The Alabama Solution (2025)

TV-MA because this is a documentary about the real violence that takes place in Alabama (and, by loose proxy, other...) prisons. The conceit almost makes you understand how graphic things are going to get.  This takes smuggled camera phone footage of the abuses that prisoners in the Alabama Prison System face and makes it as raw as it can be.  This movie shows real death and real blood.  There is language and homophobic remarks throughout.  This is not meant to be an easy movie to watch.

DIRECTORS: Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman

I'm really far behind for a reason.  Things...are not good right now.  I'm spiraling pretty hard guys.  I did something that I needed to do at work because it was the right thing to do and I'm probably going to get fired from the best job I'll ever have.  I'm throwing every self-care thing at the wall and seeing if any of them stick.  So maybe, just maybe, crossing off my stupid unnecessary to-do list will give me power over these weird overwhelming feelings I have every few minutes.  I know that this has nothing to do with The Alabama Solution, but I tend to overshare in these things anyway.

I did watch this one a minute ago and I remember being incredibly moved by it.  (When I say, "A minute", it had to be less than a week ago.)  It's just that so much emotional stuff happened between now and then that trying to conjure up my emotional response to something distant is a bit trying right now.  Since both of these moments involved justice, let's color what I'm feeling right now to this film.  One of my low-key regrets on this blog was that I haven't always been the most informed when approaching some of these entries.  I mean, we're all growing and acknowledging that we're growing is important.  Back in the day, I wrote about 13th, a look at the modern day Black slave movement through the lens of law enforcement and the penal system.  I remember being way too centrist about that film in retrospect.  It wasn't that I disagreed with the movie as a whole.  It's just that I thought that I knew better than a group of researchers who were living the life.  

Again, mature life is about growth and, in many ways, I knew a lot about The Alabama Solution without having even heard of it.  But it is so different understanding that the prison industrial complex is corrupt and seeing the images of it from the inside.  What the directors of the film (and I'm not surprised that its The Jinx guys) is take this incredibly widespread story of violent corruption and exploitation and make it incredibly personal.  This isn't one person's story, but grounding the film with Robert Earl Council / Kinetic Justice is possibly the smartest thing that the film could do.  Admittedly, Council is the ideal subject matter.  If the point of the prison system is rehabilitation, Council was rehabilitated against what is even basic logic.  He was a man who pushed to better himself in a system that likes throwing people like him in prison. 

If anything, Council's thriving in prison shows how the system that Council is in wants him to stay savage.  Using Robert Council as an example, he was a guy who jumped onto the few and far between opportunities offered to him.  It's not like the Alabama Department of Corrections was giving Council the chances to better himself.  What I am absolutely taken aback with is that he learned how to self-advocate from the protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.  These were prisoners who knew what they were getting into before they got to prison.  They knew that the system was going to get them for doing the right thing and used those skills to survive in an environment that was meant to kill them.  Again, 13th argued that prisons were modern day slavery, a way to keep Black people and the poor as free labor.  But the only thing that even slightly disrupts that is when those imprisoned know how to understand a legal system that seems almost intentionally obtuse.  When someone is able to somehow break that code that is meant to keep the uninformed in prison, there's a disruption to the status quo that can only punished.  

And as much as this story is about the savage world of the prisoner of Alabama, this is almost a brutal takedown of something that we know so much to be true that it almost feels like we're stereotyping.  I can say that I now know who the governor of Alabama is and she is not failing to live up to an expectation that I have about what I think that the people of Alabama might think of themselves.  (I cannot stress enough that I'm talking about the people who voted her in.  I'm sure that there's the Tim of Alabama just banging his head against the keyboard wondering how he can escape this Fresh Hell).  Kay Ivey is just an old white lady who seems to be afraid of Black people and fosters that fear in all of the people around her. Sure, I have to acknowledge that this documentary, like all documentaries for the most part, has an agenda.  Bias is a thing.  But seeing how the people in prison understand the outcomes of the Stanford Prison Experiment through living it and understanding that the world is a cruel place, Kay Ivey and her entourage come up with ideas that are the results of generations of afraid white people.  

The main issue that seems paper thin is that much of the concern for Alabama's prison system is that, because Alabama might hold the most prisoners per capita, the prisons are overcrowded and there aren't enough guards and employees to staff these prisons in an effective manner.  On one end, with a defecit of qualified employees, these private businesses tend to take anyone that they can get.  There's a beautiful irony that the prisoners who are leaking this footage to the press are getting their phones from corrupt cops who are then being filmed being monsters.  But beyond that, Ivey's solution to a problem with overcrowding  and understaffed prisons is to shudder the prisons that Alabama has and transfer all of these prisoners into three mega-prisons.  It seems like she doesn't understand how overcrowding works, but it seems all really impressive to those who don't want to put a ton of critical thinking into this.

Just a heads up, I'm spiraling.  I have two more of these things to write afterwards and I'm having these clusters of panic attacks, so I apologize if I'm not all here for this.  I'm really hoping that if I get more of these done, I can at least feel the (chemical that is released from joy?  My brain isn't braining right.  Seratonin?) kick from being done.  I feel like I'm doing this thing a disservice.

What's really interesting is that The Alabama Solution also wants to dispel the notion that, while mass incarceration is a race issue, it's also a poverty issue.  The filmmakers cement the story of The Alabama Solution on Steven Davis, a white man who is killed by a guard.  All of the inmates involved in the video tell the story of how Steven was subdued and that the guards just kept hitting him and hitting him because he had a plastic knife tied to his hands.  He dies in the hospital barely looking human (I can't help but make the Emmitt Till comparison).  Now, the real empathy that the movie establishes is that every human life is connected to another human life.  The Davises don't seem like rich folks.  If you were to comment on what (potentially) Appalachian white seems like, the Davises probably might match a lot of those traits.  (I'm really not trying to stereotype here, but Mrs. Davis is meant to be representative of a population.) But Mrs. Davis, because of Steven's placement in prison, has made herself educated on the nuance of prison.  She loved her kid.  She acknowledged that he was a flawed individual who found himself in the prison system.  But she also has that knowledge that not everyone in prison is beyond redemption or at the same level of threat to society.  Yet there's a haunting part where the people in her environs are looking for reasons why Steven died beyond the notion that the prison system might be corrupt.  There's an old man who thinks he is being well-intentioned who keeps asking what Steven could have done that got him killed.  Eventually, he lands on the notion that Steven's drug use was the real probelm.  

That's what the world seems to be.  Again, I'm just going to ride my anxiety wave right now.  If something bad happens to someone, there needed to be a reason.  Instead, we keep forgetting that these people are people.  Everyone's a little bit good.  Everyone's a little bit bad.  There are people who make me so fearful about humanity that I get angry.  But then I have to remember.  These are people who are loved.  It is so hard to remember that kind of stuff normally.  However, a movie about the grossness of our penal system reminds me that there are other people suffering when someone is killed and it takes those people to see the dead's personhood sometimes.

I'm having a hard time writing beyond this point.  I knew there were a bunch of things that I wanted to say, but I have to cut it off here.