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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely prohibits media access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized cookout. On camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting story emerged—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Years of Neglect

This interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly broken system rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned observers informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

A guard, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The state profits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and services to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage shows how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of the region. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every region and in your name.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything