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As filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned men, mostly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a different narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that everything is about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant danger, to change situations declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

Council starts the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses sight in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated sources continued to collect evidence, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the state’s explanation—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. However several incarcerated observers informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This government profits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations 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 give me release to leave and go home to my family.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, choking Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Outside Alabama

This strike may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not just one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything