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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits media access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. But off camera, a different narrative emerged—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official halted recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular officer violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

Council begins the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. However several imprisoned witnesses informed the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who faced more than 20 individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This state benefits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unfit for the community, earn $2 a day—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding improved treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Beyond One State

This strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every region and in your name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in most states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything