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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. During film, incarcerated men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. However off camera, a different story emerged—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt system rife with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple imprisoned observers told the family's attorney that Davis held only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After years of evasion, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Exploitation System

This government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in goods and work to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, make two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to give me parole to leave and return to my family.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding improved conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video shows how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Beyond One State

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your region and in the public's name.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than minimum wage, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a punitive approach to {everything