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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans media entry, but permitted the crew to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant danger, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their suddenly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources provided multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the state’s version—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. However multiple imprisoned observers told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Slavery System

This government profits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and services to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, mostly Black residents deemed unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

Such workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better conditions in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything