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When documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from overheated, dirty dorms. When Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and security, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Years of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers

One activist starts the documentary in five years of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses persisted to gather proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. However several incarcerated observers told Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

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

After three years of evasion, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

The government benefits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent 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 goods and work to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black residents considered unfit for society, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video shows how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and severing communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

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

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything