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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance came from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue event begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly broken institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple incarcerated witnesses told the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation System

The state profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film details the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and services to the government annually for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, make two dollars a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor more than half a day for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

The protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every region and in your name.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “you see comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything