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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from overheated, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue event begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

Council begins the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses continued to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the official version—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the news. But several incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The state profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the shocking scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in goods and services to the state each year for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, make two dollars a day—the same pay scale established by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

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

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates 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.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved conditions in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to threaten and attack participants, and severing contact from organizers.

The National Issue Beyond Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every state and in the public's name.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable things in most states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything