Gone are the days when the latest Michael Moore exposé — Sicko or Fahrenheit 9/11 — could fill Merrill’s Roxy Cinemas. This year’s five Oscar-nominated documentaries didn’t even show up in local theaters, with a few exceptions. Come See Me in the Good Light had a run at the Savoy Theater, Mr. Nobody Against Putin played at Catamount Arts and the Vermont International Film Foundation, and Cutting Through Rocks, about a firebrand Iranian midwife, screened at festivals.
But if you want to see The Alabama Solution, a shocking window into American incarceration from documentarian Andrew Jarecki — brother of Waitsfield’s Eugene Jarecki and maker of “The Jinx” — you’ll need to stream it on HBO Max or a rental platform.
The deal
In 2019, codirectors Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman shot a religious revival meeting on the grounds of an Alabama correctional facility. Inmates told them derisively that if they were allowed to film inside the prison, they’d get a story very different from that staged photo op.
But what if they could see inside? Alabama prisons, we learn, have been running at 200 percent of capacity with one-third of their optimal staff. As a result, the under-supervised inmates easily obtained contraband cellphones, with which some of them proceeded to contact the filmmakers and document their living conditions in damning detail.
One of these informants tipped off producers to the death of inmate Steven Davis after a beating. Witnesses, including an anonymous correctional officer, alleged that staff had killed Davis when he posed no threat to them. His grieving mother hired a lawyer.
Meanwhile, a federal Department of Justice investigation prompted Alabama officials to fret about the prison problem. Gov. Kay Ivey insisted that only an “Alabama solution” would do — namely, the construction of new mega-prisons with funds taken from the state’s education programs.
Inside prison walls, activists Robert Earl Council and Melvin Ray of the Free Alabama Movement weren’t impressed with her plan. In 2022, schooled by veterans of the civil rights movement, the men organized a statewide shutdown of prison labor — a strike.
Will you like it?
There are plenty of drawbacks to the way cellphones have turned everyone into a potential documentary filmmaker — privacy issues, for one. The Alabama Solution demonstrates that there are equally powerful advantages.
In the film, inmate Ray observes that journalists can enter a war zone more easily than they can enter an American prison. But with a phone, any inmate becomes a crusading reporter. And the shocking images and testimony these incarcerated men collect, assembled into a narrative by Jarecki and Kaufman, could change some minds.
Perhaps the film’s most telling moment comes when Sondra Ray, mother of the slain Davis, says she never thought she’d need to care about the plight of prisoners. The family is white — yes, race matters in this context — and Ray draws mixed reactions when she tells her story to acquaintances, with some suggesting that convicted criminals deserve no sympathy. In snippets of talk radio commentary on the 2022 strike, the hosts voice the same opinion with a snicker. “You’re in prison — it’s supposed to suck,” one quips.
But at what point does “deserved” punishment become cruel and unusual punishment? The footage of filthy, chaotic, vermin-infested facilities makes a convincing case that Alabama has crossed that line. So do the stories we hear about lengthy sentences, plummeting parole rates, unstaffed substance-abuse treatment units and exploitative labor practices.
By the end of The Alabama Solution, it’s hard not to agree with Council that prison labor is slavery by another name. “You can change the name of it,” he says, “but the undergirdings are the same.”
Some of the film’s harshest critiques come from former correctional officers who speak on camera. They describe overworked “officers who look like zombies” and scoff at the notion that prisons work toward rehabilitation: “You can’t rehabilitate a man by beating the hell out of him.”
The filmmakers let such witnesses speak for themselves. They use on-screen text to supply background information and glossy B-roll as a counterpoint to the gritty cellphone footage. Verdant Alabama countryside contrasts sharply with the prison interiors — even as we learn that inmates tend the grounds of the pristine governor’s mansion.
Jarecki and Kaufman have shaped their footage into a gripping story, complete with a twist involving the fate of a key witness. There’s also a scene worthy of any Hollywood courtroom drama, in which Sondra Ray confronts a bureaucratic prison study group with a gruesome image of her son’s corpse.
The attendees don’t seem to know how to react. Audiences of The Alabama Solution may not, either. But perhaps we could start by recognizing, as Council’s daughter tells a crowd of protesters in the film, that “prisoners are humans, too.”
If you like this, try…
Mr. Nobody Against Putin (2025; Kino Film Collection, rentable): The winner of the 2026 Oscar for Best Documentary is essentially another compilation of smuggled footage: A Russian teacher documented the use of war propaganda at his school.
The Perfect Neighbor (2025; Netflix): Another 2026 Oscar nominee, Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary explores a case that tested Florida’s stand-your-ground law, one of the “tough on crime” measures critiqued in The Alabama Solution.
This article appears in April 15 • 2026.
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