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When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits media access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During film, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

Council begins the documentary 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.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the official version—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. But multiple incarcerated observers informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

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

Following years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, mostly Black residents considered unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the same pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me release to leave and return to my family.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile video reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A National Issue Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every state and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything