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When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During film, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from overheated, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

This thwarted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly corrupt system filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

Council begins the documentary in five years of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is almost killed by guards and loses sight in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses persisted to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the television. However multiple incarcerated witnesses informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards regardless.

A guard, an officer, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant release to get out and return to my family.”

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher security risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for improved treatment in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. Council ends the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in the majority of states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything