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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama prisons, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about security and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly ended prison tour, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost killed by guards and loses sight in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the state’s version—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the news. But multiple incarcerated observers informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: The Modern-Day Slavery System

This state benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the state each year for virtually no pay.

In the program, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unfit for society, make two dollars a day—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of the region. Council ends the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in most states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not just one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything