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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue. During film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. However off camera, a contrasting story emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Years of Neglect

This thwarted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly corrupt system rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly ended prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

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

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who had more than 20 individual legal actions 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 last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This government benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the shocking scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450 million in products and work to the state annually for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unfit for the community, make $2 a day—the identical pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor more than 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video shows how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are happening in your region and in your name.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below standard pay, “one observes comparable things in most jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything