A documentary chronicling Alabama’s notorious prison system has dropped on HBO.
“The Alabama Solution” is a nearly two-hour look at the state’s maximum-security lockups, using footage from inside prison walls taken by inmates on contraband cellphones. The documentary has been in the works for six years and hit the service’s streaming app HBO Max on Friday.
“We want to show viewers the truth about a system that has been cloaked in secrecy,” said co-director Andrew Jarecki. “We hope the film sparks an effort to allow access for journalists and others so the public can have transparency into how incarcerated citizens are treated and how our tax dollars are being spent. We hope to inspire Alabama’s leadership to acknowledge the crisis and to overhaul its prison system and its use of forced labor.”
The film, from directors Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, first premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Press releases around its release said the footage “exposes the inhumane conditions inside Alabama’s prisons.”
The documentary begins with filmmakers visiting a revival meeting at a south Alabama lockup in 2019. While the cameramen document the meeting, inmates start to pull them aside and tell them of horrible conditions inside the facilities — which filmmakers were not allowed to enter and record. According to the filmmakers, that incident sparked the six-year investigation into what was really going on behind the southern prison walls.
The cellphone videos show leaking sewage, rats captured in water bottles, inmates sleeping on the floors of overcrowded dorms, people overdosing without medical attention, blood scattered across tile floors and more. The U.S. Department of Justice has long said the conditions inside the prisons are unconstitutional.
Some inmates also took videos of themselves to submit to documentarians or recorded their video calls with producers. The inmates who most frequently told their stories on camera were Robert Earl Council, also known as “Kinetik Justice,” Melvin Ray, and a man who identified himself as “Raoul.”
Kaufman, the co-director, said without those men, the movie wouldn’t have happened. “Thanks to their work, the film is able to break through the veil of secrecy and bring the audience into a world that is otherwise inaccessible.”
Birmingham-based journalist Beth Shelburne was a co-producer on the film.
Prison data, compiled by AL.com, shows from October 2023 through September 2024 — the 2024 fiscal year — there were 292 death investigations opened inside Alabama prisons.
During the same period, there were 738 sexual abuse investigations. Some of those incidents involved staff, but the majority were inmate-on-inmate incidents. More than 30 of those sexual abuse incidents involved group attacks, with 4 or more people.
And according to the new documentary, Alabama has paid out more than $52 million in settlements for wrongful abuse cases from prison workers.
Alabama’s prison system has been in the federal crosshairs for years and is currently facing a lawsuit from the Department of Justice for rampant physical and sexual violence and unconstitutional conditions. Too many male inmates are raped and killed, too many drugs to enter prison walls and life expectancy drops from the moment an inmate walks through the doors, the government argues.
Alongside showing what life is like behind bars, “The Alabama Solution” follows a mother whose son was killed in prison. But the narratives of what happened to Steven Edward Davis vary. At the time of his 2019 death, prison officials said Davis “rushed out of his cell brandishing one prison-made weapon in each hand and attempted to strike an officer.”
His former roommate told a lawyer, documented on “The Alabama Solution,” that officers did the right thing. But then, the roommate said he had to look out for himself, hinting he could be in danger, until he was released from prison and would speak with Davis’ mother in person to tell her what happened.
That man died before his release day.
In the film, other inmates and anonymous prison workers said officers killed Davis using excessive force.
The directors said they are concerned for the safety of the men who participated in the film. Kaufman said the men, specifically Council and Ray, “have faced retaliation for their activism in the past, and the risk remains present.”
“In response, the organization One For Justice, through the Alabama Whistleblower Legal Defense Fund, has assembled a defense committee of lawyers and experts to prepare legal arguments and challenge retaliation by authorities or others. Ultimately, it is the legal and moral responsibility of the Alabama Department of Corrections to keep these men safe.”
The name of the film appears to come from frequent comments by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, who has long said the state needs an “Alabama solution to an Alabama problem.” In 2021, she said that opening new mega prisons was “the driving force behind our Alabama Solution to an Alabama Problem.”
The governor’s office directed questions to the prison system, but prison officials didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story. Neither did the Alabama Attorney General’s Office.
Jarecki added one of his hopes is “that by getting to know the extraordinary men in the film, we can look past their circumstances and see their humanity. In the U.S., being convicted of a crime may result in extended imprisonment, but it should not mean forfeiting the most basic human rights.”
In its 2019 and 2020 investigation documents, the Department of Justice laid out possible solutions to Alabama’s prison crisis. Among those were:
That was just some of what the federal government recommended. But, according to the lawsuit filed at the end of 2020, the government said the state hadn’t taken their solutions seriously and that Alabama “has not made this easy fix” despite acknowledging the “decrepit conditions” for years.
Construction is ongoing for a mega-prison for men in Elmore County that’s going to cost more than $1 billion. That new prison is slated to have just 4,000 beds, along with additional room for medical care, mental health care, and educational opportunities.
The new lockups won’t add beds to the state’s total number when they open — they’re set to simply replace beds in the dilapidated facilities that will shut their doors. There’s plans for a second mega-prison in Escambia County.
The federal investigators said the expensive new buildings won’t solve Alabama’s issue, and the state might just wind up back in the same position it’s in now.
Mens’ prisons in the state, according to the 2020 lawsuit, “remain extremely overcrowded, prisoner-on-prisoner homicides have increased, other forms of prisoner-on-prisoner violence including sexual abuse remains unabated, the facilities remain inadequate, use of excessive force by security staff is common, and staffing rates remain critically and dangerously low.”
A response from the state’s lawyers in court records said the lawsuit contained “vague allegations” and that its descriptions of violence inside the prisons are “isolated examples.”
Researchers at EJI “found that people are murdered in Alabama’s prisons at a rate 513% higher than Alabamians who are not incarcerated.”
The same data showed the fatal overdose rate in the state’s prisons was 1,629% higher than the rate for Alabamians who weren’t imprisoned. The suicide rate for Alabama inmates was 135% higher.
And a recent report from the ACLU of Alabama showed that 105 prison deaths in 2024 were listed as being from an unknown cause or were under investigation. The report cited a lack of transparency in death data, and the organization called for the prison system to require autopsies for all who die in custody and update its definitions of death.
“The Alabama Solution” calls the state’s lockups “America’s deadliest prison system.”
“Every day these conditions persist brings greater risk to the men at the center of the film,” said Kaufman.
“In recent years Alabama’s state prisons have had the highest rate of assault, drug overdose, rape, and murder of any system in America. Since the DOJ sued the state over its prisons in 2020, we believe the situation has further deteriorated. The US prison system, operating largely out of public view, costs US taxpayers a fortune (over $80 billion annually) and many of the policies and practices around incarceration are not making us safer.”
