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When documentarians the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt system rife with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked floors
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on substances sold by officers

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated sources continued to gather proof, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the official version—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the news. However multiple imprisoned witnesses informed the family's attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 individual legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The state benefits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and services to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents considered unfit for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and return to my family.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and severing contact from organizers.

The National Problem Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in your region and in your name.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in most jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything