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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling largely prohibits media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized cookout. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that it’s all about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That thwarted cookout meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly ended prison visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses continued to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. But multiple imprisoned witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The state profits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage reveals how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

A National Problem Outside One State

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

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