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When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely prohibits media access, but allowed the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Film Uncovering Years of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt system filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is nearly killed by guards and loses sight in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated witnesses continued to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the official version—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the news. But multiple incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who had numerous separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Slavery System

This government benefits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film details the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in products and services to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

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

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding improved conditions in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video reveals how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, choking the leader, sending personnel to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Issue Beyond Alabama

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

From the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “you see similar things in most states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not just one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything