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When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, the prison mostly prohibits media access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On film, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. When the director approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly broken system rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

One activist starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost killed by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources continued to collect evidence, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the television. But several incarcerated observers told Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

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

After three years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Slavery System

This government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450m in goods and work to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners en masse, choking Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. Council ends the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are happening in every state and in your behalf.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything