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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits media access, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During film, incarcerated men, mostly African American, danced and laughed to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a different narrative emerged—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Revealing Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

This thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly ended prison tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

Council begins the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official version—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. However several imprisoned observers informed Ray’s attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

This state benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in goods and services to the government annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unfit for society, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved treatment in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Outside Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every region and in your name.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in most states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

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