LONDON, – When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited an Alabama prison in 2019 to capture footage of a revival meeting, inmates began approaching them about the “terrible things” they said were taking place within its walls.

Jarecki and Kaufman were soon told to stop filming, but their quest to find out more led to a six-year investigation into the U.S. state’s prison system and the documentary “The Alabama Solution”.

The film combines video secretly shot by inmates and interviews. It also follows Alabama mother Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers about the events leading to the death of her son Steven Davis, in prison.

The film states that Alabama’s 14 prisons, which house around 20,000 inmates, are operating at nearly 200% of intended capacity, with a third of required staff and the highest drug overdose, murder and suicide rates in the nation.

The Alabama Department of Corrections did not reply to a Reuters request for comment.

The U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into Alabama’s prisons in 2016, deeming conditions “unconstitutional” and filing a federal lawsuit in 2020.

“I think we felt what was sort of a sacred obligation. Once people are showing you these kinds of atrocities, you have a responsibility to not look away,” Jarecki said in an interview.

“We could have had an unlimited amount of murder and mayhem. We could have shown corruption time and time again,” the Emmy-winning “The Jinx” director said. “We were trying to be judicious about how much the audience could handle, but also letting them know how serious it is.”

At the film’s centre are Robert Earl Council and Melvin Ray, leaders of a non-violent protest movement inside the prisons, who provide first-hand accounts of the events and their living conditions.

“You don’t have to agree with them on everything, but you do have to recognise that this is happening in our names,” said Jarecki.

“Crime is important and taxes are important, and people have strong feelings about these things. They should understand and know what their money’s going toward. So I think we can learn a lot from these men who are sort of unlikely heroes.”

Streaming on HBO Max, “The Alabama Solution” has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics and received a Producers Guild Awards nomination on Tuesday.

“It’s either the best time to put out a film like this because there’s the authoritarian slide happening in the world or it’s the worst because maybe nobody cares,” Jarecki said.

It was important for viewers globally to see “another side of that equation …. especially if you’re allowing leaders to imprison more people for their views, their thoughts or their religious observances”.

“The question really is who we want to be as a society,” he said. “If we believe that we need to have a safer environment, is this going to do it?”

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