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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans media access, but allowed the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On film, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting story emerged—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director approached the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly corrupt system rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant danger, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned sources persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the state’s version—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the television. However several incarcerated witnesses informed the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

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

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. Gadson, who faced numerous individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in products and services to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unfit for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and go home to my family.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage reveals how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Issue Beyond One State

The protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every region and in your name.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below standard pay, “you see comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not just one state,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything