‘The Alabama Solution’: Sundance Review

Dirs: Andrew Jarecki, Charlotte Kaufman. US. 2025. 115mins 

Many People recognise the injustices inside the nation’s jail system, however the case has not often been laid out as comprehensively as it’s in The Alabama Answer. Administrators Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman incorporate interviews with incarcerated males utilizing contraband cell telephones as a way to hear their tales and witness their horrifying dwelling situations. US viewers will confront alternating waves of anger, disgust, sorrow and disgrace as they watch Alabama’s elected officers and jail officers enable this dehumanisation to proceed.

Personalises the powder-keg actuality behind the statistics

A HBO movie, The Alabama Answer  is a despairing, enraging documentary. Sundance veteran Jarecki, who received the US Grand Jury Documentary Prize for 2003’s Capturing The Friedmans and an Emmy for 2015’s The Jinx: The Life And Deaths Of Robert Durst, ought to assist elevate the movie’s profile. His directing associate Kaufman served as a producer on The Jinx and 2020’s The Innocence Information, a Netflix documentary collection about The Innocence Venture; a nonprofit which works to overturn wrongful convictions.  

Filmed over the course of about 5 years, The Alabama Answer originated as a mission during which the administrators visited an Alabama jail to shoot a revival assembly. Quickly, although, prisoners began approaching them, desirous to share their horrible experiences behind bars. (One prisoner declares, “This ain’t match for human society.”) The guards shortly shut down the filmmakers however, via again channels, Jarecki and Kaufman be taught that incarcerated Alabamans typically get entry to smuggled smartphones, starting a collection of interviews between the administrators and the imprisoned males.

Disturbing pictures and conversations await viewers because the prisoners take us into their day by day lives. Bloodstained partitions, rat-infested bathrooms and overcrowded situations are simply a number of the sights captured by these hidden cell telephones, complemented by the incarcerated males’s anecdotes about their indignities. Guards put prisoners in solitary confinement for years, and they’re severely crushed. Untreated drug addicts cling to life. A title card informs us that roughly 20,000 individuals are incarcerated in Alabama, and that these prisons are at 200 % occupancy whereas being severely understaffed. The Alabama Answer’s topics — risking nice hurt to themselves by talking out — personalise the powder-keg actuality behind these statistics. 

After devoting its early stretches to the key jail footage, the documentary turns its focus to particular person tales, together with that of Steven Davis, a prisoner killed in 2019 by guards who claimed they had been performing in self-defence. Davis’ fellow inmates inform a unique story, insisting that he was solely holding a plastic knife earlier than he was brutally crushed. The Alabama Answer spends time together with his grieving mom Sandy Ray, who fights to get justice for her son, discovering that the Alabama Division Of Corrections will do every little thing in its energy to demonise the deceased. (Fairly than attempt to enhance jail situations, the state authorities decries the proliferation of smartphones behind bars.)

One other phase considerations a statewide jail strike staged in response to the tough working situations prisoners endure whereas offering low cost labour for the state economic system. Utilizing sound bites from conservative radio stations and televised interviews with Alabama politicians, Jarecki and Kaufman show their struggles when demanding their human rights: the skin world has little sympathy for these behind bars.

Many have made the argument that America’s jail system is merely a contemporary extension of slavery — Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary thirteenth shortly springs to thoughts — and The Alabama Answer continues that dialog, particularly when the documentary reveals how the Alabama penal system responded to its hanging prisoners by limiting their meals. The technique, put merely, was to starve them into submission, and the cellphone footage of this standoff might be upsetting. However it’s a testomony to the filmmakers, and editor Web page Marsella, that these covertly-shot movies usually are not overused and, due to this fact, by no means lose their influence. 

The Alabama Answer makes the purpose that many states have comparably horrendous jail situations, introducing infuriating cellphone footage taken throughout the nation — together with the much more liberal California. Alabama’s jail–industrial advanced will provoke outrage, however the filmmakers know that it’s merely a microcosm of a nationwide drawback.