‘The Alabama Solution’ Co-Producer Beth Shelburne On Humanizing Alabama’s Inmates

(Photo credit: Beth Shelburne/UAB)

The Alabama Solution opened its audience’s eyes when it premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Its streaming debut on HBO Max later that year showed the U.S. and the world what was happening in Alabama–heinous crimes that most of the state’s population weren’t even aware were happening in their name.

Journalist Beth Shelburne is well-known in north-central Alabama. Having worked throughout Birmingham at WVTM and WBRC, as well as throughout the country, including Mississippi, California and Massachusetts, Shelburne has found her niche in highlighting violations in Alabama prisons. Her work led her to become co-producer of The Alabama Solution, now an Oscar-nominated documentary.

How Shelburne got involved

Shelburne became a leading journalist on prison reform after filing a report on the subject 14 years ago. Since then, she says, whistleblowers have constantly reached out to share what’s happening in Alabama’s prisons.

“I had been reporting and writing about Alabama’s prison system dating back to 2012. That was when I filed my first story on illegal things that were happening inside the prison system,” she said. “In 2012, it was Tutwiler Prison for Women that brought me into this crisis, and 50 women had filed a federal complaint alleging widespread rapes, sexual harassment, sexual abuse inside the prison system. I reported on that federal complaint being filed, and I tell people it was like opening up Pandora’s Box.”

“My phone started ringing after that first report, and I’ve been reporting on it ever since then. It hasn’t stopped ringing, and the stories haven’t stopped coming to my desk and finding their way to me,” she continued.

“I had been reporting on crime as a journalist since the beginning of my career in 1996 when I graduated college and took my first job in a newsroom. But I had never thought about what happened on the back end of our criminal justice system to the people that were caught up in it. Like most people in traditional media, I covered crimes vis-a-vis what the police told me had happened,” she said. “I reported on the suspect being arrested, publishing a mugshot, which is, you know, a carefully crafted storytelling device to put somebody in the worst possible light, quite literally and figuratively in their own lives, putting them in an unflattering rendering.”

“To say it’s [the mug shot and press statement] incomplete is a total understatement, but that was what we ran with. That’s what the traditional media typically does. And then they may cover a trial if there is a trial, they may cover a verdict and sentencing, and that’s the end of the story as far as the traditional media is concerned, and really the general public is concerned,” she added. “Justice has been served, the bad guy’s put away, and um, we move onto the next catastrophe. So the Tutwiler story really ripped the blinders off my eyes and made me realize there’s this whole other part of the system that we don’t see that operates in a black box. And in fact, that part of the system is itself criminal because it has consistently violated the Constitution.”

Shelburne said her reporting has uncovered how the criminal system “takes people who have been harmed in some kind of way, [and] that’s the vast majority of people that end up in our justice system.”

“Yes, many of them have harmed other people, too, but we put them in a harmful environment where they continue to be harmed, and all of the issues that led them to jail or prison are compounded. They’re not corrected,” she said. “So I realize this is a system that’s not delivering on its mandate and is, in fact, violating the law and is, in fact, covering all that up and doesn’t want me to report it. And so, as a journalist, that just triggered everything to let me know I was onto something.”

By 2019, Shelburne left traditional media to work as an independent journalist. She took a part-time investigative reporting job with the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice and wrote articles for various outlets about Alabama’s sentencing policies and other issues in the system.

At that point, directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman reached out to her about joining their film project as a journalist on the ground.

“[They] came down to Alabama and got inside a prison, decided they were going to focus some time and energy on what was going on in Alabama’s prison system, and in the process found my work and reached out to me, scheduled a meeting, and I very quickly joined their team,” she said.

“I believe I was the first person they hired.”

Journalist Christopher Izor from Hoover also joined the team as an associate producer.

“Chris and I were the two Alabama-based folks that worked on the project from beginning to end, so that’s kinda how it all came to be,” said Shelburne.

Creating The Alabama Solution

The Alabama Solution focuses on exposing the rights violations prisoners face from prison officers. These range from physical abuse and deaths to neglect of drug addiction and filthy, vermin-infested facilities. Despite these serious problems, getting information in or out of Alabama’s prisons is nearly impossible.

“I mean, part of the beauty of a piece of work like The Alabama Solution is that it keeps revealing itself in new ways, not just to audiences, but also to the folks that made it. And I think that one thing occurred to me…is that prisons are sort of the worst example of authoritarianism,” she said. “I mean, a prison is not a democracy. It’s totalitarianism. There’s a warden in charge, and there are subjects under the warden, and there’s all sorts of Byzantine, confusing rules, and it’s a punishment of culture. It’s crazy-making, and it’s dehumanizing, and it doesn’t make sense. It goes against our common basic humanity.”

“So when you put all those things into place, and then you have people with this absolute power over other human beings, the likelihood of abuse is almost 100 percent,” she added. “And then you have the kind of framework of, ‘This is a secure institution, therefore we can’t let you in because it’s for security reasons.’ [There are] these kind of nebulous, non-specific security reasons. We [the prison] can block you out. We can redact. We can refuse records requests, We can refuse access, and that’s allowed. Then the absolute worst things are happening. I think it’s up to journalists and also people on the inside that are willing to blow the whistle to expose it.”

The main story in The Alabama Solution is about Steven Davis, an inmate who was allegedly beaten to death by a prison officer named Roderick Gadson. His murder shows the failures in leadership and power inside Alabama’s prisons. The directors gave contraband phones to prisoners like Melvin Ray, Raoul Poole, and activist Robert Earl Council so they could record their daily lives. Given that the film used material that was technically illegal to obtain, it’s remarkable that The Alabama Solution was completed.

The film exists because whistleblowers were determined to show the world what they were experiencing. Council stood out for his motivation—he supported fellow inmates while facing abuse from officers and led a prison-wide work boycott to demand better conditions. Although the boycott didn’t succeed, it inspired other inmates in the South to keep fighting for their rights.

“He is one of the most remarkable people that I’ve ever met,” said Shelburne, adding that he and Davis’ mother, Sandy Ray, were the emotional core of the film. “They both actually have a lot of the same attributes, I think. She’s a little bit quieter in how she operates, but both of them insist on the truth, and they are gonna do what they can to get to it. And Robert Earl is…you just come across some people in life, and you’re like, ‘They’re a star.’ Not like a celebrity, but he is an enigmatic human. He is highly intelligent, very engaging [and] has an incredible capacity for staying positive.”

“We included this very short clip of him at the end of the film laughing and joking with an older man, a guy named Papa Smooth, because that’s how Robert Earl moves through the world. He’s got this huge laugh and he can joke around, despite what he has been put through in there, you know, just being brutalized repeatedly,” she said. “He has this inner spark that just refuses to die, and it’s really incredible to bear witness to. I’m honored to know him.”

Shelburne added that Council, who is from Enterprise, has a supportive family that the team got to know and became close with. He also has a daughter who stands by him and advocates for him along with the rest of his family.

“I really hope and pray that he is able to get some relief in his case because I think if and when he’s ever out in the free world, he can do incredible things,” she said. “But, you know, he’s done incredible things in prison, too, and he’s risen to a calling that few people can really pull off.”

Council and Ray’s stories collide at the intersection of race and class. Council and Ray both come from lower-income families. As a Black man, Council has had to deal with Alabama’s attitudes towards Blackness. Ray and her family represent a class of white people that other, richer white Alabamians deem forgettable. These cultural and social issues are part of what led to Davis’ death.

“Sandy Ray has just been through hell with her son, and she’s had a very hard life, as many poor people, working class people, do,” said Shelburne. “She worked her whole life and never got a break, and that’s who ends up in prison, you know, is poor people, people that don’t have the resources.”

“The fact that she said yes when we asked if we could embed with her right after Steven died–I mean, I’m telling you, the day after, we showed up at her door, she let us into her house, and she said yes” she continued. “We gave her some information about what we had learned, because it was new information to her, and she really appreciated hearing the truth from somebody because nobody was telling her the truth. So she let us in. …If she wouldn’t have allowed us that access, we couldn’t have walked alongside her in that journey.”

Shelburne said that many more informants contributed to the story beyond those shown in the documentary.

“There were dozens of other informants we were in contact with that didn’t appear in the film, but totally informed the story and gave us information and materials,” she said, highlighting their courage to come forward.

The prisoners helping to create the documentary

The film is based entirely on footage inmates recorded on their phones. In a way, it was only possible because contraband is so common in Alabama’s prisons.

“You recognize why they want to control communications and access because this is their worst nightmare. I mean, they’re not controlling it, obviously, because their guards are bringing in phones and selling them, and not to mention drugs, weapons, and alcohol and all kinds of other stuff,” said Shelburne.

“But this is why they don’t want us to see inside. They don’t want us to see the humanity. They don’t want us to see how these men are insisting on being seen and heard and really pushing back against this authoritarian control because it is embarrassing to the state of Alabama to be unmasked that way, you know?” she said. “They want us to just think they’re all Jeffrey Dahmer and getting what they deserve, and they’re not. They reveal themselves to be complex humans that are trying to survive, doing really incredible things.”

She described how the film shows Poole walking through what is supposed to be a drug treatment dormitory, but there aren’t any facilitators to be found. Instead, Poole serves as the facilitator, having recovered from drugs by himself in prison. Poole is given no support and can’t contend with the rampant contraband drug trade that the prison refuses to correct. Prisoners are overdosing, and Poole and his other inmates have to figure out how to get them help.

“That seems to be a scene that stays with people, just the appalling reality of that, that this is an actual treatment dorm where people are overdosing and dying, where they are getting thrown into a laundry cart and wheeled to the infirmary by other incarcerated men,” she said. “It’s just beyond, I think, what most people imagine how bad it could be.”

The film team looked into many issues, but they had to decide what could be included in the final cut. Shelburne said making The Alabama Solution meant leaving out many important stories about Alabama’s prisons, and that decision still troubles her.

“I really lobbied for this to be a series,” she said. “I did not think it should just be its own feature, but the decision was above my pay grade, and then there’s a distributor, HBO, and there’s some real realities of what can an audience tolerate. What are they gonna be willing to engage with? And the decision was made that a series would just be too much.”

“But I’m continuing to push for more reporting on some of the stories that we reported during the making of the film,” she continued. “There were other murders that we covered. There were other truly horrific things. And so we’re trying to work out where does that stuff land? And I really am advocating that it should land somewhere. We can’t let these stories die. They’re just too important.”

Alabama’s original sin

None of what’s happening in prison systems in Alabama and across the South can be talked about without the context of the South’s history of racism, which goes back to the region’s reliance on slavery.

A lot of what Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in the documentary, such as “defending Alabama’s interests” and that prisoners are “evil people with no regard for human life,” is dogwhistles for those who believe that the South’s rights include subjugating others based on skin color, class, or both. The film makes a concerted effort to show how Alabama’s history of enslavement reverberates today within the modern prison system, with inmates, many of whom are Black, forced to work for free throughout the state. This free labor (including in your favorite fast food chains) helps keep Alabama’s capitalist infrastructure afloat. In short, bodies are still Alabama’s currency, so of course, rehabilitation wouldn’t be on the table. It makes sense why Marshall wants Alabamians to believe that the imprisoned are all evil and irredeemable.

“We said during the making of the film many times when that clip would come up that that’s such a meta moment because he’s describing himself,” said Shelburne. “It’s like he’s turning the mirror on himself. I think that sort of binary has been used historically by white politicians to describe crime as is [committed by] evildoers. We know that’s not what the main cause of crime is. I mean, are there evil people who harm others? Well, yeah, but I think that represents a very small subset of people that end up in the criminal justice system.”

“We know the main drivers of crime are things like life history, socioeconomic history of abuse, being victimized yourself, poverty, addiction, mental illness, lack of education, so on and so forth, but those are really hard, substantive issues that require a lot of work on the front end, which is what our politicians don’t want to do. And so it’s much easier to cast everybody in a negative light and say, ‘Well, they’re evil,” she said. “That does two things: it allows them to enforce the most punitive policies imaginable with very little pushback from the public, and it allows everybody to excuse what’s happening in prison because those people obviously deserve it. So that kind of mindset does a lot of work for their side, but I think the film certainly interrogates that and pushes back hard against it.”

It seems Marshall had some inkling that his words in the documentary would come back to haunt him. In a CBS 42 interview conducted around the time The Alabama Solution was heading to the Oscars, Marshall told newscaster Andrea Lindenberg that he had never been interviewed for the film, despite footage of himself being interviewed being clearly featured in the documentary.

“That’s a 100 percent lie,” said Shelburne of Marshall’s assertion. “I’ll tell you, when I saw that interview–it’s hard to surprise me, [but] my jaw fell open because I was like, ‘Does he not remember we were in his office for six hours interviewing him for this film? Our director, Andrew Jarecki, sat down and interviewed him for hours. Steve Marshall signed a release form to Andrew’s production company. So I don’t know. I can’t explain why he would double down on that because that was 100 percent not true.”

None of what’s happening in prison systems in Alabama and across the South can be talked about without the context of the South’s history of racism, which goes back to the region’s reliance on slavery.

A lot of what Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in the documentary, such as “defending Alabama’s interests” and that prisoners are “evil people with no regard for human life,” is dogwhistles for those who believe that the South’s rights include subjugating others based on skin color, class, or both. The film makes a concerted effort to show how Alabama’s history of enslavement reverberates today within the modern prison system, with inmates, many of whom are Black, forced to work for free throughout the state. This free labor (including in your favorite fast food chains) helps keep Alabama’s capitalist infrastructure afloat. In short, bodies are still Alabama’s currency, so of course, rehabilitation wouldn’t be on the table. It makes sense why Marshall wants Alabamians to believe that the imprisoned are all evil and irredeemable.

“We said during the making of the film many times when that clip would come up that that’s such a meta moment because he’s describing himself,” said Shelburne. “It’s like he’s turning the mirror on himself. I think that sort of binary has been used historically by white politicians to describe crime as is [committed by] evildoers. We know that’s not what the main cause of crime is. I mean, are there evil people who harm others? Well, yeah, but I think that represents a very small subset of people that end up in the criminal justice system.”

“We know the main drivers of crime are things like life history, socioeconomic history of abuse, being victimized yourself, poverty, addiction, mental illness, lack of education, so on and so forth, but those are really hard, substantive issues that require a lot of work on the front end, which is what our politicians don’t want to do. And so it’s much easier to cast everybody in a negative light and say, ‘Well, they’re evil,” she said. “That does two things: it allows them to enforce the most punitive policies imaginable with very little pushback from the public, and it allows everybody to excuse what’s happening in prison because those people obviously deserve it. So that kind of mindset does a lot of work for their side, but I think the film certainly interrogates that and pushes back hard against it.”

It seems Marshall had some inkling that his words in the documentary would come back to haunt him. In a CBS 42 interview conducted around the time The Alabama Solution was heading to the Oscars, Marshall told newscaster Andrea Lindenberg that he had never been interviewed for the film, despite footage of himself being interviewed being clearly featured in the documentary.

“That’s a 100 percent lie,” said Shelburne of Marshall’s assertion. “I’ll tell you, when I saw that interview–it’s hard to surprise me, [but] my jaw fell open because I was like, ‘Does he not remember we were in his office for six hours interviewing him for this film? Our director, Andrew Jarecki, sat down and interviewed him for hours. Steve Marshall signed a release form to Andrew’s production company. So I don’t know. I can’t explain why he would double down on that because that was 100 percent not true.”

Holding journalism accountable

I asked Shelburne whether she had contacted CBS 42 after Marshall tried to claim the film crew hadn’t interviewed him.

“Actually, I contacted them,” she said. “I contacted Andrea Lindenberg, who did the interview, and said, ‘Yo, that ain’t true, and I think y’all might need to correct the record.’ And so, thankfully, some other media picked up on it, and I believe was the Alabama Political Reporter who did a piece saying that the film appears to contradict what Steve Marshall says. Then then, all sort of other things happened.”

That included Sandy Ray releasing a video on social media putting Marshall on blast for lying about not being interviewed for the film.

“I don’t know why Steve Marshall lied about that,” said Shelburne. “I can’t explain why he does so many things. That one was real weird. …He’s just assuming nobody’s really gonna fact check it. But they did on this one.”

As a journalist, I know why Lindenberg didn’t question Marshall’s statement. It’s also probably why more journalists aren’t trying to cover this human rights powder keg of a story. Unfortunately, it’s because of our training.

For decades, journalists (including me) had been trained to believe what the official police press statements say. If it comes from the offices of city or state government officials, then it’s gospel. But, as we’ve learned over the years, especially in this post-truth environment with Donald Trump as President, the truth always needs to be investigated. It’s part of the journalist’s code that the story we’re given must be fact-checked and questioned. Yet the dirty secret is that, under deadline pressure, biases, and the demands of our own personal lives, many of us have accepted what the police or City Hall has told us as fact.

“It is really hard to push back against that if you’re working in a traditional newsroom,” said Shelburne. “I just want to name that. I’m able to say whatever I want because I’m an independent journalist now, and I’m self-employed. But I’m also incredibly lucky and privileged. I have a partner who has a grown-up job at UAB [University of Alabama at Birmingham] with a salary and benefits that has allowed me to do this. It hasn’t always been an easy business decision because I gave up a pretty substantial income, and it’s been up and down as an independent journalist and creator. But I just want to say that on the front end because it’s not something that everybody can do.”

“When I was working in traditional journalism and started questioning these things…you do develop a reputation of being a certain kind of journalist,” she continued. “I started to question why is our entire first block of news police blotter? Like, just because the police send us a press release doesn’t mean it’s a news story, guys.”

She also added how the daily pressures of working in the newsroom keep journalists at bay.

“There are a lot of pressures inside a daily newsroom that journalists are working under, and I recognize that,” she said. “Now, maybe more than ever, you have a few corporations that are owning most local newsrooms that are making certain demands on the newsroom about output, and that doesn’t translate into quality. You’ve got individual journalists that are trying their damnedest to do good work, but they are facing more and more demands with less compensation, less resources, and that’s why the quality, I think, of journalism has suffered.”

While outlets like Substack are giving journalists a place to make a living off of writing substantive articles, Shelburne added that “it’s just becoming harder and harder, I think, for individual journalists to sustain that kind of reporting and questioning authority, A, in the current economic environment and reality with journalism outfits and B, in the political climate where from the White House on down, you’ve got administrations that view journalists as the enemy. They view the Fourth Estate as liberalism.”

“When you have a Republican super-majority in places like Alabama, I have statewide officials that just will not respond to legitimate questions sent to their office over and over again,” she said, adding how she has filed several stories for the Alabama Reflector about the fact that Alabama taxpayers are unwittingly funding litigation and settlements on behalf of abusive officers who have been accused of beating inmates until they died or were rendered comatose.

“The Attorney General’s office is in charge of all of that litigation. That is an agency that needs to answer for these decisions that are being made on behalf of taxpayers. And over a period of months of my reporting, I called, emailed, I sent certified letters, left voicemails,” she said. “I mean, I got zero acknowledgment or response to any of these questions.”

“I believe that is part of this larger wave coming from the White House of we don’t need to answer them because they’re the enemy, when really what I’m reporting is on behalf of taxpayers and citizens. That’s not the enemy,” she continued. “That’s what keeps our democracy strong and brings accountability to elected officials. But they don’t really see a political downside to ignoring journalists anymore, and that’s a real shame. …I think there are a lot of good journalists that want to do good work, and they are put in an impossible situation right now with the demands that are being put on them.”

Keeping the Fourth Estate strong and fighting back against government influence that makes newsrooms bend to fascist whims means that the leaders of newsrooms must stand up, said Shelburne.

“That really falls on supervisors, newsroom leaders and media owners to really lock arms in solidarity and say, ‘We’re not gonna let this happen,’ and I don’t think that’s happening,” she said.

What’s next?

What has happened since The Alabama Solution has been released? Well, most recently, Marshall’s bid for the U.S. Senate ended in defeat in the Alabama primaries this May. According to the Alabama Reflector, he came 70,000 votes behind U.S. Representative Barry Moore and 5,000 votes behind Jared Hudson, who ran on being a former Navy SEAL.

“So a person who for nearly 10 years has occupied one of the state’s most prominent political offices lost to a relative newcomer,” wrote Brian Lyman for the outlet. “It’s even more notable because Marshall spent much of that decade trying to be the perfect politician for right-wing media. Which may explain his record.”

Marshall’s loss likely shows how Republican candidates are struggling, even in their own primaries, in a society that has changed under Trump. With the cost of living so high, even some Trump supporters are turning away, and Marshall’s focus on Trump probably didn’t help him win new voters.

But to bring it back to the issue at hand, Lyman notes that among Marshall’s many failures as the state’s attorney general, Marshall “rejected a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2020” about the horrific state of Alabama prisons. Not only did that decision make women’s prisons less safe, but it also “left the state open to a federal lawsuit, which swiftly followed (from President Donald Trump’s DOJ) and continues today.”

It’s worth noting that the Trump Administration of 2020, as bad as it was, seems like business-as-usual compared to the Trump Administration of 2026.

Governor Kay Ivey, Marshall’s boss, also mishandled the prison crisis. She responded to the ongoing human rights problems by promising to build three mega-prisons. The film says the cost started at $450 million but has now grown to billions, including money taken from the state’s education fund.

Ivey is about to leave office, and the governor’s race is between two very different candidates. Doug Jones, the Democrat, is a former U.S. Senator known for prosecuting the Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the Birmingham church bombing. The Republican candidate, Tommy Tuberville, is a former Auburn football coach and current senator who strongly supports Trump and has made controversial statements about race and religion. If Alabama wants real prison reform, it’s clear which candidate is more likely to help.

Despite not knowing where the governor’s race is headed, there is still cause to celebrate positive movement on prison reform. SB-316, a bill to establish independent oversight in the state’s prison system, seemingly failed upwards into a compromise that Shelburne described as “not enough, it is a Band-Aid, and it is progress. It’s all of those things.”

She described how the bill survived because a Republican backer watched the film and currently has a family member in the system.

“That is what changes people, and because we have such an empathy problem, not just in this state but everywhere, folks are like, ‘If it’s not me, I don’t care,” she said. “And you know, that is especially true when it comes to crime and punishment because there is no other issue that’s more emotionally loaded than that.”

The bill ultimately died in its original form despite bipartisan support because of the governor’s veto and the state’s Department of Corrections, which opposed independent oversight. But the talks continued, and the bill was resurrected and turned into a bill to create a pilot program that works without legislation. Instead of the original idea of an overseeing board that would have included a family member of an inmate, the bill now calls for a single overseer who works in state government. She will have access to four prisons during the pilot program’s first year.

“I will say she’s probably the best person to do it,” Shelburne said of the person chosen for the job. “She works in the examiner of public accounts office, and she’s kind of a take-no-shit person, and I think she really wants to do a good job. She’s trying not to be friends with anybody, which I think is really wise on her part, so that’s progress. And the fact that she’s gonna be going into the prisons, they’ve got to let her in, and she’s gonna be producing some reports and doing some audits, that’s progress. That’s never happened in our state, the prison system’s been running for a century, and we have never allowed this.”

Shelburne described the overseer position as “one baby step forward.”

“There were a couple of other bills that passed that were positive for criminal justice, some parole reforms. Again, not anything earth-shattering, but some necessary changes that I think will help people and help prevent people getting sent back to prison for stupid stuff, which is what our parole board does now,” she said, describing how a man who had been on parole after serving nearly 30 years in prison for drug trafficking had his life ruined by police not taking his bladder issue seriously.

“[He] has been out for years doing very well, had built up a trucking business in North Alabama, was in the process of buying his own home, just a great example of someone really turning their life around,” she said. “And he has a bladder issue from some health problems, got pulled over by the police for a busted taillight, was held on the side of the highway for a long time because they pulled up his record and saw he was on parole for drug trafficking. So they started running a bunch of checks on him and he told the officers, ‘Look, I’ve gotta urinate, I have a bladder problem.’ He keeps a portable urinal in his car for his reason. And they said ‘No you can’t.'”

“…Finally, he’s gonna wet his pants, so he wants to the side and sort of discreetly relieves himself, and they arrest him and charge him with indecent exposure, which is a misdemeanor, not a felony,” she continued. “That charge gets dropped, but the parole board still violates his parole even though the charge was dropped, and he goes back to prison for a year.”

The story was the catalyst for the parole reforms to get pushed through. Shelburne said these small forward nudges will never be enough to fix all the problems because the system is already in “total collapse,” but she said focusing on these small wins is still important.

“It’s never progress like we want it to be, but it is progress, and that’s something.”

Another step toward progress is changing the minds of everyday people who have been conditioned to think one way about prisoners and the prison system.

“I’m not really surprised at all, but one of the things that I have noted in screening the film to audiences around the country is a lot of white people will say, ‘I’m surprised at how articulate and smart the inmates in the film were,’ and ‘They seem like really good people,'” she said. “I found myself initially getting really annoyed at these comments because I’m like, ‘Ugh, please check your privilege. Do you know why that is occurring to you?’ But I’ve also realized part of the work of the film is allowing people that would think that a chance to be proximate to folks that are in the system, and it’s a chance they’ve never had before.”

“Them naming that, while it rubs me the wrong way, and certainly exposes all sorts of racism and classism and blind spots, I think it’s also showing that they are shifting a little bit, that they’re recognizing something,” she continued. “As uncomfortable as it is for people that are far beyond that to hear, the alternative is they’ll think everybody in there is an evildoer and deserves that. They don’t think that anymore. They’re surprising themselves by feeling something. So I’ve had to do some work on myself in meeting people where they are, because not everybody is ready to challenge the whole system, to interrogate all the lawmakers and everything.”

People watching The Alabama Solution for the first time might go into it thinking the wardens are the good guys, and, to be fair, there are some upstanding ones (two of whom were also featured in this film). But for every good guy, there’s a man like Gadson, who not only wasn’t held responsible for Davis’ death, but is still working in the prison system despite numerous lawsuits against him alleging abuse.

“I get the question, ‘Are you ever afraid of the people that you interact with?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I’m afraid of the jailers,'” she said. “I’m not afraid of the folks inside because they’re totally powerless. That’s what people don’t understand is that these are the most marginalized, beat-down people in our society. They literally have been stripped of everything, including their names. So no, I am not afraid of them, and honestly I’ve never had a bad interaction with any incarcerated person in over a decade that I’ve been doing this work.”

“But have I felt uncomfortable next to the guards and the wardens? Yeah. Now that is a certain kind of scary that I have felt.”

The Alabama Solution is now streaming on HBO Max. You can read more of Shelburne’s work from her Muck Rack page and her Substack.You can also learn more about her from her website. If you want to learn more about the issues facing Alabama prisoners, check out the advocate group No More Alabama’s curriculum based on the documentary.