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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. On camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Neglect

This thwarted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a shockingly corrupt system filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided multiple years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

Council starts the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses sight in one eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources persisted to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the official version—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. But several incarcerated witnesses told the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The government benefits financially from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film details the shocking scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in goods and work to the government annually for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every region and in your name.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below standard pay, “one observes similar situations in most states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything