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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama prisons, Easterling largely bans media access, but permitted the crew to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a prison official halted filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the excuse that everything is about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

Council begins the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is almost killed by guards and loses sight in one eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. However several incarcerated observers told Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

The government benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in products and services to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unfit for the community, earn $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, 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 return to my family.”

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every region and in your name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA fires for below standard pay, “you see comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything