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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans media access, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and safety, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That thwarted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly corrupt system filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly ended prison visit, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council starts the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the official version—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. But several imprisoned witnesses informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

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

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced more than 20 individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This government benefits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in goods and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unfit for society, make two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of half a day for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to get out and go home to my family.”

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety risk. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video reveals how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Outside One State

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every state and in your name.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in most states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything