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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized barbecue. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different story emerged—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. As soon as the director moved toward the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly broken system rife with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

Council begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the news. But several imprisoned observers informed the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced numerous individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. 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 past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The state benefits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in goods and work to the state each year for almost no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

These laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video reveals how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners en masse, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A National Issue Outside One State

The strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are happening in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in most jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything