What Is in an Alabama Solution?
A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS WITH A LONG HISTORY
The Eighth Amendment protects prisoners from cruel and unusual punishment. In Hudson v.
McMillian, the Supreme Court addressed excessive physical force against prisoners. In 1976, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Estelle v. Gamble that the “deliberate indifference by prison personnel to a prisoner’s serious illness or injury constitutes cruel and unusual punishment contravening the Eighth Amendment.” The Alabama Solution is a prison documentary directed and produced by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman on the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Alabama’s state prisons—institutions plagued by underpaid, understaffed, and underreported conditions.
Although the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2025, the accounts recorded by inmates date back to 2019. In the Department of Justice’s Investigation of Alabama’s State Prisons for Men, the report recounts fatalities caused by excessive staff violence from as early as 2017. Decades earlier, Pugh v.
Locke documented similarly unconstitutional conditions in Alabama prisons. A United States public health officer toured facilities at Draper, Fountain, Holman, and Kilby, and testified that “he found these facilities wholly unfit for human habitation according to virtually every criterion [*324] used for evaluation by public health inspectors.” That was over fifty years ago.
The documentary is currently streaming on HBO Max. Through videos recorded by incarcerated people, the documentary depicts the following injustices from inmates’ embedded videos: excessive use of force by correctional staff; healthcare neglect; deaths that the film connects to inadequate staffing and healthcare; unhygienic and, put simply, unfathomable living conditions; repeated rejection for parole, deteriorating their overcrowding problem; and, foremost, the repeated delay of a true, fair Alabama solution.
VIOLENCE, CONTRABAND, AND INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE
Equal Justice Initiative, summarizing an Alabama Reflector investigation, reported that ADOC paid more than $14 million to settle 94 lawsuits alleging excessive force from 2020 through 2024. Other lawsuits accused staff of failing to protect incarcerated people from violence, wrongful deaths, assaults, and rapes. Separately, the DOJ reported frequent excessive force in 12 of the 13 men’s prisons it reviewed.
The DOJ did not review Tutwiler and said the available evidence did not allow it to determine whether a pattern existed at Hamilton.
Ironically, a 2018 Prison Policy Initiative survey found that staff were a major route through which contraband entered the local jails surveyed. That finding should not automatically be generalized to every U.S. prison. Still, a recent report from the ADOC Law Enforcement Services Division in November 2024 revealed that out of 113 contraband-related arrests, one third of those arrested were correctional staff.
In July 2025, ADOC reported five contraband-related arrests, including that of a YesCare employee. According to ADOC, seized contraband included eight grams of fentanyl, six grams of ecstasy, 14 cell phones, multiple charging blocks, and Black and Mild cigars.
AN “ALABAMA SOLUTION”?
What do you get when correctional officers are underpaid, understaffed, and operating without adequate institutional support, and the healthcare workers contracted to treat the fallout face missed paychecks? An “Alabama Solution”?
THE PROMISE OF NEW PRISONS
In 2019, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey promised to deliver an “Alabama Solution” to an “Alabama Problem”: the multi-billion construction of two mega prisons with 4,000 inmate intake capacities each. The first phase of this plan involves the Governor Kay Ivey Correctional Complex, previously called the Elmore Specialized Men’s Facility, and its 54 new buildings with “enhanced medical and mental health services including substance abuse treatment, rehabilitative programming, and vocational training.” She promised 720 medical complex beds, confidential treatment spaces for mental healthcare, and recreational areas for structured out-of-cell activities. The Alabama Corrections Institution Finance Authority later named the complex in Ivey’s honor.
The name arrived before the completed prison did.
The project was set for completion by May 2026. A dejected update from Alabama Reflector in February 2026 remarked that, “Four years after authorization, work has not started on the Escambia prison. Staton, Elmore, and Kilby all remain open… Closing of older prisons was key in the years of debate over new prison construction, with DOC officials saying the cost savings from shutting old and expensive prisons would help pay for new ones.
Governor Kay Ivey formed a commission in 2020 to recommend closures. Some prisons have been closed in whole or in part, like Draper Correctional Facility in Elmore County or Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore.” The delays leave the state’s promised “Alabama Solution” unfinished.
WHEN STATE CONTROL BECOMES FEDERAL RECEIVERSHIP
Keeping its prisons state-controlled clearly means a lot to Alabama. Alabama has historically been a state to push back on the possibility of losing their autonomy to the federal government. In spite of themselves, it has already happened before.
In 1979, New York Times reported that Federal District Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. placed Alabama’s prison system into receivership and appointed the state’s new governor, Fob James, as receiver while the court retained supervision over compliance. According to Governor James’ press secretary, Jon Ham, James had requested the receivership “because he felt direct gubernatorial control was the only method by which the state could achieve compliance with Judge Johnson’s orders, dating back nearly seven years, to upgrade conditions in state prisons to meet ‘minimum requirements of the Constitution.’” But, the receivership became a textbook conflict of interests.
The Brennan Center of Justice explained that the federal judge recognized the policy preferences of a state governor’s request to be the state’s receiver, but appointed him regardless. As a result, “the governor took several steps, such as opposing a potential court order to release prisoners that undermined the court.”
Now, Ivey prides herself in being just as hard on crime and, apparently, rather lenient with her budget. The Legislature initially authorized $1.3 billion for the prison construction program—in 2019, there were plans for three regional men’s prisons. As costs rise and Escambia’s construction remains delayed, you start to wonder how much more money Alabama will put on the table.
THE COLLAPSE OF PRISON HEALTHCARE
For context, in April 2026, 1819 News reported that ADOC was facing the collapse of its healthcare contractor, YesCare. Bankruptcy records show that YesCare filed for bankruptcy in Florida in May 2026, after payroll complaints had emerged across several jurisdictions. In New Mexico, Doña Ana’s Board of Commissioners agreed to pay outstanding wages to YesCare workers after their bankruptcy on May 8 left employees unpaid until May 15, when the county decided to take action.
In Kentucky, WAVE News reported that more than 100 YesCare employees had already entered their third week without a paycheck during the same week that YesCare filed for bankruptcy. Staff at the Leon County Detention Facility in Tallahassee, Florida confirmed in an article written by former nurse Angelina Walker that they had not been paid since May 1, 2026. Medical staff at Philadelphia’s prison facilities had gone nearly one month without pay until Mayor Cherelle Parker said in a statement to 6abc Action News that “the city is wiring money to Yescare to pay workers immediately.” And in Alabama, WSFA reported that workers at the Bullock County Correctional Facility had already gone more than two weeks without pay.
Janetha Oliver, a licensed practical nurse at the facility, told WSFA that, “At first, they were telling us we’re going to get paid on Monday, then Tuesday. Now they just ain’t saying anything.”
The payroll crisis raises a more serious question: when officials know that a contractor’s collapse threatens continuity of medical care, at what point does a failure to protect incarcerated patients become deliberate indifference to their serious medical needs?
FROM CORIZON TO YESCARE
Corizon Health Services was Alabama’s prison healthcare provider before YesCare. When Corizon claimed bankruptcy in 2023, Corizon used a restructuring strategy commonly called the “Texas Two-Step,” placing substantial liabilities into Tehum Care Services while YesCare continued operating and taking on contracts. Critics and creditors argued that the restructuring could prevent claimants from recovering what they were owed.
In an article by The Marshall Project, Michael Crawford– attorney for the wife of a man who died in an Arizona prison from septic shock after being left unattended by Corizon Health staff— said “These guys are playing hide-and-go-seek with all the money.”
Alabama Appleseed, a Birmingham nonprofit, reported that “despite the [ADOC] having paid YesCare a final payment of $11 million in April with a ‘verbal agreement’ that the money would be used to pay employee payrolls… That didn’t happen.” An article from CBS42 News on July 20, 2026 includes a statement from Alabama state representative, Chris England, who says, “Now, those employees still haven’t been paid…in order for those folks to get the money that they earned, they have to essentially become a creditor behind a whole bunch of people that they lied to, fraud and robbed and stole from, and hopefully at some point one day get the paycheck that they earned.” England had expressed concerns about the YesCare contract in 2023. The record raises questions about whether Alabama adequately accounted for the risks of contracting with a company facing repeated allegations of neglectful care and missed payrolls. Employees are suffering, and so are inmates, and Alabama has decided to sign an emergency contract with NaphCare as their solution.
NAPHCARE BECOMES THE EMERGENCY SOLUTION
ADOC terminated YesCare for what the department described as a failure to fulfill its contractual duties and announced a 24-month emergency agreement with NaphCare beginning May 3, 2026. Alabama surely reacts with speed, but not so much with caution. Caution would have required, at the very least, careful scrutiny of NaphCare’s record before the emergency agreement was signed.
In March 2026, New York Attorney General Letitia James found that the office found that NaphCare had unlawfully provided medical services. As part of the settlement, NaphCare was ordered to pay $875,000 and barred for five years from specified correctional-health contracts in New York. NaphCare also provides healthcare services within Arizona’s prison system.
Separately, a federal court placed that system into receivership after years of constitutional litigation; the receivership concerns the state system’s broader and long-running failures. NaphCare is headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama.
What is in an Alabama solution? ADOC published a statement from NaphCare on its website. NaphCare praised the state for “a transition like this [that] would normally take months– often three to nine.
The fact that this is coming together in just nine days says a lot about the level of collaboration, professionalism, and commitment across everyone involved.” The continuity of healthcare in Alabama’s prisons is of utmost importance to them. NaphCare has been in this industry for 37 years. They are a “mission-driven company focused on improving and saving lives in correctional healthcare.” Under the emergency agreement, NaphCare will provide healthcare services within Alabama’s prisons.
WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES
Alabama Appleseed reported, using records obtained from ADOC, that 202 people died in Alabama prisons in 2025. There were 277 recorded deaths in 2024, which was a slight decrease from the 327 deaths in 2023. Complete mortality figures are difficult to obtain because the DOJ has documented serious failures in ADOC’s incident reporting.
When Alabama repeatedly signs contracts with healthcare corporations accused of neglecting employees and patients, the question is not whether every death proves deliberate indifference. It is whether repeated warnings, preventable breakdowns, and inadequate oversight are being met with a constitutionally adequate response.
