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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. But off camera, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy housing units. When the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied multiple years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses vision in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple imprisoned observers told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the state each year for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black Alabamians deemed unfit for the community, make two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

The strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in your region and in your name.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” said 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