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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized barbecue. On camera, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly broken system filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant danger, to change situations declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers

Council starts the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and loses sight in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources persisted to collect evidence, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the state’s version—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. But multiple imprisoned observers informed the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This state benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in products and services to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals 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.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety 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 individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding better treatment in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, choking Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The National Issue Beyond One State

This strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in your region and in the public's name.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything