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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely bans journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On film, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. When the director approached the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue event opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided multiple years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

Council starts the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses sight in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the television. However several imprisoned observers told the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four officers anyway.

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

Following years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Slavery System

This state profits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in products and services to the government each year for virtually no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American residents deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better treatment in October 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

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

From the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for below standard pay, “you see comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything