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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama prisons, the prison largely prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. When the director approached the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and security, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked floors
• Routine guard violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers

Council starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses persisted to gather proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the television. However several incarcerated witnesses told Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

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

Following three years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

This government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in goods and work to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to give me parole to leave and go home to my family.”

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved conditions in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A National Issue Outside Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in every state and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in most states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything