In 'The Alabama Solution', Incarcerated Freedom Fighters Expose the Deadly U.S. Prison System

This essay mentions suicide, as well as state-sanctioned abuse and murder.

Among this year's list of Oscar nominees was documentary The Alabama Solution, a stark and harrowing look inside the conditions of one of Alabama's prisons. The film opens with documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman's first visit to Alabama's Easterling prison in 2019, a day steeped in a sinister pleasantness. While all of Alabama's 13 prisons prohibit media access, Jarecki and Kaufman were allowed in to film the yearly volunteer-run barbeque, a sunny day in which incarcerated men, dressed in all white, eat fresh roasts, dance, and pray together while live music plays in the background. On camera, the prisoners smile and give sermons about joy and hope. Off camera, they tell the filmmakers of the real, day-to-day conditions inside that "ain't fit for human society": routine officer beatings, rotting food, extreme heat, flooding. 

The Alabama Solution was produced over the course of six years and uses a decade's worth of footage filmed by incarcerated men on contraband cellphones, an effort largely organized by prisoners Melvin "Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun" Ray and Robert Earl "Kinetik Justice" Council. "We're in these walled-off secret societies. These are state institutions. But it's one of the only state institutions that the public or the media has no access to. How can a journalist go into a war zone, but can't go into a prison in the United States of America?" said Ray, early in the film. Throughout the years, the filmmakers stayed in touch with the men inside the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), which incarcerates over 20,000 people—the majority of them Black—at 200% capacity, with one-third of the required staff, and a suicide rate that has consistently been reported at three to four times the national average for prisons. 

The footage that Ray, Council, and others collected is horrifying: human waste- and blood-streaked walls and floors, rat-infested cells and toilets, stabbings, overdose deaths, and hallways full of men nodding off on drugs sold by officers on the black market to supplement their low wages. In the middle of the documentary, Stacy George, a former Alabama correctional officer, states that the system purposefully ignores the officers' drug smuggling. If one got caught, officials would be forced to fire them, worsening the understaffing issue. "There's no checkpoints out the front. There's no dogs anymore," George said. "So they're not even really paying attention."

The film is, essentially, a smuggled piece of evidence, showing the extremely violent abuse and inhumane conditions these men face—conditions deemed "unconstitutional" by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2020, which didn't change anything for the men inside. "It's a continuous cycle of violence, lack of accountability," said Ray. "And without us being able to inform society about what's happening—these incidents are not even reported." 

On the day of the barbeque, filming was eventually shut down, but soon after, in October 2019, Jarecki and Kaufman got a tip about a prisoner, Steven Davis, who had been beaten so badly inside the William E. Donaldson correctional facility, he was taken to the ICU at an outside hospital. The film follows Davis's mother, Sandy Ray, as she tries and tries to get answers from ADOC, who would not even let the man's family bring their phones to his deathbed, probably to hide the fact that every bone in his now-cavernous face was broken. 

On the news, the state explained that Davis allegedly threatened officers with a knife, but multiple incarcerated witnesses told Sandy Ray's lawyer that Davis only had a plastic knife and surrendered, just to be beaten by four officers anyway. The one who eventually killed him was said to have stomped Davis's head off the concrete floor "like a basketball." Later in the film, an unidentified officer calls Sandy Ray to offer his condolences and share the truth of what happened. "I wanted to tell you, your son was beaten to death by an officer," he said. "That was a murder."

Regardless, the state ultimately concluded that the guard who killed Davis, who was holding back a smirk during his deposition, was justified in his use of force. In fact, he was promoted twice after the murder. In August 2024, Alabama paid Sandy Ray $250,000 to settle a lawsuit over the killing of her son. This is, unfortunately, a common occurrence, as Alabama has spent more than $53 million defending and settling lawsuits and protecting murderous officers, the filmmakers reported. In just Sandy Ray's case alone, the state spent an additional $393,000 on 11 different attorneys to defend the corrections officers named in the lawsuit. 

For years, the men in Easterling fought to expose their inhumane conditions by filing grievances, with few actually making it to court. Then in 2013, Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council tried to take matters into their own hands and move away from legal solutions. They launched the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) inside Holman Correctional Facility before organizing at St. Clair Correctional Facility, to protest against prison slavery and rally their loved ones on the outside to push for prison reform. "The combination of both of us is like a perfect algorithm… In a sense, my background is dealing with street dudes, so I began organizing. We have to come together and make a stand that our life is worth something. We gotta take our power back," said Council. As punishment for organizing, ADOC separated Ray and Council, beat them, and threw them into five years of solitary confinement. "Because we had the thought to be free, they punished us for it," said Ray.

But this didn't stop the organizers from fighting for their freedom. In 2016, the Free Alabama Movement and the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) participated in the nationwide prison labor strike, which started with a group of prisoners at Alabama's Holman prison, to protest forced labor, overcrowding, and understaffing, among other injustices. Within a week, 24,000 prisoners from more than  20 prisons across 24 states participated. In 2018, they joined another general strike with prisons across the country in protest of the 13th Amendment's slavery exception, which abolishes unpaid labor unless it's a condition of incarceration. FAM organizers claimed that before the start of the strike, correctional officers at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility transferred one of FAM's lead organizers into solitary confinement, only to release him at the end of the strike. 

