“The Alabama Solution:” New Doc Exposes Disturbing Conditions in AL Prisons

Next, to Alabama, a state that locks up more of its population than almost any country on Earth.

That's what inspired our next guest to peek behind the curtain and through a network of prisoners willing to risk it all to expose the truth.

A new documentary, The Alabama Solution, was born.

Here is some of the trailer.

There's an argument that there is some systemic problem within all of our facilities, and I wholeheartedly disagree with that.

How can you defend this?

That one guard, he knew something.

I could tell he was a liar.

We are going to pursue it based on the facts to the fullest extent that we're allowed.

Their biggest fear is to see us come together on one and four.

We got to take our power back.

We have to come together and make a stand that our lives is worth something.

I carried a prisoner in 1985.

I know what these folks are through.

We have been taking life and death risks to get this information out while we still can.

To break that silence, filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman speak to Hari Sreenivasan about how their shocking discoveries inspired a campaign for change.

Christiane, thanks to Andrew Jarecki, Charlotte Kaufman, thank you both for joining us.

You recently directed a documentary called The Alabama Solution about the conditions inside Alabama's prison system, which houses some 20,000 individuals.

I mean, your film has incredible footage from inside, inmates who have access to cell phones.

But what are the conditions there?

Because from the outside, what we see is that the state prisons are operating at nearly 200% of their capacity with just a third of the required staff.

So what does that lead to?

- The conditions are horrible inside Alabama's prison system, and they're deadly and they're brutal, and they're upheld by a very corrupt administration.

These conditions have been documented in a Department of Justice report that came out in 2019, and further documentation followed up in a Department of Justice lawsuit.

But it's very hard to understand the everyday brutality and violation of constitutional rights by just reading a report.

But once you see it on the cell phone footage, there's a whole new level of understanding it on a visceral human level.

And what you see is an environment where your life is threatened every day, where you are not guaranteed medical care, where there is rampant drug use, where people are being forced to work for free, where mental health crises are being exacerbated.

And I think that what we hope the audience will take from the film is beyond what any written legal document could provide.

We have record numbers of people leaving out of their body bags.

They don't want the public to see what's really going on on the inside.

How can a journalist go into a war zone but can't go into a prison in the United States of America?

The state is selling one lawsuit after another.

There's no consequences for their actions.

It's not the inmates that's killing them folks.

It's the guards.

Andrew, the cell phone footage, these are from contraband phones, right?

But how is it that so many inmates had access to cell phones and how did you get it?

>> You know, I was talking to one inmate in the system and asked about how it's possible that there's so many drugs in the system and that there are so many cell phones, which was shocking to us as well.

Where are they coming from?

And he sort of looked at me incredulously and said, "You know we don't leave, right?"

And it struck me that it was clear these things were coming in, and we learned about this as we investigated, from officers.

And officers are operating a very lucrative trade in drugs and cell phones.

What's unique is that the cell phones, while they're prohibited allegedly by the administration, they're actually the tear and the fabric of secrecy that we were able to penetrate because of the brave efforts of these men who were inside, who were taking a tremendous risk by sharing their stories and sharing their material.

Okay, they're gone now.

Would a regular phone call be better?

No, because it does not allow us to just be ourselves.

You know, when we present our stories, we want to present our whole self, not just our voice.

You highlight a number of individual stories in the documentary, and one of those was a man named Stephen Davis who dies in prison.

It's actually through an anonymous phone call that his mother hears that her son was beaten to death.

OK, I understand.

Who's this?

Well, you know, I'm just I know you're grieving and mourning and I but I just I want to tell you that your son was beaten to death by an officer.

That was a murder.

You know, they sweep stuff underneath the rug all the time about this.

Tell our audience a little bit about Stephen Davis and what happened to him.

Well, like a lot of people that are incarcerated, Stephen was a somewhat troubled kid, but not very different than a lot.

You know, he went through his life and ran into some problems, especially because of drug use.

And so he was in prison under the sort of felony murder statute because he was in a car with somebody who went into a house to buy drugs and there was an altercation and that person shot someone and then came back out in the car and forced him to drive away.

So he had never pulled the trigger and, you know, there are many people in prison who do pull the trigger or have pulled the trigger, but he ended up in a jail where he was tased and was essentially was dead for a number of minutes until he was revived and then after that had more difficulty, continued to medicate himself with drugs and ended up in one of the worst prisons in Alabama.

There are 14 of those prisons.

And it's clear that he got into altercation with an officer.

They will say, "Oh, that's because he was threatening the officer."

But as we hear from the informant who calls us, he says, "They make things up all the time like that because they want to be able to say that the inmate was responsible and that they had no alternative but to use deadly force," which was clearly not the case.

And we ended up having the ability to hear from a whole series of witnesses who were present at the time and said that that was just a made-up story.

You should know that the state of Alabama, in the case of Stephen Davis, says that they maintain that Officer Roderick Gadsden's use of deadly force was warranted because Stephen Davis refused to drop his knives.

Has anything happened to that officer since?

This officer was, after the death of Stephen Davis, promoted twice.

So he was not disciplined, he was promoted.

And then he was put in charge of the CERT team, which is the special response team that's supposed to deal with the most sensitive situations inside the prison.

I was going to say, I think one thing that we observed is that it seems that the administration made a calculation that one of the only ways you can run a facility that is close to 200% overcrowded with one-third of the prison staff is by greenlighting brutal tactics.

But in fact I think that brutality creates more chaos within the prison as our participant Robert O. Council said there's a phenomenon of hand-me-down oppression when you have officers constantly treating the population with violence and brutality that creates a violence, a culture of violence throughout all of the facilities and a culture of tension and trauma and PTSD.

So it's really a problem that seeps through the whole system.

It's also worth pointing out that not all prison guards are like Roderick Gadsden, the man who appears to have killed Stephen Davis, along with help from some others.

There are guards who are in our film who are extremely understanding, joined the prison system in order to make a difference, to try to do something good, to bring religion inside, to bring care inside to these men.

But when the men are dehumanized in this way, when they're brought in and treated in this way, they start to not feel like human beings.

And in some ways, the system attracts guards who are willing to and are encouraged to commit this kind of brutality.

You also focus in on how this idea of human rights inside a prison has a long history, going back to the Civil Rights Movement and perhaps even earlier.

And a couple of the people that you focus in on, Robert Orr Counsel, known as Kinetic Justice, and Melvin Ray, who after really years of suffering in solitary confinement and living in these conditions, they sort of band together and create this thing, this idea, this Free Alabama Movement.

And tell our audience a little bit about what that is and how they were able to orchestrate a statewide sort of work strike.

Robert Earl Counsel, Melvin Ray, and many other men who we spoke to but who don't appear in the film have understood for over a decade the power of the court of public opinion.

And they have understood that if they can reach the public, that the public will be horrified by what's happening inside these facilities in terms of brutality, in terms of free labor, in terms of profiting off of the suffering of others.

And they have, you know, really since cell phones first appeared inside these facilities, since around 2013, have been using the devices to capture their realities and share them with the public and with the press in hopes of sparking a conversation about the dire need to change how we deal with justice in this country.

And they also have always recognized the power of the, you know, the importance of the economics in this situation, that this is a system that is profitable, this is a system that provides great value to the state in terms of labor, $450 million a year in terms of unpaid services and labor, and that they have the power to communicate with the outside world, and then they also have the power to, as they say, shut the system down and prevent it from profiting, and hope that that will be a lever to start a real conversation about change.

When you think about the work strike that these men have undertaken, again, it's a peaceful protest and that's something that's so difficult to achieve in the free world.

And yet these men being restricted by tiny forms of communication, furtively being able to use cell phones to try to organize, were able to just reduce the amount of work that was happening in the prisons.

And not just in the prisons, we were really shocked to find that it's not just that Alabama is using the men to sweep the floors inside the prison, which maybe people could say, well, if they're incarcerated, they should do their part.

But actually, they're shipped out in vans every morning.

They work in lots of state facilities, the governor's mansion or on road crews.

They work at the state fair.

But also, they're essentially leased to corporations.

So a lot of these men who are not deemed safe enough to be released from prison are every day going to work at McDonald's or going to work at Burger King or going to work at KFC or going to work at the Hyundai plant or the Budweiser distributor.

They're out in the world and yet they're not considered safe enough to be given a chance to re-enter society which is why parole is so low in the state.

You know the Department of Justice had a multi-year investigation into this and in the lawsuit that they filed against Alabama they said the complaint alleges that the conditions at Alabama's prisons for men violate the Constitution because Alabama fails to provide adequate protection from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, fails to provide safe and sanitary conditions, and subjects prisoners to excessive force at the hands of prison staff.

Now, for the record, we did reach out to the Alabama Department of Corrections for comment about the conditions that your film highlights.

As we speak, we haven't heard back yet, but they did respond to Good Morning America earlier this month, and in that, they said, "The Alabama Department of Corrections is aware of the film.

The production began in 2019 with footage acquired from inmate contraband cell phones.

The ADOC cannot confirm or comment on the authenticity of any video footage obtained illegally.

What kind of response has the state had?

And I guess what's your response to them?

Well, I think the state is responding to our film in a similar way that they've responded to the Department of Justice report, which is to say, we don't agree.

We don't have a systemic issue across all our prisons, and we're going to dare defend our rights to run our prisons the way we want.

And I think, you know, they can try to say that they can't validate the footage in the film, but we've made our film across six years.

And we did not just collect video footage.

We also did extensive reporting through filing FOIAs, autopsies, speaking to multiple government sources, inside sources.

And we have not only investigated the deaths you see in the film, but we have also investigated all deaths that have happened within the facilities since 2019, since the release of the Department of Justice report.

And our investigation shows that the death rate has doubled during that time, as well as, you know, the drivers, the preventable drivers of death, like drug, murder, suicide have also increased rapidly.

So this is a system that is still out of control and that the proposed solutions, like building new facilities, are not realizing real results.

And in fact, things are getting, you know, have declined further.

So it is still as urgent a situation as it was in 2019 when the Department of Justice first came in as today.

>> I interviewed Steve Marshall, who's the Attorney General of the state, and asked him if he thought that there were serious problems in the prisons.

And he said, well, there's this idea that we have some systemic problem in all of our prisons, and I wholeheartedly disagree with that.

I think that that's in part because, you know, there's a sort of philosophy that you can act like something's not happening, even if the public is, you know, asking questions.

But it just also represents the fact that these people are locked away in places that the public is not allowed to see into.

Journalists are not allowed to go into prisons, except very occasionally, in the country because, hypothetically, they're like safety considerations.

But the reality is these things are happening.

There's nothing the state can do to prevent the information from going out, other than stopping the cell phones, and in fact, that's what they're trying to do right now.

So they're installing jammers and spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the information stop flowing, rather than trying to improve the conditions that are obviously generating this kind of information.

You know, I wonder, when you talk about the phones, when you talk about this sort of access to information and transparency, whether this is limited to Alabama or whether this lack of accountability and insight that we have into prison systems, whether you were able to find this type of a pattern repeating in other states as well?

I would say, you know, the conditions that allowed for the crisis in Alabama to deepen to such a severe extent exist all throughout prisons in America.

Secrecy, lack of accountability, a punitive mindset, an ability to make people work for free, that exists in all of America's facilities.

And I would say, you know, yes, our film is about Alabama, and yes, our film is about prisons, but our film is also about what happens when a government is allowed to detain people under constrained and surveyed communication with little to no accountability.

And that's not just happening in terms of our state or federal criminal prison system.

That's happening in other arenas too.

There is an urgent conversation we need to have about whether detaining people secretly and cutting them off from civil society and cutting the press off from being able to report on what's happening in institutions is compatible with a democracy.

The HBO original documentary, The Alabama Solution, is now available to stream on HBO Max.

I want to thank the filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman both for joining us and just for making the film.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for watching and thanks for sharing this with your audience.

Yeah, thanks for having me.