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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as the director moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That thwarted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly broken institution filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film documents inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances sold by staff

Council begins the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the official version—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the television. However several incarcerated witnesses informed the family's attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

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

Following three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in products and services to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unfit for society, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals labor more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your region and in your behalf.”

From the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar things in most jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything