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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance came from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly broken system filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on substances distributed by officers

One activist starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses vision in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the state’s version—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. However multiple incarcerated witnesses informed the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This state benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by Alabama for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work more than half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for improved conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage shows how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners en masse, choking the leader, sending personnel to threaten and attack others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

A National Issue Outside Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in your state and in your behalf.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

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