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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This thwarted cookout event begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly broken institution rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

Council starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement 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: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the official explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. However several incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

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

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery System

The state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better conditions in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video shows how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in every state and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in most jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything