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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. However off camera, a contrasting story emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. When Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This interrupted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly corrupt system filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

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

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. But multiple incarcerated witnesses told Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. 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 defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This government profits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film details the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American residents considered unfit for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding improved conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage reveals how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Outside One State

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of the region. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in most states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything