The Alabama Solution documentary on HBO Max exposes the appalling abuses inside the Alabama prison system

“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.

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These prisons are like black sites.

“‘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 U.S. 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.”

Read the full story at TheGuardian.com.