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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison largely bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized barbecue. During camera, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly corrupt system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided years of evidence recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

One activist begins the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the official version—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. But multiple incarcerated witnesses informed the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: The Modern-Day Slavery System

This state benefits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in goods and services to the state each year for virtually no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unfit for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me release to leave and return to my family.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in your region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented 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 LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar things in most jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This is not just one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything