“The Alabama Solution” (2025) is a documentary that includes footage that incarcerated men shot for over ten years using contraband cell phones to disclose allegations of human rights violations behind bars. In 2019, codirectors and cowriters Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman were at Easterling Prison to film a revival, but inmates aired their grievances instead. After they left, they stayed in contact with the men. The documentary chronicles the struggle inside and outside the prison to stop human rights violations while providing historical context of how the fight for prison reform is a struggle for the soul of this country. The 98th Academy Awards nominated it for “Best Documentary.”
Let’s start with some parameters. Prisoners are serving a sentence, and for argument’s sake, let’s say it is well deserved. They then become the state’s responsibility, and the punishment is confinement. When the sentence is delivered, the judge does not say that guards have the right to beat them, kill them, refuse to feed them, deny them medical treatment, or have rats and refuse in their living areas. If you do not agree, keep it pushing. “The Alabama Solution” is not for you. If you are inclined to agree because of the severity of the crime, then you can still work with this movie because some of the men who appear in this documentary and wind up dead were not convicted because they hurt someone. If you want to judge these men from the comfort of your home or sympathize with them based on their tale, Jarecki and Kaufman do not devote a lot of time giving exhaustive profiles of each person who appears. Some get more screentime than others, and some are forgettable without their name printed on the bottom of the screen, which happens more often than not, but not as often as some may need.
One main character is Raoul Poole, who has the most freedom of movement and reveals water on the floor as if there is a constant flood in the common areas. He often functions as the person who gets a camera to Robert Earl Council, aka “Kinetik Justice,” who is one of the leaders of this prison reform movement. His family is briefly shown, and there are montages of photographs of the Council family, which includes his parents, Robert Earl Sr and Ernestine, his niece, Catrice, and his daughter, Ciara. The family also is instrumental and are the public face of the prison reform movement. If “The Alabama Solution” has a protagonist, it is Council even though he is kept in solitary confinement for most of his onscreen appearances. The documentary does not point out that solitary confinement for even more than a day is considered a human rights violation.
In the marketing for “The Alabama Solution,” it is framed as if the human rights battle is actually a murder mystery revealing a government cover up conspiracy. Though it is a bait and switch, as a narrative gimmick, it is an accurate way to spin the problem because one extrajudicial execution reveals more abuses. This narrative factual trick may be an effective gateway to help more skeptical, cynical viewers to understand the scope of the problem if one person and family gets magnified to at least one thousand. That man is Steven Davis, and that family includes his mom, Sandy Ray, who leads the charge for justice, and his brother, Brandon, who is civilly disobedient and secretly photographs his dead brother to show that Davis was beaten to death. Davis gets humanized with photograph montages, and Ray does discuss what he did to end up in jail.
Raoul manages to get one unnamed witness to Davis’ extrajudicial execution on camera, but there is a conflicting report from the roommate, James William Sales, who expects to be released shortly and does not want to wind up being the next dead person. The family’s attorney, civil rights attorney Hank Sherrod, is shown on the phone talking to inmates who are unnamed except for Sales. Unlike the other families, at least on camera, officials, particularly Department of Corrections Deputy Commissioner Jeffrey Williams are decent to Ray, who brandishes her son’s photograph in public meetings. There is an unspoken bias to the proceedings. Officials stop the inflammatory rhetoric about all criminals deserving the death penalty because she is their target audience. The dog whistle briefly stops working, but the machine keep churning. Possibly “The Alabama Solution” wisely chose to make Davis into their vehicle for sympathy knowing that a viewer does not have to live in Alabama to share the same views of who deserves sympathy and ho deserves contempt.
“The Alabama Solution” has villains. Officer Roderick Gadson, a prison guard dubbed Big G, becomes the face of the Witness Wrecking Crew, an alleged guard group that physically abuses the prisoners. Gadson appears as a self-satisfied smirker during a deposition about his use of force. To bolster these claims, the directors have interviews with former correctional officers Quante Cockrell and Stacy George about what they witnessed their coworkers doing. Governor Kay Ivey, Department of Corrections Commissioner Jefferson Dunn, and Attorney General Steve Marshall mostly appear in archived news clips dismissively discussing the Department of Justice’s investigation of widespread abuses. Sadly, the documentary does not reveal whether the change in administration has changed progress from delay to a complete standstill or outright abandonment.
Only one official is confident enough to appear for an exclusive interview: the Commissioner, and in an unintentional self-own, he defines criminal behavior as “evil people in the world that have absolutely no regard for human life.” The implication is clear. As the Commissioner defines it, criminal behavior is not associated with the prisoners, but the officials who seem immune to people. The title, “The Alabama Solution,” comes from Governor Ivey who does not want the federal government to solve the problem but wants it to remain a state issue. The catchphrase bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a phrase associated with another historical atrocity, and it begins with “Final.” In the cell phone footage, especially during the labor strikes, it is the prisoners who seem civilized like people attending a worship service or caretakers as they transport an ill man in a cart or improvise medical care. It raises the question of why media images of prison as a harsh place with a strict hierarchy among the population is not reflected in a second of footage. Instead, images of peaceful unity dominate.
“The Alabama Solution” takes its cues from the protestors and visually links the Free Alabama Movement with the mid twentieth century Civil Rights movement complete with a march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Melvin Ray, one of Council’s friends and cofounder of the movement, is the most distinctive personality because he starts each Facetime call checking the perimeter and explaining how the person on the other end should act. His explanation of the Halifax County Curriculum, a self-help program that the prisoners run, as a “legacy of jailhouse lawyers,” who were activists in the Sixties and Seventies. A montage of handwritten pleadings shows how prolific they are in their practice, but unsuccessful. The documentary never considers whether it is based on a flaw in their work versus a rigged system. It is likely a bit of both, but the energy is so inspirational, viewers will only want to believe the latter.
The cause is also linked in broader terms to antebellum slavery and the civil war with the State of Alabama still aligned with the Confederacy’s actions. While the film shows the contradiction between officials fearmongering with the contradiction of showing inmates working in public, including children and places that should be more secure like the Governor’s mansion. It is cheap labor, but it felt as if the corporate interests benefitting should have been named. “They trust me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to parole me.” In some cases, even if freedom is earned without clemency but by fully serving the sentence, the implication is that Alabama would prefer that an inmate die than be released. The death penalty is legal in Alabama, but the people who die while incarcerated were not sentenced to death hence the term extrajudicial execution. The State of Alabama’s actions indicate that the legal system could easily reflect reality, and the legislature could declare every crime worthy of death yet within their own parameters, their actions reflect that they treat people whom they are caretakers of inconsistently with their veneer of stated values.
At the end of “The Alabama Solution,” footage of bad conditions at other states’ prisons indicates that a member of the Union does not have to be a former Confederate state to exhibit antebellum behavior. If you enjoyed “Sing Sing” (2023) in part because inmates transform into amazing actors, then this documentary proves that inmates make excellent investigative journalists even with the obstacles and lack of resources for production. Ray says, “When we present our stories, we want to present our whole selves, not just our voice.” The story structure may not flow smoothly, but let’s sign a waiver considering the circumstances, especially since it is unlikely that any meaningful change will happen. They can have the honor of a film well done.
