OSCARS 2026: The Alabama Solution (2025)

I knew a guy who was a prison guard. Any time he would tell me stories from his job, it always sounded like a real fucked-up gig to me. From my view on the outside, it sounded like the entire system was designed to breed animosity between the guards and the inmates. That violence was inevitably chosen to be the first and only solution to most problems. He got the shit beat out of him all the time too, so the entire system was fucked. I said to him once that I thought corruption was present in every layer of American justice and that the prison system needed to be completely overhauled, with a focus towards rehabilitation and not “punishment.” He agreed with me and this guy never agreed with me on anything, so that should tell you something about the self-evident flaws in the corrections industry. I don't know where my state ranks country-wide in terms of prison shittiness but I was also not surprised to hear that Alabama's prisons are especially bad. This is the starting point of “The Alabama Solution,” another Oscar-nominated documentary about clear and evident injustices in this country of mine.

Cell phones are strictly forbidden among the inmates in U.S. prison. This has not stopped them from becoming among the most common of contraband behind bars. The proliferation of cell phones has allowed prisoners to record an unfiltered and honest documentation of what their lives are like. “The Alabama Solution” began to take shape when, while filming an outdoor barbecue at Easterling Correctional Facility in Barbour County, Alabama, prisoners covertly approached directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman with accounts of abuse from staff and unsanitary conditions. The murder of Steven Davis, beaten to death by guards, and the movement from his mother, Sandy Ray, to find the truth is also a prominent bullet note in the film. Eventually, the focus turns to the Free Alabama Movement, a peaceful activism group driven by inmates to call attention to their own mistreatment and lead to proper government oversight of Alabama's prisons. Naturally, those in power – including governor Kay Ivey, who gives the film its title by insisting that “Alabama problems require Alabama solutions” – do what they can to dismantle the protests. 

The backbone of “The Alabama Solution” is that cell phone footage of life inside the prisons. Jarecki and Kaufman maintain all the video errors, the skips in audio and footage, leaving little doubt about what we are seeing is largely unedited.  The film doesn't show me much of anything I couldn't have guessed about prison life. That doesn't mean some of these images aren't shocking. We see people sleeping on floors. Drug addicted inmates collapse in public spaces, their arms blacken and rotted with injection wounds. Blood is left splattered from beatings. We see Steven Davis' body in the immediate aftermath of his murder, his face so bruised from the brutal beating that nearly his entire face is blackened. Weirdly, that's not the moment that grossed me out the most. Instead, it was when a scene where an inmate says that he can't leave any food in his cell for fear of rats eating it... Before revealing a home-made mouse trap made of a water bottle with two live rats squirming around inside it. I mean, Jesus. 

Not that things would have to be any worst than that to make “The Alabama Solution” upsetting. However, the film prepares more than enough material beyond the violent abuse and filthy conditions to prove how fucked-up Alabama's prisons – and, by extension, all American prisons – are. Once again, the fact of the matter that inmates are used as essentially slave labor by both the state and major corporations is examined. A notable moment sees a man working in a laundry department, saying he's been in prison for thirty years, has worked every day, and never gotten a single dollar in all that time. A pointed statement has the state's governor saying she doesn't want to be around prisoners before it's casually dropped that inmates being paid two dollars a day built her fuckin' mansion. 

Proving that all of justice bends towards workers' rights, the Free Alabama Movement uses a workers' strike to demand change. The system's response is to cut the amount of food the inmates are fed, literally starving the movement to death. This is such a disgustingly immoral response that my brain immediately goes “why isn't that illegal?” before remembering that laws don't apply to social institutions that get to make the laws. We hear talk radio house make demeaning, dehumanizing comments about prisoners. Governor Ivey's solution is to consolidate Alabama's prisons into three mega-facilities, saying that it'll save the state money. Guess what project ends up going wildly over-budget before the end? It's always the same thing. When the repressed class realize they actually have the numbers on their side, those in power resort to systematically starving them of options and distracting the public with a bunch of stupid bullshit. 

Sorry, I know this wasn't my most coherent review. I don't have a lot of deeper thoughts about “The Alabama Solution” other than to say, over and over again, how much this kind of stuff pisses me off. I suppose the film's ability to prompt such a viscerally emotional reaction to these social injustices is an example of its success. Simply pointing a cell phone camera at these horrible abuses of power and bringing them to light makes it so evident how wrong this shit is. So I'll just wrap this up by once again asking the two people reading this to please donate to the Free Alabama Movement, or whatever the closest local equivalent is for, if you can. I don't know how to fix any of this shit but, if I can buy a striking inmate lunch for a day, that's better than nothing. [7/10]