![‘The Alabama Solution’ Review: A Wrenching Look at a New Civil Rights Battlefield [Sundance]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/27140304/The-Alabama-Solution.jpg "‘The Alabama Solution’ Review: A Wrenching Look at a New Civil Rights Battlefield [Sundance]")
“A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens,” wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “but by how it treats its criminals.” The United States ranks as an unabashed and alarming failure by that metric. The country’s negligence toward the vulnerable and marginalized will certainly not come as news (or at least a surprise) to most, so it’s a testament to the fearless filmmaking of co-directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufmann that their documentary “The Alabama Solution” lands with such force.
READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated Movies At The 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Their key decision that gives the film such tremendous power is to center the voices of prisoners in their unflinching glance at injustice in Alabama’s carceral system. Unlike Jarecki’s brother Eugene with 2012’s War on Drugs documentary “The House I Live In,” this is not a film that outsources its analysis to academics and outside activists. “The Alabama Solution” leverages the voice of the disempowered to tell their own story, a bottom-up approach that renders it all the more immediate and impactful.
The incarcerated activists, led by Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council (known as “Kinetik Justice”), are no standard talking heads. They beam in from contraband phones smuggled into the prisons, which struggle to clamp down on the devices due to an imbalance of 200% inmate capacity and 33% staffing. It’s an act of courage for the filmmakers and participants alike, given the tremendous restrictions imposed on journalists. America’s Supreme Court ruled that journalists can report from inside war zones, but prisons are a step too far for security reasons.
Jarecki and Kaufmann structure the film around the spine of their video dispatches and narration, which never becomes dry or diaristic. Beyond being tremendous proponents for recognizing their own humanity, many participants are incredibly articulate advocates thanks to an education initiative. The Halifax program taught them to protect themselves intellectually, not just physically, to survive their sentences. As haunting as any image of overt violence in “The Alabama Solution” (and there are many that deserve the content warning that precedes the film) is a superimposition of the countless “pro se” lawsuits handwritten from inside prisons—almost all of which fall on deaf ears within the justice system.
The film begins with the documentarians’ initial encounter with the Alabama prison system following a 2019 facility tour in Montgomery. Away from the cameras rolling, prisoners approached them to whisper an unspoken truth hiding in plain sight: the tranquil façade of a barbecue masked widespread abuse and inhumanity. The gruesome death of prisoner Steven Davis at the hands of a guard begins the slow process of revealing the extent of abuses to the wider public.
It’s a bit odd that the film only lightly touches on a key prism through which to view the events: race. While the overwhelming majority of the incarcerated voices in the film are black and brown men, Davis is white. In the linear trajectory drawn by “The Alabama Solution,” an association is implied between Davis’ death and a Department of Justice investigation accusing the Alabama Department of Corrections of unconstitutional practices. The film’s concern with equal justice is so incontrovertible that it feels plausible that Jarecki and Kaufmann wanted to avoid superimposing any external lens on the situation, but avoiding the racial dynamic is nonetheless notable.
As the fast-escalating showdown between the state and federal authorities evolves, so does the film’s form. With initiatives like the Free Alabama Movement taking the fight outside the walls and the DOJ amping up outside scrutiny, “The Alabama Solution” begins incorporating more newsreel-style footage to ensure the audience can see the whole picture. That forward motion is further augmented by following bureaucratic struggles with Davis and Council’s families and a lone figure from the opposing side of the issue, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who inexplicably agreed to speak plainly on the situation.
The filmmakers do not make the supposition their audience will immediately accept their assertion that the state’s leaders are cookie-cutter villains. Instead, they take pains to explain the “deep story” that undergirds how Alabamians incorporate events that cause dissonance with their worldview. In their defiantly libertarian narrative, Alabama has a pure state of being that they like to enjoy without federal authorities coming in and imposing rules on them. This mindset gives birth to the film’s title, a reference to the phrase used by Republican Governor Kay Ivey to explain how she intends to address the controversy swirling around her state: a home-grown answer to an Alabama problem.
Jarecki and Kaufmann are deeply attuned to this counter-narrative that presents such an obstacle to realizing the transformational change needed in the prison system. To many, justice for the incarcerated is not self-evident—in part because this fight exists entirely out of sight and thus out of mind. This sad truth turns up frequently in the B-roll footage they shoot of Alabamian life, which is more than just connective tissue between scenes of people talking. Their glimpses of continuing, as usual, seem crazy to any viewer who realizes the extent of abuses happening in such proximity.
This steady accumulation of detail earns “The Alabama Solution” its nearly two-hour runtime, one on the decidedly longer end of streaming-era documentaries. Everything converges on a climactic standoff where a wide network of incarcerated Alabamians stage a coordinated strike. This campaign makes their demands felt by governmental and business entities, who see them as little more than sources of profit and punishment.
Jarecki and Kaufmann edit this final tick-tock in a way that makes the collective action thrilling and involving. By providing a voice to the voiceless, “The Alabama Solution” invites audiences into what they successfully argue is nothing less than a new frontier in the ongoing civil rights movement. Institutions may need more time to change, but any viewer of this film should only need two hours to be galvanized into action. [A-]
