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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, the prison largely prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. When Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant physical threat, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly ended prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied years of evidence filmed on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost killed by guards and suffers sight in an eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the state’s version—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

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

After years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the state each year for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unfit for society, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and go home to my family.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage reveals how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The National Problem Beyond Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in the public's name.”

From the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, 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, “you see comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything