On October 10, 2025, “The Alabama Solution,” an acclaimed expose into Alabama’s prison system, was released on HBO. Earlier in the year, it was released at the Sundance Film Festival. It has since won the Best Political Documentary at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards. It has also been nominated for a host of other awards including the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
“The Alabama Solution” was the product of the African working class commitment to the war of ideas. Towards the conclusion of the film, one of the lead organizers Melvin Ray states, “[‘The Alabama Solution’], would not have been possible if we didn’t violate the rules to get the story out. And because of that, you’re able to see the truth about a reality that they’re going to tell you doesn’t exist.”
The central narrative of “The Alabama Solution” revolves around the 2019 killing of Steven Davis, an inmate who was beaten to death by guards at the Donaldson Correctional Facility. The truth of the murder of Davis, who was white, would not have been possible without the leadership of the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), an African-led antiprison movement.
Thinly veiled below the surface of “The Alabama Solution” is the prevalence of African Internationalism, the legacy of the African National Prison Organization (ANPO) and the leadership of Richard Mafundi Lake.
Alabama’s prisons are amongst the deadliest
In 2019, Jarecki and Kaufman filmed an evangelical revival at Alabama’s Easterling prison. In confidence, inmates criticized the revival as propaganda and demanded the filmmakers speak directly to the inmates about the abuses inside the Alabama prison system. That same year, the filmmakers learned of the murder of Steven Davis at the hands of prison guards.
Alabama’s prisons are amongst the deadliest in the US. The rate of prisoner mortalities in Alabama prisons is almost three-times the US average. According to statistics compiled by the Equality Justice Initiative, from 2015 to 2017, Alabama had a prisoner homicide rate of 38.5 for every 100,000. This was over double that of neighboring states of Florida and Louisiana, 2.5 times greater than California, three-times that of Tennessee, and more than ten-times the rate in Texas. In 2020, a federal lawsuit was filed against Alabama prisons, since then, there have been more than 1,000 deaths.
Alabama prisons function at 270 percent capacity. Alongside the murders, these conditions lead to increased suicides and drug overdoses. Inmates are repeatedly denied parole despite spending decades in prison. The Alabama prison system does not only steal the lives but also the labor of the inmates. According to multiple studies, Alabama ranks between the 6th and the 8th poorest state. As elsewhere, incarceration in Alabama is an austerity measure. Inmate labor is a vital part of the economy.
All of this is profiled in “The Alabama Solution.”
Free Alabama Movement, Mafundi Lake and the African National Prison Organization
“The Alabama Solution” is the result of more than a decade of organizing by the Free Alabama Movement. FAM was organized in 2013 by Robert “Kinetik” Earl Council and Melvin “Bennu” Ray at Alabama St. Clair prison. Yet, before they were moved to St. Clair, Kinetik and Bennu were held at Holman Prison. At Holman, Kinetik and Bennu participated in legal classes and received direct leadership from Richard Mafundi Lake, a political prisoner and veteran Uhuru Movement organizer.
In 1973, Mafundi co-founded Inmates for Action (IFA). This work brought Mafundi in league with the Uhuru Movement. In 1979, Mafundi became a founding member of ANPO. A prison organization, as opposed to a prisoner organization, ANPO aimed to organize a mass anticolonial movement against the genocidal system of mass imprisonment in the US.
With FAM, Kinetic and Bennu aimed to modernize the lessons they learned from Mafundi. FAM is prisoner-led but its membership is not limited to incarcerated people. FAM, like ANPO, includes people inside and outside the walls. FAM has organized political education, boycotts, social media campaigns and strikes. In 2016, 2018, and again in 2022, FAM organized US-wide and statewide strikes.
The Uhuru Movement has directly organized with the Free Alabama Movement in recent years. Bennu is the cousin of veteran Uhuru Movement organizer Kobina Bantushango. Comrade Kobina is located in Huntsville, Alabama. Kobina and Uhuru Movement cadres throughout the Southern Region organize the yearly Black Power Weekend on the first weekend in March. On Saturday, the Uhuru Movement organizes the Mafundi Lake Day observance in Birmingham with the Mafundi Lake Day Committee. On Sunday, organizers then conduct outreach in Selma at the annual Bloody Sunday Observance.
Bennu and FAM have participated in three Mafundi Lake Day events, from prison. The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) has participated in several FAM protests and helped give direction to others. The Uhuru Movement has participated in their live podcasts. In 2021, Melvin Ray participated in the Southern Region’s Black Power Summit. As well, Kinetik and Bennu regularly participated in political education classes led by the Southern Region.
The Alabama Solution lacks a “to what end”
“The Alabama Solution” is an important documentary but it lacks a to what end. African Internationalism provides the way forward. For example, African Internationalism is the only thing that can provide clarity to the case of a white inmate, killed by a black prison guard. The race question cannot answer this, which is likely why it is not really touched in the film. The colonial question of African Internationalism can.
In many ways, Davis’s murder resembles the killings of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti. The colonial system is enacting the violence, often directed at Africans, towards members of the colonizer community. Reform measures such as lawsuits and legislation can be tactically important but the objective must be the overturning of the colonial mode of production.
An expansion of InPDUM’s George Jackson-Dessie Woods Prison Outreach Program as well as The Burning Spear’s Mafundi Lake Sponsor-A-Prisoner Program are important ways forward. As well, it all directs us towards Chairman Omali Yeshitela’s call to rebuild the African National Prison Organization.
“The Alabama Solution” should be necessary viewing by organizers. Yet, they should read the pamphlet “The New Period” produced on the eve of ANPO’s founding and also read Chairman’s recent political reports, namely “An Uneasy Equilibrium” and “Vanguard.” Minus an African Internationalist “to what end,” viewers could be directed back towards the same liberal measures that have produced the prison crisis in the US.
