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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling mostly bans media access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue event begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly broken system filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied multiple years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on substances sold by staff

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in an eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned witnesses continued to gather evidence, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. However multiple imprisoned observers told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

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

Following three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This state profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in goods and services to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, make $2 a day—the same pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to give me parole to get out and return to my family.”

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, choking Council, sending soldiers to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The National Problem Outside One State

This protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are happening in every region and in the public's behalf.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “you see similar things in most jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything