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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. However off camera, a different story emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. When the director approached the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly corrupt system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances sold by officers

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the official version—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. However multiple incarcerated observers told Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

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

Following years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who had numerous separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered 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 Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in goods and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned workers, mostly Black residents deemed unfit for society, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and return to my family.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The National Problem Beyond One State

The strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are happening in every state and in your behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything