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As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, the prison largely prohibits media access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying beatings, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. When the director moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about security and safety, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly broken institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided multiple years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances sold by staff

Council starts the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the state’s version—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

The state profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the same pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me release to leave and return to my family.”

These laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, choking the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond Alabama

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the state of the region. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every state and in your behalf.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below standard pay, “one observes comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything