Release Date: General release/streaming: October 10, 2025 on HBO Max
Runtime: 115 minutes (1h 55m)
Rated: TV-MA
Production Companies: HBO Documentary Films
Producers: Andrew Jarecki, Charlotte Kaufman, Alex “Alelur” Duran, Beth Shelburne
Cinematography: Nicholas Kraus
Editing: Page Marsella
Music/Composer: Mark Batson & Chris Hanebutt
The Alabama Solution (2025)
Directors: Andrew Jarecki & Charlotte Kaufman
Writers: Andrew Jarecki, Charlotte Kaufman, & Page Marsella
Featured Subjects:
Robert Earl “Kinetik Justice” Council – an incarcerated activist and leader in footage testimony
Melvin “Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun” Ray — incarcerated activist helping supply footage and testimon
Steven Davis — inmate whose death at the hands of officers becomes a central narrative thread
James Sales — Davis’s cellmate and a key witness.
Sandy Ray — Davis’s mother, who seeks accountability for her son’s killing
Raoul Poole — an incarcerated activist and a leader of the Free Alabama Movement, known helping lead a
It should go without saying that witnessing the systemic failures of our nation’s prison system is bound to be disturbing. The simple mistreatment of human beings — citizens among us — is enough to unsettle anyone willing to look directly at it. And while some incarcerated individuals carry complicated and serious pasts, the fallacy in arguing for their dehumanization or unpaid exploitation collapses when confronted with the actual facts — especially when those facts disproportionately affect communities of color.
In The Alabama Solution, directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman choose Alabama’s prison system deliberately. While the abuse documented there is among the most severe in the country, the film makes clear that Alabama is not an anomaly — it is a microcosm. What is happening there exists, to varying degrees, across the United States.
Alabama prisons operate at roughly 200% capacity. Facilities designed for one population are forced to contain double. Compounding this crisis is severe understaffing — often functioning with only one-third of the personnel required for safe operation. The result is not just neglect, but volatility. A system stretched beyond capacity becomes a system where accountability erodes, where power consolidates in dangerous ways, and where corruption finds oxygen.
The film’s primary voice emerges through Robert Earl Council — known as “Kinetik Justice” — an incarcerated man serving a life sentence who becomes a documentarian from within. Through contraband cell phones, he and others record footage that bypasses institutional censorship. The images are raw, unstable, immediate. Video calls bleed with urgency. There is no polish — only testimony.
Melvin “Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun” Ray, co-founder of the Free Alabama Movement alongside Council, supplies additional footage and organizing leadership. These men are not framed as abstractions. They are activists operating from inside confinement, documenting the violence, the drug proliferation, the neglect, and the psychological toll of incarceration under these conditions.
Jarecki and Kaufman were initially granted access to film a religious service. Instead, they were confronted by inmates urgently requesting that their lived realities be documented. From that pivot, the documentary becomes an exposé of systemic neglect, violence, corruption, and exploitation — themes introduced early and sustained throughout.
Drug-related deaths inside Alabama facilities reportedly rose from 9 in 2019 to approximately 122 by 2023, according to reporting referenced in the film’s broader coverage. The documentary suggests that narcotics circulate not simply despite the system, but in part because of its structural failures. Overcrowding, insufficient staffing, and alleged internal corruption create an environment where drugs move more easily than reform.
The film also scrutinizes prison labor. Incarcerated individuals generate an estimated $450 million annually in labor value for the state, much of it unpaid or severely undercompensated. Meanwhile, the same individuals are portrayed publicly as burdens on taxpayers. The contradiction is stark: labeled disposable, yet economically indispensable.
The narrative narrows around the 2019 killing of Steven Davis at Donaldson Correctional Facility. Official reports claimed self-defense. Yet inmate testimony and documented accounts challenge that version of events. The film shifts perspective here — not just toward the incarcerated, but toward those waiting outside.
Sandy Ray, Davis’s mother, becomes one of the documentary’s emotional anchors. Her pursuit of truth exposes alleged state obfuscation and the difficulty families face when confronting institutional power. Through her, the film complicates the narrative of incarceration: it reminds viewers that sentences extend beyond prison walls.
The Free Alabama Movement eventually organizes a labor strike across the state’s facilities. At its height, the protest reportedly involved participation from a significant percentage of Alabama’s incarcerated population — estimates reaching as high as 80% across major facilities. Their demands were direct:
- Mandatory parole criteria reform
- Repeal of the Habitual Felony Offender Act and life-without-parole sentences
- An end to unpaid forced labor
- Creation of independent oversight for the parole board
The strategy was economic disruption. If the system relies on incarcerated labor, withdraw the labor.
The state’s response was swift: lockdowns, solitary confinement for organizers, restricted access to resources. The strike lasted roughly three weeks before participation fractured under pressure. It generated national attention — but no immediate legislative concessions. Governor Kay Ivey publicly dismissed the demands as unreasonable.
Parallel to the activism, civil rights attorney Hank Sherrod works with Sandy Ray to investigate the circumstances surrounding her son’s death. Interviews with incarcerated witnesses reveal fear — fear of retaliation, fear of jeopardizing parole. One witness, James Sales, agrees to speak after release. He dies in his cell shortly before that opportunity materializes. The ambiguity surrounding his death deepens the film’s portrait of institutional opacity.
The title itself — The Alabama Solution — drips with irony. Faced with Department of Justice scrutiny over unsafe conditions, the state’s “solution” becomes the construction of new mega-prisons, funded in part by redirected federal relief allocations. Meanwhile, reports indicate that in some recent months, more people have died in Alabama prisons than have been granted parole. The parole board has faced criticism for frequently denying release, even to individuals with clean disciplinary records.
The film offers few easy resolutions. Hope appears briefly — in solidarity, in organizing, in the courage of those documenting their own confinement. But the prevailing atmosphere is one of normalization: dehumanization framed as justice, punishment marketed as patriotism.
Those who risked retaliation to expose these conditions did so in pursuit of humane treatment — not absolution, not erasure of accountability — but dignity. What the documentary ultimately suggests is that the crisis is not accidental. It is structural. And structures are not sustained by oversight alone, but by political will.
If justice is meant to correct rather than crush, then the conditions documented here demand more than outrage — they demand reckoning. The Alabama Solution does not argue for innocence. It argues for humanity. And in doing so, it quietly dismantles one of the most persistent myths of the American carceral system: that severity equals safety.
Alabama may be presented as an extreme case, but the film never lets us believe it is isolated. The overcrowding, the understaffing, the labor exploitation, the bureaucratic indifference — these are not aberrations. They are symptoms. And symptoms, when ignored, calcify into policy.
What lingers after the credits is not simply anger. It is recognition. Recognition that reform is often postponed in favor of expansion. Recognition that visibility does not automatically produce accountability. And recognition that a system that depends on confinement as commodity may never be incentivized to shrink itself.
The men who risked retaliation to document their reality were not asking for absolution. They were asking for basic dignity. The film leaves us with a question that feels heavier than any statistic: if the exposure of suffering changes nothing, then what does that say about the society witnessing it?