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When documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama prisons, the prison largely bans media entry, but permitted the crew to film its annual community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. But off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly broken system filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

After their suddenly ended Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on substances sold by officers

Council starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and loses vision in an eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. As imprisoned sources continued to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However several imprisoned observers informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who had numerous individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, 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 spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation System

The government profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively operates as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in goods and work to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unfit for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by Alabama for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, choking Council, sending personnel to threaten and attack participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Issue Outside One State

This protest may have failed, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of the region. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are happening in every region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see similar situations in most states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything