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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, the prison largely prohibits media entry, but allowed the crew to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as the director approached the voices, a prison official stopped filming, stating it was dangerous 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 remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly broken institution filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. However multiple imprisoned observers told Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This government benefits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in goods and services to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unfit for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, choking Council, sending personnel to threaten and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your region and in your behalf.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar things in most states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything