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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, the prison largely bans media access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, dirty housing units. When the director moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped filming, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that it’s all about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt system filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant danger, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided multiple years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

One activist starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and loses vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. As imprisoned sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the official explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the television. However multiple imprisoned witnesses informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery System

This government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in products and work to the government annually for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unfit for society, earn $2 a day—the same pay scale established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They labor upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in every state and in your name.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything