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When documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On film, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. However off camera, a different narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director approached the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film documents inmates' herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the directors connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances sold by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the news. But multiple incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards regardless.

One of them, an officer, stomped Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: A Contemporary Exploitation System

This government profits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film details the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in goods and work to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unfit for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant parole to leave and return to my family.”

Such laborers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video reveals how prison authorities ended the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, choking the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Problem Beyond Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable situations in most states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything