“More Cameras, More Cages”
Michelle Brown (University of Tenessee)
Through contraband footage shot by imprisoned organizers Robert Earl Council, Melvin Ray, and Raoul Poole, the Oscar-nominated The Alabama Solution offers what looks, at first glance, like unprecedented access to a prison system insulated from meaningful oversight, a film most commentators view as a harrowing exposé. A more critical reading sees something different: a portrait of the prison-industrial complex functioning exactly as designed—an extractive machinery of racialized labor, organized abandonment, and routinized violence whose default “solution” to crisis is always more cages, more control. While the documentary takes us inside in a powerful way, it is less clear whether its producers help us imagine how to get free.
Stylistically, The Alabama Solution bears the narrative gloss familiar from Andrew Jarecki’s work (Capturing the Friedmans, The Jinx). Guerrilla cell‑phone video from inside is seamlessly intercut with family photos, home movies, drawings, re‑enactments, civil rights footage, and legal documents. The result is a dense evidentiary archive built around a kind of carceral detective story: we follow autopsy reports, conflicting accounts from guards and the men in prison, and the painstaking efforts of families and attorneys to reconstruct what really happens in spaces where the state insists there is nothing to see. That structure is effective at sparking empathy and outrage, but it also recenters a single mysterious death in a way that risks displacing the structural analysis the film needs.
This tension runs through the film’s core appeal to visibility. The Alabama Solution leans hard on the premise that if the public could see what is happening in Alabama’s prisons, change would follow – a haunting, unfulfilled legacy of prison documentary. Filmmaker/scholar Brett Story has asked, “What does it mean to make something visible, and why do we think seeing has the power of dislodging?” That question feels urgent here, because The Alabama Solution is built from images that incarcerated people risked everything to create. The Free Alabama Movement (FAM) had already been filing lawsuits, documenting abuses, organizing strikes, and uploading videos for years before HBO and the show’s producers arrived. FAM formed in 2013, organized its first work stoppage in 2014, and helped catalyze a national 2016 prison strike widely described as the largest in U.S. history. Yet the rich radical genealogy of prisoner rights movements from which FAM comes—linking labor, Black Power, and contemporary abolitionist organizing—is mostly off‑screen. Instead, the film folds their organizing into the frame of a Department of Justice investigation and then narrows further to one horrific killing.
That death—of Steven Davis, brutally beaten by a guard—becomes the fulcrum of the film’s emotional and legal arc. We watch his mother, Sandy Ray, navigate grief, illness, and carceral bureaucracy in her search for answers. Civil rights attorney Hank Sherrod walks us through autopsy documents and settlement patterns that mirror familiar police violence playbooks: the state quietly pays while publicly denying any culpability. In one of the film’s most troubling scenes, Sandy holds up a photo of her son’s corpse at a public hearing and says, “I never want that picture to be seen but I want to show the world what they’ve done.” The film returns repeatedly to images of Steven’s body and to other men bloodied, overdosed, or slumped in drug‑induced stupors. It is a spectacle of death that asks the viewer, again and again, to let the horror of the image do the work of political outrage.
But some of the most politically generative moments are not the most graphic or visual. In one sequence, Council, Ray, Poole, and others discuss organizing strikes and boycotts from inside. They organize long-term study groups, refuse exploitative labor conditions, coordinate demands, and feed and care for one another when the institution retaliates. We see political consciousness forming: “We were able to see more clearly what was going on around us that wasn’t right,” one man explains. Another insists, “We all we got, but we all we need.” The film briefly lingers on this mutual aid and insurgent safety work, then pivots to the state’s reactionary violence. Organizers are transferred, thrown into solitary, and targeted “because we had the thought to be free.” At one point Council, exhausted and suffering from a yet another brutal attack by a guard, wonders aloud whether “maybe it’s going to take a whole lot of bloodshed for people to say this has gotta stop.” For a moment, the documentary opens debates about violence and non‑violence as a matter of survival among people deciding what they are willing to risk to ruin the prison.
Rather than sit with that instability, The Alabama Solution sutures it back into a more familiar liberal narrative: frustration gives way to renewed faith in documentation, lawsuits, exposure. Structural questions about how imprisoned people understand organizing strategy, self‑defense, and revolution are left hanging. The film’s closing movement widens the geographic frame to show that incarceration’s violence is hardly unique to Alabama – cameras in prisons all over are capturing the same thing, but the analysis remains anchored in excess and exceptionality rather than in the everyday operation of a carceral regime that is, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, designed to produce “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” What seems missing is a more sustained centering of the analyses already being offered by imprisoned organizers themselves—about prison labor, coordinated strikes, state retaliation, mega-prison expansion, and the political choices through which carceral crisis repeatedly produces more cages rather than decarceration. What are the histories, the social and political conditions, specific to Alabama (and elsewhere), that create the conditions for this kind of brutality? Archival pieces, interviews, and visualizations that focus on explicitly analyzing systems of racial capitalism, organized abandonment, and state violence could go a long way.
The film’s treatment of state power follows a similar pattern. We see Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and Governor Kay Ivey cast themselves as guardians of state sovereignty against federal overreach, denying “systemic issues” only to reassert the existence of “evil people” who must be imprisoned. At one hearing, an official casually suggests that everyone in prison ought simply to be executed. The state’s proposal—the Alabama solution—is to spend nearly a billion dollars on new mega‑prisons, while disappearing the lead organizers, whose footage made the film possible, to solitary confinement. Viewers familiar with prison struggles elsewhere will recognize the pattern: crisis produces expansion, not decarceration; scandal is met with ideological entrenchment, not a redistribution of power. This outcome is positioned as inevitable as opposed to political.
The Alabama Solution moves us in its unflinching depiction of prison conditions and partnership with those inside, reflecting a new wave of prison journalists and incarcerated organizers But it stops short of an abolitionist cinema that would frame organizers’ strikes, boycotts, mutual aid, and strategic thinking as blueprints for political struggle that exceeds prison walls. It offers only glancing attention to the actual crises of racial capitalism in a southern revanchist state that make prisons appear necessary, or to the nascent infrastructures—inside and outside—that are contesting punishment’s hold. The new relationships, coalitions, and institutions that could be determined through struggle are denied us. Here, Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes offers a compelling counterpoint, without ever entering a prison, instead showing how carceral power is distributed through the social reproduction of everyday life, affecting us all – inside and outside. Sierra Pettengill’s Riotsville, USA and Todd Chandler’s Bulletproof model formal strategies that show how security, repression, and carceral common sense are historically and institutionally produced, through infrastructures, atmospheres, and forms of politics that rely on fear and racial capital. What The Alabama Solution leaves me aching for is the expansion of this cinematic language, one that could meet the courage of FAM on their own terms, sparking renewed political will and possibility. What would it look like to make a film that not only documents the ongoing carceral catastrophe, or itemizes atrocity, but also refuses the premise that more visibility and more prisons are the only solutions we can imagine, or allow?
“Everybody is Watching Everything”
Kimberly Schreiber (University College London)
There is perhaps no institution that has better deployed techniques of visuality for the purposes of domination than the modern prison. As Michel Foucault famously argued in Discipline and Punish, the modern prison does not simply make use of physical violence as a tool of control, but enshrines unequal vectors of visibility to monitor the incarcerated and produce compliant subjects. Surveillance, however, has in turn incubated sousveillance––the monitoring of those in power from below. Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s The Alabama Solution exemplifies the spirit of sousveillance as it attempts to return the repressive look of the state apparatus. The film makes use of both visual and audio recordings taken by prisoners with contraband cellphones, defying the decades-long blackout that has prevented journalists from entering the corridors of Alabama’s prisons. These recordings play a critical role in the prisoners’ and their families’ ongoing attempts to shed light on the atrocities taking place in Alabama’s carceral institutions and to improve the conditions in which prisoners are made to live and work. As one incarcerated activist astutely observes during the film, finally “everybody is watching everything.”
The documentary was born out of the filmmakers’ experience of censorship in which they were prohibited from speaking with inmates during a highly choreographed visit to a religious ceremony at an Alabama prison. As in many cases of censorship, rather than straightforwardly redact something from the visual record, this gesture ultimately proliferated new modes of representation—ones that would creatively circumvent the repressive mandates of the censor. The Alabama Solution emerged out of a collaboration between filmmakers and incarcerated activists, reflecting their shared desire to expose the routine, and often deadly, violence taking place within Alabama’s prisons. The film’s transgressive premise is invariably registered at the level of form, privileging the evidentiary capacities of shaky cellphone footage, first-person testimony taken with front cameras, and pixelated recordings of video calls. The footage not only captures the horrifying conditions of the prison—its dingy corridors, leaking ceilings, overcrowded dorms, and rat-infested cells—but also registers the necessity of the recordings being taken on the sly. For instance, footage captured from within barred windows depicts a stream of anonymous prisoners being carted away from the prison in body bags, accompanied by the whispers of prisoners who narrate the scenes despite enormous risks to their safety. Recorded video calls with incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl are accompanied by panicked looks over their shoulders and secret codes to indicate the presence of guards.
While many sequences speak volumes about the shocking and poignant potential of visual evidence and personal testimony, the film is far from a straightforward celebration of the power of the visual. The Alabama Solution documents one mother’s attempt to investigate the death of her son, Stephen Davis, who was brutally murdered by a gang of prison guards in 2019. Sandy Ray’s pursuit of justice takes her inside the halls of power, where she confronts Alabama state officials with a photograph of Stephen’s brutalized face. Ray’s actions rhyme with those taken in 1955 by Mamie Till-Bradley, who insisted that her son Emmett’s lynched body be on display in an open casket at his funeral. Photographs of Till’s mutilated body were later published in the pages of Jet Magazine, helping to ignite the righteous fury of the civil rights movement. Ray similarly holds out hope that the chilling photograph of her son will stir sympathy among Alabama’s political establishment; however, in a stunning rebuke to the unifying capacities of human feeling, the officials remain utterly unmoved by either the visual aid or her story of loss.
Nevertheless, the film remains invested in the power of visual revelation. In contesting the terms through which the prison is officially made visible, The Alabama Solution resonates with previous historical moments in which a prison suddenly became accessible to the public and prisoners themselves were able to seize the means of representation. Perhaps the most striking antecedent can be found in the rebellion at Attica State Prison in upstate New York. On 9th September 1971, a group of prisoners gained control of the facility, taking over thirty hostages in an attempt to negotiate for improved living and working conditions. Acutely aware of the power of visual representation, the prisoners cannily invited television crews and newspapers reporters into the prison to observe the negotiations, marking the first occasion in which incarcerated men were able articulate their demands live on television and speak directly to the public. These video interviews, as well as still photographs and sound recordings, formed the basis of Cinda Firestone’s 1974 documentary Attica, a highly sympathetic film that casts the bloody retaking of the prison by state troopers and police officers in a particularly cruel light.
While Attica relied upon the novel capacities of television to beam the prison rebellion into the living rooms of ordinary Americans, The Alabama Solution posits the cellphone as the latest in a line of technologies through which the geographic segregation of the prison and the challenge it poses to visibility can be overcome. The documentary shows how, by tapping into this alternative infrastructure, prisoners in the Free Alabama Movement were able to organize a statewide work stoppage and thrust the conditions of Alabama’s prisons into the national spotlight. So although these two films and the prisons they document are separated by many decades, they both pin their hopes on the revelatory capacities of the camera: if the prison is no longer out of sight, then perhaps it will no longer be out of mind. In this way, The Alabama Solution is in many ways a classic documentary. The film draws on the camera both to represent and to challenge a particular spatialization of human experience, showing us how geographic boundaries also function as borders between races and classes. Given the logic of exposure that underpins The Alabama Solution, the only thing that remains to be seen is whether its revelations actually help to transform the conditions of the state’s prisons and the lives of those affected by its inhumanity.
DOCALOGUE 