U.S. Prisons Are Black Sites, Kept Secret from the Public — Filmmakers and Journalists Can Change That (Opinion)

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman are the directors and producers of the documentary feature “ The Alabama Solution ,” streaming now on HBO Max . “How can a journalist go into a war zone, but can’t go into a prison in America?,” Melvin Ray, one of the incarcerated subjects in our film “The Alabama Solution,” shared this question from inside the nation’s deadliest prison system. Media requests to visit or interview people in prison are often denied without explanation. When pressed, wardens cite supreme court decisions letting them refuse access for reasons of “safety and security.” Since we can find no incident in the past twenty years in which a journalist has been harmed while visiting a prison, we are compelled to ask: Who is this secrecy really protecting? For us, the answers came from incarcerated men using contraband cell phones to expose shocking human rights abuses in Alabama’s fourteen prisons. These brave whistleblowers spent seven years and countless hours collaborating with us, recording, investigating, and covertly transmitting files to investigate crimes perpetrated by corrections officers tasked with protecting, not harming, the men in their care. Since we began filming our documentary “The Alabama Solution,” nearly 1,500 people have died in that state’s prison system alone; some from beatings at the hands of brutal guards, some from neglect. Many have died from overdoses of drugs brought into the prisons by officers. Alabama’s Department of Corrections is the largest law enforcement agency in the State, but people in its care are twenty times more likely to die of a drug overdose than those in the free world. That’s not correction, it’s exploitation. These problems are not limited to Alabama. A year ago, at New York’s Marcy Correctional Facility, handcuffed prisoner Robert Brooks was killed by guards . Brooks’ demise might not have been accurately reported but for the fact that officers inadvertently left their body cameras on while they choked and beat him to death. A few months later, 22-year-old Messiah Nantwi suffered the same fate . With the Department of Justice abandoning its responsibility to protect the constitutional rights of people in detention, and upending traditional definitions of what constitutes criminality, it falls to filmmakers and journalists to investigate and call out abuses. That requires access . But in 2024, when the California Senate approved a bill expanding journalists’ rights to tour prisons and conduct interviews (a bill strongly opposed by police and corrections officers) and preventing retaliation against whistleblowers, Governor Newsom vetoed it on the grounds that it could turn inmates into “celebrities.” The men in our film are not trying to be celebrities, they are trying to survive. They take great risks to expose conditions the State does not want us...

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