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When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison largely bans media access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. During film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for help came from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that everything is about security and safety, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly corrupt system filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents inmates' herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

After their suddenly terminated prison visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses sight in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses continued to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the official version—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who had more than 20 individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This state benefits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in goods and services to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black residents considered unfit for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale set by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners en masse, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The National Problem Outside One State

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of the region. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in the majority of states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a punitive approach to {everything