Episode Details

The Alabama Solution is a searing documentary about Alabama’s prison system and the broader crisis of mass incarceration. Directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, the film draws on years of secretly recorded cell phone footage made by incarcerated people, offering an unusually intimate and unfiltered account of violence, isolation, resistance, and survival inside one of the harshest prison systems in the United States. The film shows how contraband cell phones transform incarcerated people from subjects of documentation into documentarians themselves, while prisoners’ families emerge as advocates, investigators, and conduits to the outside world.

Time stamps:

0:00   Introduction

3:48    Not an innocence movie

6:43    The cell phone footage

10:15    A system of dehumanization

17:37    The Free Alabama Movement

22:09   The declining federal presence and state prisons

25:48   "The Alabama Solution”

31:45     A legacy of slavery

38:30    The challenges of investigating abuses in prisons

42:26    The moral obligation of prison reform

Further reading:

Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)

Foreman, James, Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017)

Lewis, Nicole, “‘The Alabama Solution’: A Humanitarian Crisis in Grainy Detail,” The Marshall Project (2025)

Margulies, Joseph, Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration (2026)

Parker, Anabelle, “‘Let’s just shut down’: an interview with Spokesperson Ray of the Free Alabama Movement,” San Francisco Bay View (Dec. 2, 2014)

Stevenson, Bryan, Just Mercy (2014)

U.S. Dep’t of Justice Civil Rights Division, Investigation of Alabama’s State Prison for Men (July 23, 2020)

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