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When documentarians the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely bans media access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On film, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. But off camera, a different story emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, dirty dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This interrupted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly corrupt system filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated prison visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied multiple years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances sold by officers

One activist begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. However multiple imprisoned observers informed Ray’s attorney that Davis held only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, stomped the inmate's skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the government each year for virtually no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and go home to my family.”

These laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding better treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Issue Outside One State

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of the region. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every region and in your name.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in most jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything