Film Review: The Alabama Solution

With the holiday season of “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” upon us, it may shock you to know that almost two million Americans will spend it behind bars in a nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world.

The United States locks citizens up so aggressively that even our smallest states have more prisoners than most other countries. Our criminal justice system is also the most expensive, costing taxpayers an estimated $270 billion dollars each and every year to operate.

This is all before being strained by the current ICE raids, mass detentions and deportations, and aspirations of an “Alligator Alcatraz” government and for-profit businesses that are building more prisons than ever before at an astonishing speed.

Unless we know someone serving a sentence, we probably tune out when we hear anything in the news about them—except for the escapes and manhunts or true crime recreations our society seems to adore.

But if you challenge yourself to watch The Alabama Solution, an astonishingly raw documentary from HBO Max, you will find a counter narrative from the inside that could permanently change your views. It was by far the most powerful film of 2025 for me, exposing the very worst and the very best of humanity at the same time.

Documenting and photographing disturbing truths that can’t be denied has an obvious and long tradition in storytelling, as does a predictable audience reaction for such work—we typically look away, or scroll past, or more often than not, simply pretend these horrors don’t exist.

Sometimes films use extraordinary access or tactics to gain this truth (Capturing the Friedmans), or other times it comes forward through tortured revelations by people in their own words and the power of their own voices in revealing it (Catfish). It can be discovered, or pieced together by directors and editors and archivists who play the part of investigator and theorist (The Jinx).

The filmmaker Andrew Jarecki has used all these methods and more in his remarkable career so far, but in The Alabama Solution, he and his co-director Charlotte Kaufman have captured a story that should never exist. They dig deeply to piece it together in collaboration with the prisoners who capture these atrocities using sometimes contraband cell phones, calls and recordings, and footage from within the overloaded Alabama Department of Corrections system over the course of many years. As one man says in a confessional phone video, “There’s no hope in prison, so you have to bring it in.”

The multi-layered stories of personal cases and prisoners, their families on the outside, and those who work within the system all flow together in an editing rhythm that keeps us engaged at a deeply personal level. The entire creative team should be commended for their sense of respect for the subjects and the nature and tone of what’s at stake.

During the making of the film in 2020, the Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit against Alabama and the ADOC for the overwhelming violations it found, as well as a systemic and racist pattern of prisoner abuses. The state fights back, proposing autonomous reforms and rejecting government claims, calling their approach The Alabama Solution.

The consequences, sadly, are deadly. And I predict most people who give the 1 hour 54 minute documentary their attention will have to sometimes pause, collect themselves, or stop to wonder if what they are seeing and understanding could actually be real. It’s difficult, and is not suitable for all audiences.

But in addition to the unthinkable stories The Alabama Solution reveals and the anger it should provoke about a prison-industrial complex and modern system of slavery, what makes it shocking could also be so powerful as to finally provoke reforms and compassion.

That is, if enough people can watch and not look away, and then demand justice.

The Alabama Solution premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Now available on HBO Max and through HBO Max programming on Amazon and Hulu.

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