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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, the prison mostly bans media entry, but permitted the crew to record its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy housing units. When the director approached the voices, a prison official stopped filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

This thwarted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly broken system rife with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the television. But several incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced numerous individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This government profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and work to the state annually for virtually no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A National Issue Beyond One State

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable things in most jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a punitive approach to {everything