A picture is worth a thousand words, but in the case of “The Alabama Solution” (in theaters Friday and on HBO Max beginning Oct. 10), the pictures leave you practically speechless, and that’s the point. The new documentary is directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, but as the opening text explains, it was “made with the cooperation” of a group of incarcerated men inside Alabama prisons. They used phones that were brought in against prison rules to capture ghastly living conditions over more than 10 years.
The footage is devastating and often hard to watch, though it’s also low-fi and pixelated given the rudimentary equipment. With vastly overcrowded prisons that are grossly understaffed, the men speak of brutal violence, drug addiction, years spent living in filth and decades of laboring with no pay. Some of this became better documented in the news media during the years covered in the film — the Department of Justice sued the state of Alabama in 2020 — but the issues continue and the constitutionality of the state’s “involuntary servitude” work release programs is being challenged as well.
Yet as the inmates point out, the prisons are still among the only state institutions that the public and the news media have no access to, thanks in part to U.S. Supreme Court rulings that allow wardens to deny journalists access, citing “safety and security.”
“The Alabama Solution” aims to inform us about the situation, primarily by introducing inmate activists like Raoul Poole, Robert Earl Council (a.k.a. Kinetik Justice) and Melvin Ray, who communicate with the filmmakers through video calls. Each man committed serious crimes in the past, and speaks of his commitment to working for justice and peace in the future; each also talks about his activism in terms of mitigating what he sees as a human rights violation.
A secondary narrative thread concerns Sondra Ray and her quest for truth and justice after her son Steven Davis was beaten to death in the Donaldson Correctional Facility. Officers said he was threatening them; inmates said the officers were lying.
But perhaps the most vital part of “The Alabama Solution” is how it illuminates the sheer force of a video from inside a prison. “The public is already conditioned not to believe a person who is incarcerated,” Council notes early on, and his statement hovers over the film because it’s obviously true. The activists are fighting the most severe of uphill battles: not only are they incarcerated — in Council’s case, in solitary confinement for years on end — with little hope of ever being released, but the deck is stacked against them in the court of public opinion, too. To underline the point, the filmmakers occasionally weave in audio from radio hosts sneeringly commenting on prisoners who dare to suggest that they might have human rights,
Yet seeing blood and feces smeared across floors, or images of brutalized bodies, has a way of challenging viewer biases. Putting the inmates’ videos next to interviews the directors conducted with state officials, in which they deny that there’s anything wrong with the system, creates new meaning: This isn’t just about crime and punishment, but about a human rights crisis and willful blindness. Bringing several types of filmmaking, amateur and professional, together for a movie like this makes that message all the more powerful.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
The post In ‘The Alabama Solution,’ Amateur Footage Helps Expose Prison Abuses appeared first on New York Times.
