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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling largely bans journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized barbecue. On camera, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help came from overheated, filthy housing units. When the director approached the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue meeting begins the documentary, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly broken institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It documents inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

After their suddenly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and loses sight in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources continued to collect evidence, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the news. But multiple incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a toy utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This government profits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and work to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned workers, mostly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and return to my family.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved conditions in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and severing communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Beyond Alabama

The protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council concludes the film 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.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable things in most states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not just one state,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything