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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. On film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly broken system rife with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances sold by staff

Council starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses vision in an eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following three years of evasion, the mother spoke 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 legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This state profits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that effectively operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in goods and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn $2 a day—the same pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

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

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for better treatment in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A National Problem Outside One State

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in every region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in most states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything