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As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its annual community-organized barbecue. During film, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from overheated, filthy housing units. When the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly ended prison tour, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on substances sold by staff

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is nearly killed by guards and loses sight in one eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources persisted to gather proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother discovers the official explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. However several imprisoned observers told Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

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

Following three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who had numerous individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery System

This state profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant release to get out and return to my family.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

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

The Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in most states in the country,” said Jarecki.

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