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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, the prison mostly bans media access, but allowed the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, imprisoned men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a different story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under constant danger, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is almost killed by guards and loses sight in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official version—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. However multiple imprisoned observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery System

This government profits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in goods and work to the government annually for almost no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and go home to my family.”

These laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater security risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage reveals how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

This strike may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in your region and in your behalf.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for below standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything