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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. However off camera, a different narrative emerged—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly corrupt system filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

Council starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. However multiple imprisoned witnesses informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation System

This state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unsuitable for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to give me parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The National Problem Outside One State

The strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every state and in your name.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in most states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not just Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything