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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. On film, imprisoned men, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However off camera, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from sweltering, dirty housing units. When the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Documentary Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly broken institution filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

After their suddenly terminated prison visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on substances sold by staff

Council starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is nearly killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated witnesses told Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film details the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

In the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unfit for the community, make $2 a day—the identical pay scale established by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and return to my family.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video reveals how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every region and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “you see similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything