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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about security and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That interrupted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly broken institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and loses vision in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources continued to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. However multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards regardless.

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

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in goods and work to the state annually for virtually no pay.

In the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale established by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

These laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security threat. “That gives you an idea of how important this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video shows how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to threaten and beat others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Problem Beyond Alabama

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

From the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

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