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When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to film its annual community-organized cookout. On camera, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant danger, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided multiple years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is almost killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the state’s explanation—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the news. But several imprisoned observers informed the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After three years of evasion, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This government benefits financially from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450m in products and work to the state annually for virtually no pay.

In the system, incarcerated workers, mostly Black Alabamians deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better treatment in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video reveals how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, sending personnel to threaten and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.

The National Issue Outside One State

The strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in your state 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 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything