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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, the prison mostly bans media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized cookout. On camera, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue meeting begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on substances sold by staff

Council begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources continued to collect evidence, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the official explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the news. However multiple imprisoned witnesses informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

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

After three years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who had more than 20 separate legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This state profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450m in products and services to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding improved treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to threaten and beat participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Issue Outside One State

This protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in every region and in your behalf.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a punitive approach to {everything