“The Alabama Solution,” a 2025 film directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, is nominated for Best Documentary at the 98th Academy Awards. The film follows abuses exposed by incarcerated people recording guards with contraband cellphones.
But as the Academy deliberates, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is working to allow prisons to jam contraband cellphones, censoring the very means that made this important documentary film possible.
As Jeremy Busby wrote in The Latest FCC Censorship Push No One Is Talking About Targets Incarcerated People,” published October 3 in The Intercept:
Contraband cellphones have become a reliable tool for incarcerated journalists to report accurate news events and expose the harsh realities within correctional facilities.
This is the focus of the documentary “The Alabama Solution,” premiering October 10 on HBO. The film highlights the unchecked culture of violence and abuse of power within the Alabama Department of Corrections.
It shows how disturbing video footage of forced labor, drug-related violence, prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, and staff assaults were captured via contraband cellphone and released to the media. This footage fueled a class action lawsuit against the state of Alabama over its prisons’ system of slave labor as well as the ongoing Department of Justice investigation over abuses in Alabama’s prisons, including horrific assaults by corrections officers.
In the throes of the Covid pandemic, I used a contraband cellphone as a last-ditch effort to report Texas prison officials’ alarmingly inadequate response to the virus, which was causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of incarcerated individuals and staff members.
That video footage was incorporated into a local ABC News documentary called “No Way Out.” That reporting embarrassed prison officials so badly it compelled them to implement and follow the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those changes could not have happened without contraband cellphones.
“The Alabama Solution” is available for streaming on HBO Max.
In the Chicago area? Come by North Central College in Naperville, IL tomorrow (Monday February 23, 2026 at 6:30pm CT) for a free screening of “The Alabama Solution,” followed by a panel conversation about undercover journalism, both in prison and on the outside. This event is co-hosted by JoinJeremy, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and the Department of Communication and Media Studies at North Central College:
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