Inside look at state's brutal prison system

Inmates' harrowing secret footage drives the enraging 'The Alabama Solution.'

- ROBERT ABELE

"THE ALABAMA Solution" reveals conditions at 14 prisons, including Easterling Correctional Facility, above.

Indictments of our dehumanizing prison system don't get much more conscience-piercing than what's revealed in "The Alabama Solution," a shattering documentary from Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman that feels like a dispatch from hell, specifically the 14 penitentiaries that make up the Heart of Dixie's unchecked continuation of slave conditions.

Not that these co-directors could take their cameras inside the country's most notorious state carceral system to film wretched conditions: overcrowding, understaffing, abuse, death and untreated addiction. (As one prisoner acutely observes, a reporter getting into a war zone is easier.) After receiving permission in 2019 to film a deceptively pleasant outdoor barbecue in an Alabama prison yard, Jarecki and Kaufman were connected to a secret network of activist inmates with contraband cellphones who'd been documenting their world at deadly risk.