The Alabama Solution leads up to yet another inspiring organizing feat: a state-wide prisoners' strike with at least five other facilities demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by Ray and Council. We've always understood that our labor is what this is all about," said Council. "[ADOC] give[s] you a job. It doesn't matter if the job is dangerous. It doesn't matter if you're sick. You can be written a disciplinary for refusing to work and placed in solitary confinement. And it's not just prison jobs. A lot of prisoners are being leased out to corporations. Or to do state work." Governor Kay Ivey said their demands were "unreasonable," despite Council saying that several prisoners had worked at her mansion: "Kay Ivey being so afraid of prisoners being so dangerous, and all the murderers and rapists, you don't want them in your community. Well, you got a group of them that's walking around your mansion every day."

Cell phone footage revealed that ADOC broke the 2022 strike in 11 days by starving out the prisoners en masse and sending out soldiers to intimidate prisoners and cut off contact from the lead organizers. Later during production, Council is nearly beaten to death by guards and loses sight in one eye. Recorded footage shows streaks of blood trailing from Council's cell after he was dragged away, unconscious and facedown, presumed to be dead.

Long after the film was distributed, FAM leaders announced that the prisoners were going on a labor strike again, starting February 8, 2026. "This nonviolent action comes in response to decades of unconstitutional sentencing practices, forced prison labor, and the ongoing humanitarian crisis throughout Alabama's prison system," FAM leaders said in a statement. 

"With the release of the documentary 'The Alabama Solution,' state officials can no longer deny or ignore the overwhelming evidence that Alabama's prison system is in catastrophic failure and requires immediate, sweeping reform… Despite federal investigations, DOJ findings, and repeated warnings, the State of Alabama has failed to enact meaningful change. Therefore, incarcerated people across the state are exercising their lawful right to peaceful protest through a statewide shutdown and work stoppage." 

However, the strike lasted about a week, with little mainstream media coverage and outside support.

The documentary gets its name from Ivey's response to the federal mandate for reform in 2020: "An Alabama problem deserves an Alabama solution." But there is no "Alabama solution" that doesn't involve continued cruelty and slavery because that is exactly how the state, historically, has survived. Alabama consistently rejects federal mandates for civil rights, required federal intervention to desegregate the state's schools in 1963, and opted to secede rather than end chattel slavery during the American civil war. 

And now, rather than work to fix its overcrowded prison conditions or make any reforms, Alabama is planning to combine its incarceration system by building three new mega-prisons, a $900 million project, and diverting $400 million in federal Covid-19 relief funds and $100 million from the state's education budget. As this project is underway, the state's parole rate, which was 10 percent in 2022—one of the lowest in the nation—continues plummeting to a new low each year, offering little hope to prisoners. From the time of chattel slavery to the Jim Crow era to this era of prison slave labor, very little has materially changed in Alabama. 

Everything about Alabama and the larger U.S. prison system is intentional: the violence, the forced labor, the hopelessly low parole rate, the murderous guards getting promoted. Because the eventual killings of people that the state of Alabama has deemed disposable is necessary for the prison slavery system to exist and continue making money, as each year, Alabama's 20,000 incarcerated people provide $450 million in goods and services, for essentially no pay. "They trust me to work in the community, but they don't trust me to give me parole to get out and go home to my family," said a prisoner over footage of him working at an Alabama zoo. Nationally, incarcerated workers produce at least $2 billion in goods and $9 billion worth of prison maintenance services annually. With this exploitative system in place, the U.S. empire can continue to tighten its grip and wield its power.

Toward the end of the film, when viewers are likely catching their breath, Ray's words to the audience are swollen with hope: "We don't know what tomorrow may bring," he said about his commitment to the movement. "But what we do know about today is that we're going to give everything that we have in the struggle for this freedom."

Since its distribution, The Alabama Solution was nominated for an Academy Award in the Documentary Feature category, but that doesn't do much for the prisoners it uplifted. In fact, in January 2026, a year after the documentary's release, Council and Ray were transferred from their prisons to solitary confinement at the Kilby correctional facility outside Montgomery. These transfers came after several groups encouraged the most recent prison labor strike in February.

Anything short of a prison break, anything short of complete and total freedom for these men and all incarcerated people, is unacceptable. Our people in these prisons are the compass for our revolutionary struggles, so of course, the state is trying to destroy that compass. We cannot let this happen. We cannot wait until more prisoners die to continue their protracted struggle for freedom. 

As George Jackson once said: "We must abolish the function of the prison as a concentration camp." For the U.S. empire to survive, all potential for revolution must be destroyed, which is why it's imperative that we free all our prisoners.

And no matter what, Ray and those inside keep fighting. Though this most recent strike was not totally successful and longstanding—largely due to the complete lack of support outside prison walls—there will be another and another and another, because oppressed people will always resist their oppressor. So if they can keep fighting, if Ray and his fellow freedom fighters can organize with prisoners across different states, analyze their conditions, and withhold their labor—if they can give "everything" they have in the struggle for their freedom, then what can we do? 

Those of us who claim to be abolitionists must take stock of what that truly means. Our convictions must match our abolitionist principles. As prisoners organize and resist against slave labor and inhumane conditions—risking retaliation through abuse, torture, and even murder—the least we can do as people on the outside is loudly and unwaveringly support the people held captive and isolated behind those bloodied prison walls. The least we can do is follow their compass toward liberation. 

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Access the list of demands, action items, and a syllabus on the history of resistance in Alabama here.

Join Council's freedom campaign here.

Donate to Michael Kimble, another instrumental Alabama prison organizer, here.

Learn more about the Free Alabama Movement and how to support it here.

Watch The Alabama Solution here.