The Oscar-nominated documentary feature The Alabama Solution is a disturbing exposé about corruption impacting Alabama’s prison system and inmates — but the film’s co-directors, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, say it is urgently relevant to activities outside that state’s borders, as well. It’s a “study of complicity,” Kaufman told The Hollywood Reporter at the recent SCAD Savannah Film Festival (where The Alabama Solution film was featured on the fest’s annual Docs to Watch panel). Jarecki said that their hope is that by shining a light on the Alabama prison system, it will lead to much-needed reforms there and elsewhere.
You can watch the full interview here, or read the transcript of the Q&A below.
Can you share how you two first came to work together and what some of that work has entailed?
ANDREW JARECKI Almost seven years ago, I was thinking a lot about the prison system in America and I had been visiting a lot of prisons and my daughter knew that. She was 14 at the time, and she’s a big reader and she had been reading a book by Anthony Ray Hinton, a guy who was wrongfully convicted in Alabama and had spent many, many years in the Alabama state prison system. And she said, “We should probably read this together.” And I was like, “Any excuse to read with my daughter was the greatest thing ever.” So we read it and we were so moved by this account that we decided to take a road trip to Montgomery. We had never been in Alabama before. And when we were there, we met somebody who had access to the prison system, which was one of the many secretive prison systems in the United States. And we discovered that there was the possibility to volunteer in the system to go in and distribute hygiene packages and that they had these revival meetings. And I came back to New York and met up with Charlotte, who had just an incredible reputation for being a great investigator and somebody that had worked with friends of mine. And we had lunch and I said, “This is kind of a weird thing, but I just want to go down with you and let’s just go in the prisons and see what we can see.” And so we went down in that context. And that was the beginning of what’s now been a 6 1/2-year process. I got very fortunate in this, finding Charlotte.
I think you guys also worked together on another project that did quite well. Is that true?
JARECKI I had been thinking for a while about whether it made sense to make a part two of The Jinx and things were happening very quickly. And we realized that there was an opportunity to make a film really about something or a series that was about complicity, basically all the people who had helped Bob Durst through the years to do all kinds of mischief and murder. And I was kind of overwhelmed with that. We were deeply in this. And I said to Charlotte, “I know this is a hard subject, but would it be possible for you to help me on the investigative part on the part two of The Jinx?” And she was like, “I’m in.” And I think it was partly just, we were so deep into this project that having a little bit of a mental break from it was good, but I don’t want to speak for you.
CHARLOTTE KAUFMAN I think the Jinx II was in many ways a study of the same themes and the same aspects of human nature as The Alabama Solution just through a very different lens. The Alabama Solution is also a study of complicity. I think our whole country in many ways is complicit with this system of justice. And one of the things that we hope to have explored in this film is perhaps the reason we’re all complicit with it is because we actually don’t get to see the full contours of it. And so the myths about this being corrective and this actually making us safer have withstood time, but hopefully if we can actually see what’s happening inside, that’s the first step to solving the problem.
When you first went to the prisons, and you hear from these inmates via cellphones… how do you build the trust so that they don’t think you’re going to just turn them in for doing it? Obviously, a lot of this required a trust building.
JARECKI I think that we were really shocked that there were cell phones in the prisons when we went in and men started whispering to us. The warden had said to us, “When you go in, don’t speak to any of the men. They’re very dangerous. Don’t take anything. They’re going to try to give you little pieces of paper or you don’t want to have any interaction with them.” And from the minute we got in the prison, we felt safer with the men who were incarcerated there than any of the guards or the people that were bringing us in. And so we were hungry for more information. They were very hungry to tell us what was going on. They did hand us little tiny pieces of paper that would say, “Here’s my case. It’s on the Facebook page that my mother put up. I didn’t kill this person or I didn’t steal this.” And when we left the prison, when we started hearing from them, and it was clear that there was an incredibly high level of urgency and that they were trying to take advantage of this little tear in the fabric of secrecy that the cell phones were providing because they didn’t know how long that was going to exist. And people said to me like, “Oh, so the inmates smuggled the telephones?” I said, “No, no, no, that’s not how that happens.” One of the inmates had said to me, when I asked him, “Where are all the drugs coming from? Where are all the cell phones coming from?” He looked at me sort of incredulously and he said, “You know we don’t leave, right? They’re coming in with the guards. They’re coming in.” And it’s not that 100 percent of them are coming in with the guards, but the vast majority of the contraband that’s coming in is coming in because it’s a lucrative business for the guards who are paid $36,000 a year normally and can make up to $70 or $80,000 a year if they’re selling drugs. And that’s how the system works.
KAUFMAN And I think we had this feeling when we were making the film that we were documenting a civil rights movement that would otherwise not be accessible to the public. And the leaders that you meet are just some of the many men we spoke to and they’ve been using cell phones as a tool to overcome the secrecy, overcome the surveillance and the oppression since around 2013. So they’ve been bravely taking risks and managing the repercussions of it, as you saw in the film. So in terms of whether there was any sort of convincing like, “Oh, do you want to be sharing the truth?” That had been their brilliance to do that for many years prior to meeting us. I think the trust had to come from this was going to be a long-term project and to have faith to continue to engage with us over six years and believe that at the end of the day, we’d be able to put it together into something that would present more of the story than the shorter social media clips or news clips that had been released. And I think part of that long-term relationship is being able to build a dialogue that goes beyond just the context of their environment and them as victims of their environment, but actually leaders and fully formed people whose story is continuing.
