Team Credits:
Beth Shelburne: Co-Producer and Investigative Journalist
Page Marsella: Co-Producer and Editor
Christopher Izor: Associate Producer and Investigative Researcher
Gabe Murray: Associate Producer and Investigative Researcher

Filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman conducted a six-year investigation into the Alabama prison system, exposing it as the deadliest in America. Their documentary reveals a covert culture of corruption and brutality, as it follows the lives of incarcerated men demanding accountability and change from within.

Their project begins in 2019, when they obtain rare permission to film a revival meeting inside a prison. While their visit is tightly controlled by authorities, off camera, men describe terrible things happening inside, hidden from public view.

U.S prisons operate in secrecy, a condition reinforced by Supreme Court decisions allowing wardens to deny journalists access. But in Alabama an opening appeared; men were communicating with the outside world through contraband cell phones. Over ensuing years of conversations and secret recordings, three incarcerated activists — Robert Earl Council, Melvin Ray and Raoul Poole —begin collaborating with the filmmakers to expose the crisis, documenting killings by prison guards, shocking rates of sexual assault and suicide, a system of forced labor, and an officer-driven drug trade causing fatal overdoses.

Early in their investigation the filmmakers learn that a young inmate — Steven Davis — has been brutally assaulted by an officer and airlifted to a hospital, where he is pronounced dead. They locate Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, and embed with her as she navigates a cover-up and discovers how a notorious prison guard — Roderick Gadson — had killed her son.

Learning that Davis’s killing was not an isolated incident, the filmmakers build a database documenting dozens of excessive force lawsuits against Gadson and other violent officers. They also reveal tens of millions of dollars spent by the State defending and protecting violent guards and perpetuating a culture of brutality.

As Sandy searches for the truth, incarcerated men begin to organize a peaceful work strike. The film documents the inner workings of this movement, which successfully unites thousands of men in fourteen prisons, challenging a system that extracts over $450 million a year in unpaid prison labor.

The filmmakers’ investigation documented every in-custody death, filing records requests, examining autopsies, and interviewing witnesses to determine who had died behind bars and why. The film’s final frame shows the faces of more than a thousand incarcerated men who lost their lives in Alabama prisons since production began. They also assembled this data into a searchable database available at thealabamasolution.com, as a resource for journalists, lawmakers, attorneys, and families.

The film’s impact is already evident in Alabama, where it has helped catalyze meaningful policy change. In February, a conservative state senator introduced the state’s first prison oversight bill in over a decade, citing the film as motivation. The measure led to the creation of a first-of-its-kind pilot program to monitor state prisons. In the same legislative session, lawmakers also passed two additional bills addressing long-overdue parole reforms.

Nationally, The Alabama Solution stands as an urgent call for transparency and accountability across the country in a broken system that costs over $100 billion each year and incarcerates more than 2 million Americans.