Smuggled smartphones provide a shocking insider’s perspective on Alabama’s prison system

The_Alabama_Solution courtesy Sundance Institute

Source: courtesy Sundance Institute

‘The Alabama Solution’

Dirs: Andrew Jarecki, Charlotte Kaufman. US. 2025. 115mins 

Many Americans recognise the injustices within the country’s prison system, but the case has rarely been laid out as comprehensively as it is in The Alabama Solution. Directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman incorporate interviews with incarcerated men using contraband cell phones in order to hear their stories and witness their horrifying living conditions. US viewers will confront alternating waves of anger, disgust, sorrow and shame as they watch Alabama’s elected officials and prison officials allow this dehumanisation to continue.

Personalises the powder-keg reality behind the statistics

A HBO film, The Alabama Solution  is a despairing, enraging documentary. Sundance veteran Jarecki, who won the US Grand Jury Documentary Prize for 2003’s Capturing The Friedmans and an Emmy for 2015’s The Jinx: The Life And Deaths Of Robert Durst, should help raise the film’s profile. His directing partner Kaufman served as a producer on The Jinx and 2020’s The Innocence Files, a Netflix documentary series about The Innocence Project; a nonprofit which works to overturn wrongful convictions.  

Filmed over the course of about five years, The Alabama Solution originated as a project in which the directors visited an Alabama prison to shoot a revival meeting. Soon, though, prisoners started approaching them, wanting to share their terrible experiences behind bars. (One prisoner declares, “This ain’t fit for human society.”) The guards quickly shut down the filmmakers but, through back channels, Jarecki and Kaufman learn that incarcerated Alabamans sometimes get access to smuggled smartphones, beginning a series of interviews between the directors and the imprisoned men.

Disturbing images and conversations await viewers as the prisoners take us into their daily lives. Bloodstained walls, rat-infested toilets and overcrowded conditions are just some of the sights captured by those hidden cell phones, complemented by the incarcerated men’s anecdotes about their indignities. Guards put prisoners in solitary confinement for years, and they are severely beaten. Untreated drug addicts cling to life. A title card informs us that approximately 20,000 people are incarcerated in Alabama, and that those prisons are at 200 percent occupancy while being severely understaffed. The Alabama Solution’s subjects — risking great harm to themselves by speaking out — personalise the powder-keg reality behind those statistics. 

After devoting its early stretches to the secret prison footage, the documentary turns its focus to individual stories, including that of Steven Davis, a prisoner killed in 2019 by guards who claimed they were acting in self-defence. Davis’ fellow inmates tell a different story, insisting that he was only holding a plastic knife before he was brutally beaten. The Alabama Solution spends time with his grieving mother Sandy Ray, who fights to get justice for her son, discovering that the Alabama Department Of Corrections will do everything in its power to demonise the deceased. (Rather than try to improve prison conditions, the state government decries the proliferation of smartphones behind bars.)

Another segment concerns a statewide prison strike staged in reaction to the harsh working conditions prisoners endure while providing cheap labour for the state economy. Using sound bites from conservative radio stations and televised interviews with Alabama politicians, Jarecki and Kaufman demonstrate their struggles when demanding their human rights: the outside world has little sympathy for those behind bars.

Many have made the argument that America’s prison system is merely a modern extension of slavery — Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th quickly springs to mind — and The Alabama Solution continues that conversation, especially when the documentary reveals how the Alabama penal system responded to its striking prisoners by limiting their food. The strategy, put simply, was to starve them into submission, and the cellphone footage of this standoff can be upsetting. But it is a testament to the filmmakers, and editor Page Marsella, that these covertly-shot videos are not overused and, therefore, never lose their impact. 

The Alabama Solution makes the point that many states have comparably horrendous prison conditions, introducing infuriating cellphone footage taken across the country — including the far more liberal California. Alabama’s prison–industrial complex will provoke outrage, but the filmmakers know that it’s merely a microcosm of a nationwide problem. 

Production company: Hit The Ground Running Films

Worldwide rights: HBO Documentary Films

Producers: Andrew Jarecki, Charlotte Kaufman 

Screenplay: Andrew Jarecki, Charlotte Kaufman, Page Marsella 

Cinematography: Nicholas Kraus, Charlotte Kaufman 

Editing: Page Marsella 

Music: Mark Batson and Chris Hanebutt