Film: “The Alabama Solution,” A Six Year Investigation Exposing America's Deadliest Prison System

The Arthur Liman Center and Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale present a screening of the Academy Award nominated documentary "The Alabama Solution," a six-year investigation exposing America's deadliest prison system. Screening will be followed by a discussion with film co-producer and investigative journalist, Beth Shelburne, and Sarah Stillman, staff writer for The New Yorker and director of the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale.

Beth Shelburne (Co-Producer) is an independent writer and investigative journalist based in Birmingham, Alabama. She’s reported extensively on the crisis in Alabama prisons, with work published throughout Alabama as well as The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, The Bitter Southerner, and Facing South. In 2023, she released a critically acclaimed podcast series called Earwitness that investigates the wrongful conviction of Toforest Johnson, who’s been on Alabama’s death row for over 25 years. In 2018 she was named a Writing for Justice Fellow with Pen America. Previously, she spent 20 years working as a TV news anchor and reporter. Her journalism has won Emmy, Edward R. Murrow, and Associated Press Media Editors awards. 

Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers criminal justice, immigration, climate change, and more. She teaches narrative non-fiction at Yale, where she also runs the Investigative Reporting Lab. She is a MacArthur Fellow. Stillman's work focuses on profiteering — in prisons, jails, immigration detention facilities, and conflict zones. Recently, she's been reporting on extreme sentencing, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her coverage of the injustices resulting from the felony-murder rule, and running a project with the Lab to document extreme sentencing in collaboration with local newsrooms nationwide. Stillman joined The New Yorker in 2012; that same year, her piece about labor abuses on United States military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, "The Invisible Army," received the National Magazine Award for public interest and the Hillman Prize for magazine journalism. In 2019, she received another National Magazine Award for public interest, for her 2018 New Yorker piece, “No Refuge,” which documented how deportation can become a death sentence for asylum-seekers and other immigrants.  

Registration required for members of the broader Yale community. Dessert served after the screening.