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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, the prison mostly bans media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized barbecue. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a different story emerged—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy housing units. When the director moved toward the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their suddenly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

One activist starts the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and loses vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. But several imprisoned observers informed Ray’s attorney that Davis held only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, 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 officer—part of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The state profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film details the shocking scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450m in products and services to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black residents deemed unfit for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and return to my family.”

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater security threat. “That gives you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved treatment in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to threaten and beat others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A National Problem Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything