Days before the documentary “The Alabama Solution” was nominated for an Academy Award, the three main whistleblowers featured in the film were moved into solitary confinement.
The news, first reported by Truthout, suggests retaliation by the state prison system against the men, according to a lawyer whose team was in touch with them. All three men who were sent to solitary had filmed the brutality of their prisons with contraband cellphones and spoke to the documentarians in filmed interviews.
As of early March, two of those men were still in solitary confinement, according to Beth Shelburne, a co-producer of the documentary. But one man, Melvin Ray, an organizer and writer who also goes by Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun, was transferred to William E. Donaldson prison just outside Birmingham. It is not clear why Ray was transferred out of solitary and not the others.
Ray is the founder of the Free Alabama Movement, an incarcerated rights group responsible for multiple statewide prison labor stoppages. Among them was a 2022 strike, chronicled in the documentary, that lasted 23 days and included thousands of incarcerated people across all 13 state prisons. The group has advocated for sentencing reform, improved living and working conditions, and a reversal of the state’s plummeting parole rate.
Weeks after Ray arrived at Donaldson, PJP writer Richard “Corey” Fox, who is also detained at Donaldson, sent Ray handwritten questions. A few days later, Ray wrote back.
This appears to be the first time Ray has been interviewed by the media since the documentary was nominated for an Oscar and Ray was released from solitary. Ray’s responses, which have been edited for length and clarity, are below.
— PJP Editors
ON THE FILM’S IMPACT
An Oscar is generally beyond the imagination of the typical Black person in America, and even more removed for a person who has been to prison twice, served over 20 years and has multiple felonies, as I do.
I’ve appeared in other documentaries, in addition to the hundreds of videos I have put out over the years, so this is not altogether new territory for me.
The difference about this film is its scale. Since 2014, when we first started putting out this type of footage, the goal has always remained the same: exposing the reality about prisons and saving lives, so people can return home better than when they left.
This is a unique and historic platform for us to expound upon this mission. But it remains to be seen whether those in positions of authority and influence are going to allow us to truly capture this moment. Will this grow out into a purely commercial project that dies out when the opportunities for personal benefit wither away?
ON THE FOUNDATION THE FILM BUILT UPON
The greatest potential for the film is embedded in what made the film possible in the first place — and that’s the larger movement created by the Free Alabama Movement.
Among its achievements is awakening the prison population to the possibilities of telling our own stories with the power of a cellphone. [As part of our organizing], we created a small battalion of prison journalists who were unafraid to get in front of a camera and expose to the world the truth about what is taking place in our prison system.
To give you a sense of the movement’s scope: We’ve had an underground podcast, hosted numerous webinars and Zoom events, staged hundreds of protests, and distributed thousands of pieces of content over the years. These are some of the factors that made this film possible. Without the foundation already in place, it simply would not have been possible.
The narrative surrounding the film has to stay rooted in this history. Otherwise the film won’t serve the purpose for which we made the sacrifices to bring the film into existence. From the beginning, [we’ve believed that] the metrics for the film should be measured in lives saved, conditions changed and people and families reunited.
The film can be a pivot from direct action and lead us down the rabbit hole of the political process, or it can be a galvanizing force which brings additional resources, ideas and foot soldiers into the broader movement.
ON THE WAIT FOR ACCOUNTABILITY
Specifically, we are still waiting to see how we can leverage the film’s impact to create justice for the murders of Steven Davis and James Sales. [Editor’s note: Steven Davis was beaten to death by guards in Donaldson prison in 2019. The state paid $250,000to his mother in a 2024 court settlement. Meanwhile, the state attributed the death of James Salesto “natural causes,” but incarcerated people speculated in the documentary that his death involved foul play, possibly from a laced cigarette given to him by a guard. Sales had told Davis’ lawyer that he would serve as a witness if needed after he left prison, but he died one month before he was released.]
We did not expect to see immediate results on that front, and that’s because we understand the nature of corruption inside the Alabama Department of Corrections.
There are stages to change, and the first stage is awareness and education. On that point, it appears we have exceeded expectations. I don’t think anyone ever anticipated that the film would have this type of impact.
We are still early in the process, but we cannot deny that so far the results have not been there — and neither has the organizing.
Since the film was released, there have not been any real mobilization efforts to unify any group, and there appears to have been some deliberate attempts to stop certain actions from taking place.
It is one thing to celebrate an Academy Award nomination as a personal achievement, but it is an entirely different thing to utilize a platform like this to further a mission.
The final chapter on “The Alabama Solution” will not be written for quite some time. Until then, there is much work to do.
