This story was published in collaboration with Truthout.

Grainy footage, filmed with contraband cell phones, forms the backbone of The Alabama Solution, a 2025 Oscar-nominated documentary that exposes the horrifying realities of life inside Alabama’s prisons. Throughout the film, shocking videos from incarcerated activists Raoul Poole, Robert Earl Council (who goes by the name Kinetik Justice), and Melvin Ray reveal how the Alabama Department of Corrections (the Alabama DOC) shields its prisons from outside scrutiny—and brutally retaliates against incarcerated people who try to make their conditions public. 

Now, the Alabama Department of Corrections has further proved the underlying argument of the film. In mid-January, the three men featured in the film were abruptly taken from their facilities and transferred, via convoys, to an isolated unit in Kilby Correctional Facility, where they are being held in extreme solitary confinement, a lawyer whose team is in contact with the men said. Poole, Council, and Ray are currently the only people in the five-cell unit, according to David Gespass, an attorney who has represented Council in past litigation. He said they have not been given a reason for their transfer.

In a social media post, a co-producer of The Alabama Solution said that the transfer came after the men announced a nonviolent work strike in December. 

In the film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2025 and was released on HBO in October, Poole, Council, and Ray’s videos and interviews depict a side of Alabama prisons that officials would rather keep hidden: Filthy and flooded living spaces, people sleeping all over the floor in overcrowded dorms, officers asleep at their posts, and forlorn eyes peering through the food slots of heavy solitary confinement cell doors. Their footage also depicts groups of heavily drugged people, unconscious men being rushed to the infirmary by fellow incarcerated people following an overdose, and pools of blood left behind from assaults.

“We’re in these walled-off secret societies,” Poole says in the film. “These are state institutions. But it’s one of the only state institutions that the public or the media has no access to. How can a journalist go into a war zone, but can’t go into a prison in the United States of America?”

“Given the history of institutional violence in the Department of Corrections, including beatings by guards … they’re afraid for their lives,” said Gespass, of the activists’ recent transfer. 

They are no strangers to activism and retaliation: Council and Ray co-founded the Free Alabama Movement in 2013, a group dedicated to fighting forced prison labor and dangerous prison conditions. In an interview in the documentary, they tell the filmmakers how the Alabama Department of Corrections responded to their activism by sending them each to solitary confinement for about five years, and classifying them as enemies so they could not remain in the same institution. Years later, after the Free Alabama Movement initiated a state-wide prison work strike in late 2020 that drew significant public attention, Council expected further retaliation. 

“I try to keep two to three people with me at all times, and I try not to get caught in an isolated spot,” he says in an interview in the film. Soon after, in January 2021, correctional officers beat him unconscious, leaving him with a cracked skull, broken ribs, and permanent vision loss. The film depicts footage of the pools of blood left behind in his cell.

The documentary emphasizes the prison system’s use of violence and retaliation to keep incarcerated people in line. The filmmakers followed Sondra Ray, whose son, Steven Davis, was brutally beaten to death by correctional officers in 2019. Prison officials alleged the officers acted in self-defense — a claim disputed by multiple incarcerated witnesses, who spoke to Sondra Ray’s attorney. In a phone interview included in the film, Davis’s cellmate, James Sales, promised to tell Sondra Ray the full truth of her son’s murder after he was safely released. But Sales suddenly and mysteriously died in 2021, shortly before his release.

Now, Gespass said the three whistleblowers and their advocates fear further retaliation in their isolated solitary unit. “DOC has always been secretive about everything that goes on within the prisons,” he said, noting the more than 1,350 deaths in Alabama prisons tracked by The Alabama Solution between 2019 and 2024. “They’re completely opaque … And the DOC just does not allow any real information to come out.”

In an Instagram post, the official account associated with The Alabama Solution documentary asked people to call the prison and demand safety for the three whistleblowers.

Gespass explained: “From our perspective, the more eyes that are on what the DOC is doing, the better.”

Banner photo credit: Albert Cesare, Montgomery Advertiser