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As documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling mostly bans media access, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. When Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue meeting begins the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly corrupt system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

Following their suddenly ended prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official version—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the news. However several incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

One of them, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced numerous separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Slavery System

This state profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in products and services to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale set by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners en masse, choking Council, sending personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The National Issue Beyond Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in your state and in your behalf.”

From the documented abuses 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 less than minimum wage, “one observes similar things in most jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything