An HBO Original documentary on Alabama prisons was screened in Selma on Oct. 12.
The Alabama Solution is an almost 12-year documented experience that follows the lives of the leaders of the Free Alabama Movement, Melvin and Robert “Kinetik Energy” Earl, and other Alabama prisoners.
The two leaders started the F.A.M. movement due to what they document as “unjust and inhumane” treatment of prisoners in the Alabama prison systems. There are over 20 prisons in Alabama, and the F.A.M. movement has documented violent and murderous acts from all of them, according to the film.
In the film, Melvin and Robert Earl characterize the treatment that they and others experience in the prison as “modern-day slavery.” They said prisoners are forced into free labor, leased out to big corporations and federal strongholds throughout Alabama. They say they are physically abused.
One of the violent experiences highlighted in the film is death of a white man named Steven Davis, who was brutally stomped to death inside an Alabama prison by a prison guard. His cause of death is listed as “undefined” by coroners and as “inconspicuous murder” by his mother and his now mysteriously deceased cellmate.
Throughout the film, many of the prisoners can be seen with tears in their eyes as they recount the horrible death of Davis, an event they say his mother “deserves to know the truth” about. In the end, the Alabama attorney general sat with Davis’ mother in his office and told her that the death was ruled justifiable because Davis would not “drop the knife.”
Robert Earl, one of the leaders of the F.A.M. movement, was attacked and put into segregation for a full year during their 2016 prison strike, a strike where prisoners documented their being “starved into submission” by prisons throughout Alabama. The strike lasted three weeks in all, and it left Robert Earl close to death and blind in his left eye.
Robert Earl and Melvin are characterized as “enemies” on prison documents, but their movement survived, and their efforts to boost public interest have now made it to the HBO Box Office.
Travis Jackson, one of the documentarians who made the film, attended the Selma screening and spoke to the crowd.
“You gotta’ show up to do the work,” Jackson said. “I want y’all to be empowered, because this is the first time that a film documentary like this has reached a national level. You cannot climb the mountain top if you are a mountain yourself.”
The screening was hosted by Alabama Values. A panel discussion followed featuring Pastor Glasgow, president of the New National Christian Leadership Movement; Walter “Coach” James, a criminal justice reform advocate and an Ordinary People Society partner; and Diyawna Caldwell, founder and executive director of “Both Sides of The Wall” and a wife of an Alabama inmate.
The event was also sponsored by The Ordinary People Society, iHICA!, Transform Alabama, Both Sides of The Wall, KSG, New National Christian Leadership Movement and T.O.P.S.
The film will have a public screening at the Slave Museum in Selma on the last Friday of every month at 5 p.m.
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