To come back to The Jinx, there were these underlying moments where you could feel as a viewer … when somebody’s a little cornered or threatened, what will they do? And in this case, I wonder what, if any, those moments were. I think about when you show up at the hospital and any of these moments where you’ve caught somebody doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. What was that feeling when you were cornering somebody?
KAUFMAN I think certainly there’s obviously some personal risk filmmakers take, but compared to the personal risk that the people in the film were taking and to Sandy Ray [Steven Davis’ mother] in terms of how she was being vocal and inviting us in to film her story and all of that, it kind of eclipses it. So you get sort of a perseverance from them, I think. And I think in the moments you feel so outraged by the lies and by the obfuscation that that kind of takes over any anxiety that might come.
JARECKI Also, I think, when you know that somebody is trying to obstruct what you’re doing, maybe it’s our personality type, but probably a lot of people here also, that’s when you really want to dig in and you think, “Oh, well, they wouldn’t be so upset if we weren’t onto something.”
I wonder if you’ve thought at all about doing further things, possibly narrative, with this story, just because it might be somewhat easier to reach even more people.
JARECKI The thing that I think is so powerful right now for us is that this film, because of its accuracy, because of the extent of the research and the material that the men were able to collect using these cell phones and the communal effort that they made to kind of try to have this stuff rise to the surface, it is the thing that the audience is responding to is this visceral experience of not just reading it in a newspaper article or in a report from the Department of Justice. I mean, when you see that call out from the Department of Justice report where they say in this kind of very matter of fact prose, we interviewed four nurses who said that they had watched an inmate being beaten by a guard and the guard shouted, “I am the reaper of death. Now say my name.” And it goes on to say, “And the man begged them to kill him.” Once you have that kind of experience, reading that for me was very emotional, but it’s not enough. You have to see it. … And so when you see that they’re not lying, that they’re not exaggerating, that really the only reason why we don’t know this is because we’re prevented from knowing it because the press is not allowed in these institutions because the men are not allowed to communicate. And by the way, as you see in the film, it’s not just that they can’t communicate freely or that they can only be on a 15-minute phone call. They can’t even privately communicate with their lawyers.
Charlotte, you mentioned something backstage, that it’s very close to where we are right now as well.
KAUFMAN Yeah. So Georgia has also the distinction of having the Department of Justice declare its entire prison system to be unconstitutional. So Georgia and Alabama are both twin states in this crisis. And the whole time we were making the film about Alabama, many of the people, some of our sources were also working on Georgia. And although this film’s called The Alabama Solution, it’s not just about Alabama, it’s not just about Georgia. All of the conditions that exist that have created this crisis, secrecy, lack of accountability and brutal culture exist in every facility, every prison across America. And we would say it’s not even just about prison. It’s about what happens when your government can control other people in secret.
What would you hope people leave here and think or do?
JARECKI One is that not every single prison in America is like this, right? There are some that are somewhat better, there are a very small number that are much better. And we’ve been trying to visit prisons in Berlin, prisons in Norway, but ultimately found that in the main state prison system, in the state of Maine, there is a very humane prison system. It’s still a prison. You could argue with whether we should be caging people, but if you’re going to have a prison, that’s a place where they focus on rehabilitation, job training, mental health, substance abuse. They’re addressing a lot of the main causes. And by the way, they have much lower recidivism. They have 800 people in the prison that we visit and we’re trying to promote that. We’re saying to people like, “Look at Maine. Let’s talk about Maine. What is the main model and why are they finding that if you treat people, if you don’t traumatize people, then you actually can expect them to come out and be able to rejoin society.” And people change so much. A 20-year-old who commits a crime or a crime of poverty or somebody that robs a liquor store, when they’re 50, when they’re 30, they’re very different person. And so this is a system that recognizes that. And a lot of good things have happened in Alabama. There are many, many screenings of the film in grassroots areas with local leaders. And just this past week, people who saw the film assembled outside St. Clair prison and were protesting the fact that Rod Gadson, the guard, is still working there. And the department has promoted him a couple times since the death of Steven Davis. And then a couple hundred people showed up at the next prison oversight board meeting, which is like the least popular meeting that anybody ever could imagine going to in state of Alabama, but people showed up and they brought signs and they protested and they talked about the fact that legislature has to do something about this. So I would encourage people to go to the website, the alabamasolution.com. You cannot only see a lot of the other investigative work that we did because we investigated the more than 1,300 deaths that have happened, and that information is very interestingly presented there. But also you can put in your email address and there’s a movement of people that are starting to be activated and we’re going to need them to do things like reach out to their legislators and so on.
KAUFMAN And the other thing on that site, you can learn more about the cases of the people you see in the film and learn also about how to support them. They are so focused on the issues that affect all 20,000 people in the prison system, but they have their own journeys to regain their freedom. And so I encourage you to try to explore more. And we are seeing on the ground in Alabama that it does matter when lawmakers hear from their constituents that they care about what’s happening in the prisons. And I think that’s true in every state. So as many questions that can be asked and showing up to forums and explaining that you as citizens actually care what’s happening behind these closed walls, whether it’s in prisons or immigration facilities, does make a difference. And we’re seeing it on the local level in Alabama.
JARECKI I just want to say one quick thing that, because people are concerned about the men in the film, obviously, and we are as well, and they have been retaliated against for years even before we ever met them. And they’re continuing to do this very brave thing, which is to speak out at tremendous risk, but there’s a defense committee that’s been organized of lawyers who are doing wellness checks on them. They have not been subjected to retaliation, but there have been a lot of hints of it. And so if you put your information in on the website, you can also learn about how they’re doing and what we can do to help support them, but we are concerned about them.
