The Washington, DC, premiere of The Alabama Solution couldn’t have occurred in a more fitting place. Hosted in Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center, “where Washington comes to think,” the DC/DOX screening of the festival’s centerpiece film raised many thought-provoking questions centered around the human rights abuses that have been documented for decades in Alabama’s state prisons.

The premiere comes 10 years after HBO aired the first part of co-director Andrew Jarecki’s last project, a true-crime series entitled The Jinx. This series addressed (among other sordid events) the acquittal of Robert Durst in the murder of Morris Black, despite there being overwhelming evidence that Durst had, at minimum, dismembered Black’s body. Whereas the first part of The Jinx highlights the failure of the criminal justice system to convict and then adequately punish a violent criminal, The Alabama Solution highlights the failure of the criminal justice system to adequately protect those who have been convicted, often of lesser crimes.

As the cynics among us may have already guessed, the reason for the stark contrast between the treatment of millionaire Durst and the treatment of your average Alabama prisoner boils down to money. In Durst’s case, money bought him a successful defense—in the trial for Black’s murder, at least. In the case of imprisoned Alabamians, money buys their labor for private entities on the cheap. This exploitative dynamic makes the most trustworthy and well-behaved of prisoners the most lucrative and thus places them among the least likely to be declared eligible for parole. Of the money they earn while working, prisoners will see but a pittance, calling to mind the unfair wage and labor conditions associated with the nearly hundred-year legacy of sharecropping in the American South. That this labor is often mandated by prison rule systems makes it little better than slavery. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues as much, pointing out the racial lines along which this exploitation often falls by referring to mass incarceration at large as “the new Jim Crow” in her 2010 book of the same name.

Jarecki’s and co-director Charlotte Kaufman’s treatment of the subject is suitably sensitive. Collected and edited over the course of six years, a large part of the film’s content comes directly from the incarcerated men themselves, recording video calls and conferences on contraband cellphones while fellow prisoners stand guard, ready to warn them of approaching correctional officers (COs). They do this at great risk to themselves, to understate what is at stake, and they remain at great risk in the wake of The Alabama Solution.

The film’s pace mirrors the frantic lives of its subjects, with scarcely a second of the nearly two-hour runtime that couldn’t be described as “gripping.” Footage of the harrowing conditions in which the prisoners live calls to mind horrifyingly similar footage of overcrowded livestock in films such as Shaun Monson’s Earthlings. Rats endanger the men’s food (yet they are given disciplinary warnings if they attempt to protect it by hanging it above the floor), hematomas form on their heads after unwarranted beatings from COs, and addiction (an understandable means of escape) runs rampant, with many COs smuggling the drugs in themselves.

Despite the indignity of the prisoners’ circumstances, what emerges in The Alabama Solution is a portrait of men of sparkling intelligence and astounding resilience, with Robert Earl Council (also known as Kinetic Justice) and Melvin Ray standing out as central figures among the incarcerated activists behind the Free Alabama Movement. It would be no exaggeration to describe their living conditions as hell on earth, but it is clear that Kinetic Justice has found some measure of heaven in his books and in organizing on behalf of his fellow prisoners statewide. That he and his peers continue to fight—not with fists or weapons but with words and collective action—and transcend the horrors that surround them, including strike-breaking starvation and infighting encouraged by COs, is nothing short of an awe-inspiring testament to the indomitability of the human spirit.

In her introduction to the film’s screening, DC/DOX co-founder Sky Sitney expressed her love for the craft of filmmaking and how that love is the driving force behind the selections she helps make for the festival every year. In the case of The Alabama Solution, she said, “It wasn’t just love. It was a moral obligation.” To echo her words, especially if (like Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall) you have bought into the dominant narrative that prisoners are undeserving of our compassion and (like us on the outside) of certain unalienable rights, you have a moral obligation to see this film. Even if you are an abolitionist, on the other end of the spectrum entirely, this film will challenge you. It will move you. It will push you to ask the same foundation-shattering question Professor Vesla Mae Weaver posed in her own opening remarks: “Can the prison ever be made good?”

At the 2010 premiere of All Good Things, Jarecki’s dramatization of the Robert Durst story, an interviewer asks him, “What brought you to this film?” Jarecki responds, “I’m always interested in these sort of monster stories. You find out that somebody is described as a maniac or a crazy person or a serial killer, and I always think that those people started out somewhere. They started out as people, and they had hopes and dreams.” In The Alabama Solution, Jarecki turns this humane lens on some of the most vilified members of our society, whether rightfully or wrongfully convicted, and reminds us that turning a blind eye to their suffering makes monsters of us, too.



To learn more, check out:

A Capital Premiere for a National Reckoning:
The Alabama Solution’s Confrontation of America’s Prison-Industrial Complex