The American Solution

Some would like it to be final

Content warning: This post contains discussion of violence, death, overdose, and suicide. All of these are common occurrences in U.S. prisons by design.

Public domain image from here.

I just attended a screening of The Alabama Solution, a 2025 documentary that provides an inside view of the horrific conditions inside Alabama’s prisons. The majority of the film is shown from the perspective of prisoners through cell phone footage taken on contraband devices snuck into the prisons. I use the word “snuck” loosely because prison guards are responsible for the vast majority of contraband that enters prisons, including cell phones and drugs. Much like the prison commissaries and telecoms companies that upcharge products by 300% or more to exploit their literally captive market, prison guards have a monopoly on drug sales to prisoners. Sadly, this is just another of the many examples of two justice systems in the U.S. Many prisoners have been incarcerated for decades for drug possession or use charges, and the guards who profit from the exact same crime never face consequences.

The brave incarcerated men risked their lives and endured brutal beatings, hospitalization, and long-term solitary confinement, a punishment the UN has labeled as torture, to record the violence and murders committed by prison guards regularly. In addition to the direct violence the guards commit, they facilitate the entry of drugs into the prison and contribute to Alabama state prisons having the highest overdose rate in the country. Even worse, as one of the directors of the documentary noted after the screening, one of the things that most horrified him during this process was learning about the many “guard assisted suicides” that occur in prisons across the U.S. By guard assisted suicides he was referring to the sadly common practice of guards taunting their captives and egging them on to kill themselves, up to even providing things like razors to help them do it. This is after guards create such awful general conditions that lead some prisoners to think suicide is better than what they are going through. Alabama also ranks at the top of the list for number of suicides in state prisons.

This is what the U.S. prison system is designed to do. Once a prisoner is incarcerated, they become inhuman, not worthy of rights or basic dignity. As I wrote before, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth provides a perfect lens through which to view the U.S. prison system. The prison system is a tool of the colonial state against the colonized population, only in this case the colonized population is the citizens of that same state (the black, brown, and poor white ones).

But the war goes on. And for many years to come we shall be bandaging the countless and sometimes indelible wounds inflicted on our people by the colonialist onslaught (Fanon, p181).

These wounds are physical and emotional, and while the physical wounds are mostly inflicted on prisoners, the psychological wounds go both ways. As Fanon discusses, when one kills a colonizer they are actually killing two people, both the colonizer and the colonized, for the colonized is created by the colonizer. He also shows clearly how this type of colonial violence dehumanizes the perpetrator far more than the victim. When discussing one police officer conducting torture in colonial Algeria, Fanon notes:

Instead of leaving his job, “he asked me in plain language to help him torture Algerian patriots without having a guilty conscience, without any behavioral problems, and with a total peace of mind. (p199)”

The Alabama Solution demonstrates how the prisoners hold together hope and support each other, studying law together and, in the case of one man who had recovered from addiction, literally taking on the role of an addiction counselor after he quit and was never replaced. The guards, however, give up their humanity and, according to the testimony of a former guard, look for excuses to beat prisoners daily.

While the documentary is heavy with violence and oppression, it also tells a story of resilience, hope, and organizing under the most oppressive conditions. It shows where far-right politicians would like our country to go, but also that resistance is possible. One incarcerated man, Robert Earl, AKA Kinetik, helped educate his fellow inmates and organize them to hold a state-wide strike and work stoppage in the state prisons. This lasted for over two weeks, with prisons slowly dropping out of the strike in the course of the second week.

This strike revealed both the brutality of the prison system and the extreme extents the governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, and Attorney General Steve Marshall were willing to go to in order to keep benefitting from the hundreds of millions of dollars of slave labor conducted every year in Alabama State Prisons. Revealed in the film is the fact that Governor Ivey leases convicts from state prisons to work at her mansion, and other footage shows them working in close contact with children at stadiums and other public places. These men pose little enough threat to perform such jobs for free while Gov. Ivey and AG Marshall publicly claim that they are irredeemable.

Now incarcerated people have joined a class-action lawsuit against Alabama for denying parole to prisoners to keep them as essentially enslaved laborers and sources of revenue for the state. What these strikes show is that we can fight and we must continue fighting this inhuman system in every way possible.

The title of the film refers to the many times state politicians, including the governor, stated that they need “an Alabama solution” to the problem of guard murder and violence in prisons. These leaders note that Alabama is a fiercely independent state and should be allowed to handle its own affairs, rather than having the federal government step in to protect constitutional rights. This is in response to a Department of Justice investigation which found that

(1) the conditions throughout Alabama’s prisons for men (“Alabama’s prisons”)1 violate the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution; and (2) these violations are pursuant to a pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment of rights protected by the Eighth Amendment.

As the directors noted in a Q&A after the film, these good Christian leaders view the world as a binary. There are criminals and good people. Criminals are bad and therefore deserve everything that is coming to them. AG Marshall wouldn’t even say that people could be rehabilitated, only that they could be forgiven by God, but (paraphrasing) “that doesn’t mean they should get out of prison.” Marshall said that he believes that some people are evil, but if he thinks that someone who commits murder is evil, how does he feel about overseeing a statewide system which causes the deaths of hundreds of people each year (277 in 2024), through literal murder in addition to overdoses and suicides? Marshall, as the head of this system, spends millions in state funds to prevent any consequences for murderous guards, both in legal fees and in settlements to victims and family members.

Tellingly, in a hearing to review the violence in state prisons, one official started the proceedings by stating that the only way to ensure total public safety would be to execute all convicted prisoners. The official went on to say that the constitution and human decency prevent that solution, so they must look for some other method. To anchor expectations and discussion around criminal justice reform to the idea of mass murder is an extreme rhetorical device which reveals just how depraved these officials are.

As I wrote in my last post, there are many good people who have realized that policing does not prevent crime and they are working to build the community supports, connections, and resources necessary to end the violence that prisons only perpetuate. The conditions in Alabama may be horrific, but they are not uniquely so. Across the U.S., guards are committing violence in prisons every day and being defended by their unions and state attorneys general. Alabama has decided to fight reform tooth and nail and reduce their probation rate to pathetic levels to continue their system of state-mandated slave labor. Let us work to prevent The Alabama Solution from becoming The American Solution.

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