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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans media entry, but permitted the crew to record its annual community-organized cookout. On film, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. As soon as the director approached the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Revealing Film Exposing Years of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant danger, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked floors
• Routine guard violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

Council starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses sight in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources continued to gather evidence, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the state’s version—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the news. But several incarcerated witnesses told the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

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

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

The government benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450m in products and services to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unfit for the community, earn two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to get out and go home to my family.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video reveals how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, choking the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Outside One State

The protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of the region. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in your state and in your name.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for below standard pay, “you see similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not just one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything