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When documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits media access, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized cookout. During film, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director approached the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

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

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant danger, to change situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

One activist begins the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to gather proof, the directors investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the official version—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. But multiple incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Slavery System

The state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in goods and work to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents deemed unfit for the community, make two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and return to my family.”

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage shows how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in your state and in your behalf.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything