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As filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling largely bans journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized cookout. On camera, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different story emerged—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their suddenly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment 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: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. But multiple incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Slavery System

The government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the state annually for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and go home to my family.”

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

State-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike calling for better treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The National Problem Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every region and in your behalf.”

From the reported violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything