The buzz is already underway ahead of this year’s Academy Awards. One nominee for Best Documentary Feature Film may be getting some extra attention here in Alabama. The film “The Alabama Solution” is shining a light on conditions in the state’s prison system. The documentary uses footage shot by inmates and smuggled out to the producers.
“These men had realized this is a very powerful tool to be able to expose a reality that is otherwise being hidden from public view.” said Charlotte Kaufman.“And by the time we met them, they had been in the practice of using it that way”
She’s one of the producers and directors for the “Alabama Solution.” She’s referring to footage from inside state prisons that inmates took with contraband cell phones.
Those up close and personal images of life behind bars in Alabama may have swayed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to move the Alabama Solution from the short list for best documentary to an actual nominee for an Oscar. Kaufman says the film shows just how bad conditions really are.
“People can die inside these facilities, and we can't get to the bottom of why, and that should not be the case. These are state run institutions where people are being paid to make sure that people inside them are safe and are being kept track of. There's no reason that we should have this little information about why someone died.” said Kaufman.
It took six years to make this film. During that time, Kaufman and her co-director and producer, Andrew Jarecki, created a database tracking all the deaths in Alabama's prisons. The list went from 2019 to 2024. The database has an entry for every inmate that died. The entries include a photo, the inmate’s age, race, when they died and how they died. It also lists the prison where they were being held. There are over thirteen hundred names in the database. .
“Putting together that database included filing several different FOIAs, paying for and collecting hundreds of autopsies, comparing data across several different sources, and sort of triangulating the data to get the most complete picture,” said Kaufman.
In facilities like these where there is not much watching over them, many things can easily become hidden from the public's view. This is what was quickly discovered when research first began for the film.
“The more we started to look into it, the more we started to realize that there were much worse things going on there than we could have imagined, and you know that level of death happens as a result of not just negligence, but also just a system that's kind of in freefall, that's just falling apart.” said Jarecki.
“The men that they essentially risked their lives by filming this video, and now they have been cast away,” said Doctor Geneva McReynolds.
There have been multiple screenings for the general public, but McReynolds says she watched it too. She’s the President of a non-profit reform organization called FAMM. That’s Families Against Mandatory Minimums for short. It’s an advocacy group for prisoners and their families. Since the release of the film, three of the participating inmates have been moved from their facilities into solitary confinement.
“Family members can't reach them. They're not given their phone call to their loved one. No one has heard from them, and that is not allowed, like that should not be happening.” McReynolds said.
The inmates' attorneys said the prison systems did not provide a specific reason for their transfers but said it had to do with “security concerns.”
APR News reached out to the Alabama Department of Corrections. We asked by phone call and email for their side of the story on prison conditions and did not hear back.
Dr. McReynolds says a prison sentence should not be punishment, but rather to focus on helping inmates get better in order to prepare them for society again after their release.
“These are human beings. These are people's loved ones that have been subjected to this because they committed a crime, that is not what the objective of incarceration is. It is to restore individuals to useful citizenship. You go there and you are hopefully rehabilitated, not warehoused and abused” said McReynolds.
Jarecki with the Alabama Solution has thoughts of his own on that.
“It's sort of common sense that if you want to prepare a population of people to get back into society and sort of rejoin society, as taxpayers and as responsible parents and people who can open businesses and bring economic prosperity with a state, taking those people and putting them through the traumatic experience of being in a highly violent institution that has no supervision, no programs, is not pursuing drug treatment, is not giving proper mental health care, you're just not going to be able to release those people and expect that they're not going to commit further crimes” Jarecki said.
The Alabama Solution focuses solely on the facilities in the state of Alabama, but no prisons in the United States are open and shown to the public. This leads many people to wonder what may be going on across all other states in their prisons, and if they have similar things going on that are kept hidden inside.
“While the film is about Alabama and about the prisons in Alabama, it's really about incarceration all across America, the only difference is that we were able to see inside Alabama's facilities.” Kaufman said.
Supporters of the state’s prison system say safety in prisons goes both ways. There are concerns for the guards as well as for the inmates. Since the release of this film there has been a bigger push in that direction. Geneva McReynolds says the point is that safer prisons means inmates are rehabilitated and less likely to reoffend
“The bottom line is, safer prisons equal safer communities. When the staff is treated right, fairly, they're happy, they're healthy, they go to work and they treat individuals happy and healthy, and the common goal exists that both populations return home to their communities happy and healthy.” McReynolds said.
There are other films nominated for an Oscar in the Documentary Feature Film category. The list includes, Come See Me in the Good Light, Cutting through Rocks, Mr. Nobody against Putin, and The Perfect Neighbor. The 98th Academy Awards will take place Sunday, March 15th at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood.
