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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as the director approached the voices, a prison official halted recording, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

This interrupted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly broken institution filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant danger, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked floors
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

Council starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses sight in an eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources persisted to collect evidence, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the news. However several incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who had more than 20 separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery System

This state profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in goods and work to the government each year for almost no pay.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unfit for society, make two dollars a day—the identical pay scale set by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and return to my family.”

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video shows how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

A National Issue Outside One State

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

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