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As documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely prohibits media access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that it’s all about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

Council starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect evidence, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the news. However several imprisoned witnesses informed the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten 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 a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who had numerous individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in goods and services to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to grant parole to leave and go home to my family.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding better treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage shows how prison authorities broke the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, choking the leader, sending personnel to threaten and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.

The National Problem Beyond One State

This strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything