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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized cookout. On film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director approached the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly corrupt system rife with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources provided multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

One activist begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s version—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple incarcerated observers informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

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

Following years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who had numerous individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Slavery System

The government profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450m in products and services to the government annually for virtually no pay.

In the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a day—the same daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and go home to my family.”

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

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better conditions in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video shows how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and beat others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are happening in every region and in your behalf.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything