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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to record its yearly community-organized cookout. On camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story emerged—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt system rife with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film documents inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

Council starts the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by guards and suffers sight in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses continued to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the official version—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. However multiple incarcerated witnesses told the family's lawyer that Davis held only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This state benefits financially from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in products and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They labor more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding better conditions in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video shows how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

This strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of the region. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every state and in your behalf.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “you see comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything