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As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, the prison largely prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about safety and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That thwarted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked floors
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

One activist begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers vision in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s explanation—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. But several imprisoned observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

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

After years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This state benefits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in products and services to the government annually for almost no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unfit for the community, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of half a day for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The National Problem Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything