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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans journalistic access, but permitted the crew to record its yearly community-organized cookout. On film, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official halted recording, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly corrupt system rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided multiple years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses continued to collect evidence, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother discovers the official version—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple guards regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate legal actions alleging 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 used by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Slavery System

The state benefits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in products and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black residents considered unfit for society, earn $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

These laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, choking Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Issue Outside Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “you see comparable things in most jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not just Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything