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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On film, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, danced and laughed to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly corrupt system filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and loses sight in an eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses continued to gather proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the official version—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Labor: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in goods and work to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, choking Council, sending personnel to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Issue Outside One State

This strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every region and in your name.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in the majority of states in the country,” said Jarecki.

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