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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans media entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. When the director moved toward the voices, a prison official halted recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Years of Abuse

This interrupted cookout meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a shockingly corrupt system rife with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

Council begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned sources continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. But multiple incarcerated witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple guards regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Slavery System

The government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in goods and work to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the system, incarcerated workers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor 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 work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and go home to my family.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video shows how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, choking the leader, sending personnel to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Problem Beyond One State

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

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not just one state,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything