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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, the prison largely prohibits media access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized cookout. On camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a different story emerged—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue meeting begins the documentary, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

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

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources continued to gather proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the official explanation—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. But multiple imprisoned observers informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

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

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in goods and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by Alabama 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 government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater 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 people imprisoned,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Outside One State

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in your behalf.”

From the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable things in most states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything