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As documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans media access, but permitted the crew to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

This interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant physical threat, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly ended prison tour, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of evidence filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked floors
• Routine officer violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned sources persisted to collect proof, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the official version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned observers informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had numerous individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation System

The state profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the shocking extent and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in products and work to the state each year for almost no pay.

In the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unsuitable for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of half a day for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they refuse me to give me release to get out and return to my family.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for better treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video shows how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar situations in most states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything