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As documentarians the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, the prison largely prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly community-organized cookout. On film, imprisoned men, mostly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a different story surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official halted recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the directors connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the state’s version—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the news. However multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

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

After years of evasion, the mother met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

The government benefits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in products and services to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they refuse me to give me parole to leave and go home to my family.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding better treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video shows how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, choking Council, deploying personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in your state and in your name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything