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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue. During film, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their suddenly terminated prison visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and loses sight in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. However several imprisoned observers told Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had numerous individual legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in goods and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American residents considered unsuitable for society, make two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better treatment in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage shows how prison authorities broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, choking Council, deploying personnel to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The National Issue Beyond Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in your name.”

From the reported violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below standard pay, “you see comparable things in most jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything