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When documentarians the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help came from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly corrupt system filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

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

A Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the news. However multiple incarcerated observers told Ray’s lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

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

Following years of evasion, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery System

This government benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in products and work to the government each year for virtually no pay.

In the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed 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 maintain individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The documentary culminates in an remarkable feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for improved treatment in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, choking Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Problem Outside One State

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in every region and in your name.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything