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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely bans journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to record its annual community-organized cookout. On camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different story emerged—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, dirty dorms. When the director approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about security and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

One activist begins the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and loses sight in an eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the directors investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the official version—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the television. But several incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

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

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

The government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450m in goods and work to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a day—the same pay scale set by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage shows how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your region and in your name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “you see similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything