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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized cookout. On film, incarcerated men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security escort.

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

The Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly broken system filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to change situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances distributed by officers

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

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the directors investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s version—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the news. However several incarcerated witnesses told the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, the mother met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This state benefits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and work to the state annually for virtually no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the identical pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor more than half a day for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and return to my family.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Problem Beyond One State

The protest may have failed, but the lesson 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 taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for below standard pay, “you see comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything