The Alabama Solution
2025 documentary film directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman
The Alabama Solution is a 2025 American documentary film directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman. It follows the prison system in Alabama from the perspective of incarcerated leaders.
The film had its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on January 28 and was released by HBO and HBO Max on October 10. At the 98th Academy Awards, it was nominated for Best Documentary.
Summary
In 2019, filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling Correctional Facility to film a religious revival meeting. During the visit, incarcerated men approached them off-camera with accounts of abuse and systemic failures within the prison system. This began a six-year investigation, during which incarcerated men used contraband cell phones to document conditions and communicate with the filmmakers.
The documentary centers on the death of Steven Davis, an incarcerated man who was beaten to death by prison guards. The film follows Davis's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers about her son's death. The documentary also profiles incarcerated activists Robert Earl Council and Melvin Ray, who co-founded the Free Alabama Movement and organized protests from within the prison system.
“The Alabama Solution” enters the record as 2025 documentary film directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Alabama, Solution and documentary can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q131978291. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Alabama Solution” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.