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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama prisons, the prison mostly bans journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized cookout. On camera, imprisoned men, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt system rife with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

One activist begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses continued to gather evidence, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the official explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple imprisoned observers informed the family's attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450m in products and services to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents considered unfit for the community, make two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they refuse me to give me parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety risk. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this free labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage reveals how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, choking the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A National Issue Beyond Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA fires for below standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything