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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans media access, but permitted the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help came from overheated, filthy housing units. When the director approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly broken system filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

Council starts the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned sources continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the official version—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the news. However several incarcerated observers informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

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

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Contemporary Slavery System

This government profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in goods and work to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust 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 do not participate, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and severing communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Outside One State

The strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in this state are happening in every state and in the public's name.”

From the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for below standard pay, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not just one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything