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When documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison largely bans media access, but allowed the crew to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. On camera, imprisoned men, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue event begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

Council starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by guards and loses sight in an eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated witnesses continued to gather proof, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. But several imprisoned witnesses informed the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

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

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Slavery System

The state profits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in products and services to the state each year for virtually no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unsuitable for society, make two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals work more than 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Problem Outside One State

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see similar things in most states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything