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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. On film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. However off camera, a different story emerged—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly broken institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly terminated prison tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked floors
• Routine guard violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

Council begins the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned witnesses continued to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the official version—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the news. But several incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that Davis held only a toy utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in products and work to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black residents deemed unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and go home to my family.”

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding improved conditions in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the borders of the region. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in your region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything