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When documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help came from overheated, dirty housing units. When the director approached the sounds, a prison official stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly corrupt system filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their suddenly ended prison visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. But several incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would not press charges. Gadson, who had numerous separate legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This state profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in goods and services to the state annually for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video shows how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, choking Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and severing communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every region and in your behalf.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything