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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On film, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from overheated, dirty housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden 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 they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

This thwarted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly broken system rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist begins the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses sight in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As imprisoned sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the official version—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the television. However several incarcerated witnesses told the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. Gadson, who faced numerous separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Slavery System

This government benefits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and work to the state each year for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black residents deemed unfit for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the same pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they refuse me to give me parole to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for improved conditions in 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video reveals how prison authorities ended the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The National Issue Beyond One State

The strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's name.”

From the reported abuses at the state of 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 fires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable situations in most states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not just Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything