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When documentarians the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, the prison largely prohibits media access, but allowed the crew to record its annual community-organized barbecue. During film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a shockingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers

Council starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by officers and loses sight in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's mother, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the official version—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the television. But several incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four guards anyway.

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

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. Gadson, who faced numerous individual legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and work to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and return to my family.”

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, choking Council, sending personnel to threaten and beat others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond One State

The strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are happening in every region and in your name.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything