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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits media access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During film, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, filthy housing units. When the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and safety, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly broken institution rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses vision in an eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned sources persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's mother, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s version—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. But several imprisoned observers told the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in products and work to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and go home to my family.”

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video shows how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners en masse, choking Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Outside One State

The strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in most states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything