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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, the prison largely prohibits media access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized cookout. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. As soon as the director approached the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Years of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly broken system filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

After their abruptly ended prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine officer violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the state’s explanation—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. But multiple imprisoned witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous separate legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This government profits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that effectively operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and work to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unfit for the community, make $2 a day—the identical pay scale set by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to give me parole to get out and go home to my family.”

These workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better conditions in 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the state of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every region and in the public's name.”

From the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything