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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely bans media access, but permitted the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly broken system rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided years of evidence filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked floors
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the official explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated observers informed the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

This government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in goods and work to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated workers, mostly African American residents considered unfit for society, earn $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of 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 don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and go home to my family.”

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike calling for improved treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video reveals how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Beyond One State

The protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of the region. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in your state and in the public's name.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 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 Jarecki.

“This is not just Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything