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When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated men, mostly African American, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different story emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and security, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

That thwarted cookout meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly corrupt system filled with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to change situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly ended prison visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

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

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. However multiple incarcerated witnesses informed the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

The government profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and work to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a day—the identical pay scale established by the state for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals labor more than half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every state and in your behalf.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar situations in most states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything