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As filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans media entry, but allowed the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, imprisoned men, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

This thwarted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly broken system rife with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council starts the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is almost killed by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources continued to collect evidence, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After 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. The officer, who faced more than 20 individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This government benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the state annually for virtually no pay.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make $2 a day—the same pay scale established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor more than half a day for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to give me parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, choking the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A National Issue Outside One State

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in every region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything