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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, the prison largely prohibits media access, but permitted the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. But off camera, a different story emerged—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Routine officer beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by officers

One activist begins the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. However several imprisoned observers told Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following three years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This government benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in products and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated workers, mostly African American residents considered unfit for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

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

These laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding better treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, choking Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Problem Beyond One State

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every state and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in the majority of states in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not just Alabama,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything