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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, the prison largely bans media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for help came from overheated, dirty housing units. When the director approached the sounds, a prison official halted filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue meeting begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly ended prison visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

One activist begins the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the official explanation—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple incarcerated witnesses informed the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Slavery System

The state benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program supplies $450 million in products and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

In the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unfit for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A National Issue Outside One State

The protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

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