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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During camera, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That thwarted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly broken system filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated prison tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

Council starts the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the official explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. But several imprisoned observers told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

The state benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in goods and work to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American residents deemed unfit for society, earn $2 a day—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and go home to my family.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

The strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in your region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything