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As filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama prisons, the prison largely bans journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. During film, incarcerated men, mostly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from sweltering, filthy housing units. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a prison official stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly broken institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their suddenly ended prison visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

Council starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. But multiple incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation System

This state benefits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in products and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

In the system, incarcerated workers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unfit for the community, earn $2 a day—the identical pay scale set by the state for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals work more than 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“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 less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved conditions in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, choking Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Outside One State

This strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are happening in your region and in your name.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in most states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything