that could have made it into the movie, but didn’t?
AJ: Yeah, it was sort of an embarrassment of horrors. There were things that really stretched my understanding of what human beings were capable of, especially when the people in their care are turned into objects.
In one case, we interviewed somebody who had been very distraught after he was put into a maximum security facility when he should not have been, and then was denied a phone call.
And he called the guard over, and he put the noose around his neck, and he said, “I'm going to kill myself if you don't let me speak to my mother.” And the guard said to him: “In my experience, when people are really going to kill themselves, they don't talk about it. They just do it.”
And he walked away, and in fact, this young man did fall or step off the bed and hung himself. A guard noticed it, and they rushed back in, and they cut him down. He had severely damaged his neck, but he survived it.
Who knows whether it's just out of boredom — sometimes they're just entertained by seeing people in distress — or just because it doesn't feel real to them anymore. They don't feel like these are human beings anymore. But just the idea that somebody, a prison guard or an official, could be so inured to the humanity of the other person that when they're considering ending their life, they just give them a little bit of a push, really stayed with me in a powerful way.
JL: Obviously, there are some people in the country who don’t need any convincing of the misery that exists in U.S. prisons. But for the “prison isn’t supposed to be a vacation” crowd, do you expect this film can break through?
AJ: It really depends on whether they see the film. We all know that there are books and films that people are willing to opine on very strongly without having read or watched them.
But we've shown the film to conservative groups and had people say to us, “Look, I'm a Republican. I'm tough on crime. This is not what we're talking about. This is not being tough on crime. This is a whole other level of depravity.” We've shown it to religious groups who've said this is highly un-Christian behavior. These are things that are frowned upon in every religion.
JL: Last week, the Alabama Sentencing Commission said that the state's prison population could rise by nearly a third due to new punitive state laws. Based on what you learned while filming this documentary, what is in store for the state and its incarcerated people if that analysis turns out to be correct?
CK: We can expect a deepening of all the things you see in the film, and a closing of the window that allows us to see them, because the [Federal Communications Commission] just passed new guidelines that are going to make it easier for local authorities to use cell phone signal blockers on facilities, and that will mean that communication will be purely controlled by these huge maximum security facilities that are being constructed.