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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized cookout. On camera, imprisoned men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

Council starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the state’s explanation—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

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

Following years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

This government profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in goods and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale set by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for improved conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage shows how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Outside One State

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in your name.”

From the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below standard pay, “you see comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything