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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty dorms. When the director approached the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

This interrupted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under constant danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the official version—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the news. But multiple incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced numerous individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in products and work to the state each year for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unfit for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale set by the state for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of 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 community, but they don’t trust me to give me release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better conditions in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners en masse, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in most jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything