Documentary Shows Alabama Prison’s Alleged Abuses from the Inside

Directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, “The Alabama Solution” — released in October 2025 and nominated for an Academy Award — focuses on two stories to document conditions for people living inside Alabama prisons. The Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law and the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale brought the film to Yale Law School for a screening on Feb. 9. A discussion followed with Alabama journalist and film co-producer Beth Shelburne. Sarah Stillman, director of the Investigative Reporting Lab, moderated. 

One story is about the 2019 death of Steven Davis, incarcerated in the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer. The official story from Alabama prison authorities is that Davis died because he tried to attack prison guards. But after his death, his mother, Sondra Ray, got a call from an anonymous prison staffer. Her son was murdered by guards, the staffer explained. Attorney Hank Sherrod, who represented the Davis family, heard from several prisoners who had witnessed the killing and who agreed with the description of the unwarranted and violent assault. Davis’s cellmate, James Sales, told Sherrod he would talk more after he was to be released. Instead, he died in his cell. Davis and Sales were two of the 1,377 people who died in Alabama prisons between 2019 and 2024. The filmmakers track the official story about how Davis died and its conflicts with an independent investigation. 

“The Alabama Solution” has another story to tell about Robert Earl Council, Melvin Ray, and Raoul Poole, three incarcerated men who have spent years documenting prison abuses, bringing lawsuits themselves, and organizing work strikes across the Alabama prison system and beyond from their cells. Through videos filmed on contraband cell phones, viewers glimpse fetid living conditions, abuse by guards who act with impunity, rampant drug addiction among prisoners, and a system with little chance of parole. Co-producer Shelburne has been reporting on Alabama’s prison system since 2012. 

“I started listening to people on the inside because what they were telling me was turning out to be true,” Shelburne said. 

I started listening to people on the inside because what they were telling me was turning out to be true.”

— Beth Shelburne, film co-producer 

That contrasted with what prison officials told Shelburne about how there was nothing unusual  and that they had it “under control,” she explained. 

In 2019, filmmaker Jarecki visited Easterling Correctional Facility in Montgomery, where he met incarcerated men who asked him for help in bringing the violence of the facility to public attention. Jarecki and Kaufman took up the project and learned about the investigative reporting by Shelburne, who later joined them. Shelburne described the undertaking as a six-year journey to unpack issues including human rights abuses, the collapse of granting parole, the race to build mega-prisons, and the state’s responses to overcrowding, understaffing, violence and drug use in prisons.

The documentarians’ work intersected with efforts led by incarcerated individuals that had been going on for years, Shelburne pointed out. She noted that long before her own reporting on prisons, Council and Ray were filing pro se lawsuits, documenting abuses on cellphone cameras, and uploading them to YouTube. 

“And there were dozens and dozens of people on the inside of the prisons, doing this kind of work,” she added. 

Council and Ray started the Free Alabama Movement, a prisoners’ rights group, in 2013 and organized its first work strike in 2014. Two more followed in 2016 and 2018, involving tens of thousands of people in prisons around the country, before the 2022 strike in the Alabama prisons that was documented in the film.

The research for the film coincided with lawsuits against the Alabama Department of Corrections, including one filed by the Department of Justice under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, which authorizes the Justice Department to bring such actions. The DOJ investigated Alabama’s corrections department for years, issuing areport in 2019. That reporting served as a “North Star in the making of this film,” Shelburne said. She called the reports “harrowing” and thorough in their documentation systemic abuse, “like a fire hose of human tragedy.” 

The reports matched what the incarcerated men told the filmmakers and the accounts of excessive force described in their pro se litigation. Much of that information overlapped with allegations filed in the 2014 class action Braggs v. Dunn (now called Braggs v. Hamm). A federal court found systemic constitutional violations in Alabama’s prison mental health care system and has ordered ongoing reforms which the state has appealed.

Amidst all the evidence of harms, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey repeatedly asserted that the prisons’ reform was “an Alabama problem” that required “an Alabama solution” — and what that attitude has produced is documented in the film bearing that name. 

Council, Ray, and Poole knew that participating in the film posed risks. Shelburne described “a temptation to be overprotective of sources” and explained the need to respect the decisions of her sources. She explained that incarcerated people “are in an environment where I think they understand the risk better than we do.” Council, Ray, and Poole decided that getting information out was key and that the filmmakers could use their names and faces as they provided information about their cases. 

“The Alabama Solution” was released to wide acclaim. The New York Times wrote that it was “not just about crime and punishment, but about a human rights crisis and willful blindness,” and the Los Angeles Times called it a “shattering documentary” that “feels like a dispatch from hell.” Alabama state officials continued their “defensive stance,” Shelburne said. 

At the time of the Yale screening, Council, Ray, and Poole were held in solitary confinement in a basement in “some sort of new segregation status that the prison has just created for them,” Shelburne said. In addition, the prisons cut their access to commissaries, canceled visits, and reduced rations. They were given “cold sack lunches” twice a day. A photo of one lunch showed a bag of Cheerios, a half pint of milk, and a piece of bread.

“How do you dismantle a system that has done this kind of harm?” Shelburne asked, adding that such work would “take generations.” Looking at students in the audience, she said, “I really do feel like the solution is with you.” In the end, she said, the abuses are “allowed because we allow it,” and that must change. She then quoted James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”